ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

Leonardo: The First ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ by Michael White, Little, Brown, £20,
ISBN 0316648469

HIS genius as a painter is beyond question. Leonardo da Vinci is also admired
for his many designs for machines. While these might not have worked, they
nevertheless show his insight into the principles of mechanics—remember
the human-powered helicopter with a helicoidal rotor?

Now Michael White is claiming that Leonardo was also the first scientist.
Only 3 out of White’s 12 chapters are, in fact, about this claim and Leonardo’s
supposed contributions to science. The rest is nevertheless highly interesting,
presenting Leonardo as the illegitimate son of a playboy lawyer, who was cared
for by his grandparents and eventually apprenticed to Andrea Verrocchio, the
foremost Florentine artist of the day. It tells how he was tried and acquitted
with three other young men on a charge of sodomy. One of the men seems to have
been related to the powerful Medici family, and the charge was fabricated for
political reasons.

By the age of 30, Leonardo was well established as an artist in Florence, but
he moved to Milan and after a few years became a valued member of the ducal
court, with duties that included the design of theatrical machinery for court
entertainments. In later life, he moved from city to city, treated as a great
celebrity, and died in 1519 in the arms (it is said) of King François I
of France.

The evidence for Leonardo being a scientist is slim. He did, it is true, make
a few percipient observations. For example, in one of his notebooks he describes
the ripples resulting from a stone dropped into water and notes that floating
pieces of straw remain in their original positions, showing that though the
waves travel outwards the water does not.

He also observed that the footprints left in sand by a man jumping are deeper
than those made by the same man standing and carrying another man on his back,
and concluded that jumping feet can exert a force more than twice body weight.
In another passage, he makes remarks about bird flight that seem to anticipate
Newton’s third law of motion (the one about action and reaction). He made a very
large number of beautiful, detailed and accurate anatomical drawings, based on
dissections of human cadavers that he had to perform discreetly, at night.

In several passages, White gives Leonardo more credit than he seems to
deserve. He argues that Leonardo’s observations of ripples on flowing water
constitute a description of the Doppler effect, and that his observation of a
spectrum formed by a tumbler of water on a sunny window sill anticipates Newton.
He also claims that Leonardo replaced the muscles of cadavers with threads,
which he pulled to discover the functions of the muscles, but the passage in the
notebook seems merely to describe how diagrams can be drawn showing the
positions of muscles that overlie each other.

One may argue over whether Leonardo’s observations were scientific, but they
certainly do not compare with the systematic experiments carried out more than
100 years later by William Harvey in which he demonstrated the circulation of
the blood, or those by Galileo where he discovered that balls roll down slopes
with constant acceleration.

And although the concept of publishing technical books was developing in the
15th century (Alberti on architecture comes to mind) Leonardo published nothing,
thus adding nothing to the record of knowledge. Indeed, White presents Leonardo
as an undisciplined eccentric with an appalling record of leaving commissions
unfinished, who made little progress in setting in order his thousands of pages
of notes, on everything that interested him.

Overall, White has written an illuminating book, but his identification of
Leonardo as the first scientist wholly failed to convince me.