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Welcome to the art and science research seminar blog for our year two Maidstone Illustration group. Please do feel free to comment and also contribute your own postings on anything you would like to share with the rest of the group!
Adrian

Leonardo's Notebooks
February 1, 2011

Leonardo da Vinci's (1452-1519) works encompass a wide range of activities that we would now categorise as 'art' and 'science'. Over some 30 years, he amassed many thousands of pages of notes (some of which he described as ‘a collection without order’ that he hoped to organise later (British Library, 2011)) comprising diagrams from his anatomical dissections, engineering designs, observations of all kinds from nature, studies for works of art, and collections of his thoughts. Much of Leonardo’s original collection has been lost over the centuries with about 6,000 pages surviving today (Kemp, 2004:2).

In Leonardo’s day ars and scientia had slightly different meanings to today’s ‘art’ and ‘science.’ Ars meant technical skill or practice and scientia, knowledge or theory (Ackerman, 1969). Leonardo was able to practise ‘natural philosophy’ in which ars and scientia were unified. But, this was to be the last period in which art and science were unified, they were soon to go their different, though connected, ways.



Leonardo da Vinci (c1510-1513) Studies of the foetus in the womb, the uterine
wall and placenta, with mechanics and optics, Windsor, Royal Library, 19102.
Source of image:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/29/100524884_177af950f0.jpg .
(The Windsor Royal Library collection of Leonardo's notebooks can be
viewed at http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/eGallery/Search.asp )

No drawing of an embryo in the womb ever came closer to capturing the very spirit of generation as well as the foetus's nested position - even if the exaggeratedly spherical womb displays the cotyledonous (multiple) placenta of a cow rather than the single placenta of a human. The whole page is a feast of visual exposition. A series of small sketches of the womb shows the layers of its wall progressively opened, disclosing the germ of life within, like a chestnut within its protective seed-case. The interdigitations of the placenta and uterine wall are depicted in a solid section, drawn apart like a Velcro strip that is in the process of being peeled back. Typically, [Leonardo] speculates on why "the same soul governs these two bodies, and the desires and fears and sorrows are common to this creature as to all the other animal parts."
(Kemp, 2004:106-8)

Bibliography (see the session handout for further references)
Ackerman, James. (1969). Concluding remarks: science and art in the work of Leonardo. In O’Malley CD (Ed.). Leonardo’s legacy: an international symposium. Berkely: Univ California Press. Pp. 205-225
British Library. (2011). The Leonardo notebook, introduction, British Library. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/leonardo/accessible/introduction.html (Accessed February 6, 2011)
da Vinci, Leonardo. (2004) The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete. Project Gutenberg. Release Date: Jan 2004, [EBook #5000] http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/7ldvc10.txt (Accessed January 31, 2011)
Kemp, Martin (2004). Leonardo. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Kemp, Martin. (2008) Processes and Structures: The art and science of nature in Nature: Structural intuitions in art, architecture, and science. CCA. http://www.cca.qc.ca/system/items/1942/original/Mellon06-MK.pdf?1241160308 (Accessed January 31, 2011). The audio lecture is available at http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/60-martin-kemp-processes-and-structures-the-art-and-science-of (Accessed January 31, 2011)
Poster, Carol. (2005), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Protagoras (c.490-c.420 BCE) http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/protagor.htm (Accessed January 31, 2011)