Customer Reviews

The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance

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Fritjof Capra provides fascinating insight into Leonardo da Vinci, his life, and his many accomplishments. No special knowledge is assumed: all terms, such as sfumato and chiaroscuro, are well defined. The Greek and Latin schools of thought are introduced, and how Leonardo variously accepted, rejected, or improved upon this body of knowledge.

Particular attention is paid to Leonardo's methods, a man so interested in the process and underlying principals as to be a renowned sculptor in his time without a sculpture, one who left a trail of magnificent (yet variously incomplete) artwork. Leonardo asked not just "how", but also "why", and tested these questions with detailed experiments in many fields: optics, anatomy, and fluid dynamics, to name a few.

The text does repeat itself, though like a arabesque rope, repeats back on the core strengths of Leonardo, and shows in turn how these strengths allowed Leonardo to advance the fields of art, science, and engineering. Highly recommended.

I heard of this book during an interview of the author on NPR. The interview was fascinating and motivated me to get the book.

The book is wonderful for its balance and grace. It is a concise telling of da Vinci's life and his thinking gleaned from his manuscripts and from contemporary writers. It is interesting to discover that little is known about da Vinci's personal or inner life. However, we discover that da Vinci was truly one of the first scientists in the modern sense, predating Galileo. His gifts for observation, illustration, and painting combined with his energy and enthusiasm for experimentation led him to discoveries and conclusions that would not be widely recognized for centuries.

It was a good inspiring read! I'm looking forward to reading Capra's book on systemic thinking.

This book was a disappointment. The title leads the reader to believe that we will see a detailed exposition of contributions made (at least potentially) by da Vinci, but actually very little of the volume is devoted to such examination. The first half is a fairly interesting but overly long biography of the great man, more focused on his art than his science; and the discussion of the artistic work is mostly about the use of color, not helped by grayscale reproductions of the paintings! The second half, which purports to detail his scientific contributions, is all too often a rehash of the first half, telling us that he was really smart without providing any demonstration of the fact.

For a book about a man whose greatest talent was his ability to draw, it is woefully under-illustrated. Few pages from his voluminous notebooks are reproduced, and when they are, the pages are unannotated. This is absurd: the text is mirror-written Italian and illegible anyway in the reduced-size reproductions, and without it the drawings are mysterious in many cases.

The text is full of unsupported claims about Leonardo's discoveries; the few that are examined in sufficient detail don't really jibe with Capra's summaries. For example, Capra represents Leonardo as having discovered that light is a wave; the detailed text shows that he had in fact made the remarkably astute assertion that sound is a wave phenomenon, but did not grasp the importance of frequency or wavelength in determining perceived pitch. Capra gives no example of Leonardo exhibiting the essential properties of waves -- phase, wavelength, interference -- in discussions of light. Leonardo worked with geometric optics, which doesn't require that the underlying phenomenon be wavelike.

Similarly, he is described as having discovered the reason the sky is blue, but a more careful examination of Leonardo's remarks shows that he got only half the problem right: he correctly understood that the particles of "moisture" (actually the individual atoms) in the air are scattering incoming solar radiation, but since he didn't understand the impact of frequency on color, he could not and did not grasp that this scattering was wavelength-dependent (the 'blue' part).

The book has some gems, for Leonardo was of course a remarkable man, but all too often we have Capra reading into Leonardo's work 20th century science that either isn't there or is not demonstrated to be there. Someone will have to write a better book so that we can more fully and correctly appreciate the great man's work.

Just for completeness, I hold advanced degrees in applied physics, and have written some technical books, so my expectations for content may be a bit different from most readers!

Well written, showing how ahead of his time Leonardo was. A great perspective on a true genius.

Leonardo is known best for his art. His thousands of pages of musings and drawings of science aren't as well known. The author here tries to remedy that in what is much a biography as it is a study of Leonardo's forgotten works. By exploring his life, the author tries to uncover what made Leonardo tick, his influences and motivations. Still, the mysterious man will always be that in many ways: a mystery. The author wants to look at Leonardo's work through modern eyes and how it relates to today (or would relate). Sometimes he interprets too much through modern eyes. He gives too much credence to the myth of "humanism" being the driving force of the Renaissance (all the while discussing how the Church funded much of it) or how the supposed "Dark Ages" were a time of intellectal regression caused by the church. Many writers have shown these myths to be untrue (see The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution & The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success). However, one wonders where science would have went had Leonardo published his works. Instead, they largely languished until modern times. Could use more illustrations, but still a great history of a lost genius. See also 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance for a controversal theory that the Chinese sparked Leonardo's science.

I'm not absolutely certain about this, but I think I have a similar basic understanding of Leonardo da Vinci as your typical educated U.S. citizen. I know he was a brilliant artist during the Renaissance and dabbled a bit in science and engineering endeavors. While "The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance," reaffirmed these beliefs, it provided much, much more information that it nearly hard to believe about the great da Vinci.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is that the man essentially invented the scientific method. This, as you may already know, is the process by which all scientists conduct research in our world. It seems bizarre to even consider that a method could be invented. However, before Da Vinci's time, no one was attempting to study nature and the elements in this manner.

Through the scientific method, da Vinci made many amazing discoveries ... in fact, way too many for this short article. With the power of artistry, he was able to create detailed anatomical drawings of the human body, sketches of types of water flows and pictures of many trees and plants. His work led to advances in cognitive science, hydraulics and botany many years later.

And this doesn't include his research within the engineering and math (specifically geometry) fields, as well as general urban planning. The man somehow made advances in all of these fields, and of course, had time to whip up the "Mona Lisa."

The sad part in da Vinci's work is that most of it lie hidden for centuries before being published. Most of what we know today about da Vinci's studies remained a mystery until the 1700s. It's reasonable to think that if civilization would have known more about his discoveries during his time, or even immediately after his death, we would already be a more advanced civilization than we are today.

This book would appeal to a large group of people, especially history buffs and anyone with affection for science, math and engineering. Basically, people interested in knowledge should be intrigued by the life of Leonardo da Vinci, history's greatest life-learner.

leonardo davinci is was and ever shall be the greatest genius of all time. i agree with capra that had leonardo published his notes science and humanity would be at least 100, to 150 years ahead of its time.i also agree with capra that many of his notes and drawings will be rediscovered in some library covered with dust shedding even more light on this extraordinary individual. i just hope these discoveries of his lost notebooks are made soon, because i cant even imagine what to expect.many gaps remain to be filled and many more surprises lie ahead. the book is open on leonardo, and as capra says leonardo is more relevent today than ever. He truly was an abberration. Ijust cant wait.

As a former art history major who now teaches World History and Western Civ, I have read many books about Leonardo daVinci and probably seen most of the documentaries about him. I like the work of Fritzhof Capra and I like Leonardo daVinci, but I really didn't find anything very new here.

It's a nice book and a good introduction to Leonardo, but it is not the kind of magical mindwalk you might expect from Capra.

Kim Burdick
Stanton, DE

I just got the book, in afghanistan 4 hours ago, and i can not put it down!!!! please get this book and share with friends and family.

Capra places his story about Leonardo's science in the context of Da Vinci scholarship, which has only within the past few decades achieved a chronological dating of all of his extant writings (only about 6,000 of 12,000 pages of which are known to survive; amazing that so much has been lost, and tragic, given what the surviving pages show of Leonardo's insights, some centuries before they were rediscovered).