So you're basically claiming that what he added to science, maths and engineering was that he was a revolutionary illustrator? I would probably believe that, if it was accompanied by some evidence. Even this claim you describe in extremely vague terms, as always with da Vinci. What exactly did he do different than his predecessors? What were his great accomplishments exactly, that put him in the same category as Newton and Gauss, or even higher than them?
> So what's the big stink with Newton? I mean, we have much better mathematicians and scientists now? By modern standards Newton is incomplete and imprecise. <-- Note sarcasm.
Even though you mark this as sarcasm, I'd like to address this. Of course modern mathematicians and scientists do better in absolute terms. What Newton did is now common knowledge. What makes Newton so great is not his absolute level, but the things he added to science. The delta between scientific and mathematical knowledge before Newton and after Newton is huge. So what is da Vinci's delta? In concrete terms; not just a logical fallacy like "you don't know what da Vinci's contributions are, so they are so entrenched in society that they must be great!".
> (Note: Don't confuse what I'm talking about with linear perspective, developed in the west by Brunelleschi, a contemporary of Da Vinci. Linear perspective is vitally important to this, and Da Vinci made good use of it. Visually, better than anyone else at the time.)
Interestingly, perspective was already understood by Euclid in 300BC and described in his work on optics. Alas, like the Greeks' knowledge that the earth is a sphere (heck they even measured the diameter), this was largely forgotten and didn't become mainstream artistic knowledge until much later.
> Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine) was one project. I still have nightmares about it. I spent six months on it and never got anywhere close. And it's considered a lessor work.
I'm sorry if this comes of as rude, but that's hardly proof that da Vinci was an extraordinarily good painter. Still, I have no problem conceding this point the third time. When I look at da Vinci's paintings I see nothing particularly worthy of deification above all other painters (on the contrary), but then I don't have a degree in Fine Arts so I accept that people who are experts on the matter have it right and my tastes have it wrong.
The problem is that he is in general deified for being an all-round genius, not just a painter.
What Da Vinci did is common knowledge as well. I can't help that you don't seem to value it. Sorry. Most of the world seems to disagree with you on this.
You don't offer to explain in detail what Newton did; but don't bother on my account. In my spare time I'm an amateur astronomer. I've written 3 body force simulation software for projects (my brother, who worked at JPL in the '70s wrote the software that calculated the orbiter orbital insertion engine burn.) I've measured Jupiter's mass with nothing but a telescope, a reticle eyepiece and a hand held calculator. My results were lousy, I learned a lot and got some real, dirty hands appreciation for the efforts of the pioneers of modern science.
You dismiss this area of human technology like it is superficial and not worthy of intellectual respect.
If you want an idea of what Da Vinci's "delta" was, go back and look at that portrait I spoke of, the one I tried unsuccessfully to copy, and compare it to any previous portrait. Lady with an Ermine is considered by many to be the first modern portrait. I don't mean for you to imagine what a previous work might have been like, if you really want to understand, do a little work and find one and seriously compare the two.
Look at the use of space in that portrait. Utterly unlike anything before it. The sense of depth, the lighting, the framing.
It's cinematic. 500 years before the camera.
(There is a lot of speculation about Renaissance artists using optical aids in their work. If you are interested in that, the key search terms are Camera Obscura and Camera Lucida.)
I knew when I wrote the previous post you were unlikely to be able really comprehend what I'm talking about. I find that only people who've actually seriously taken a pencil or brush in their hands and actually tried to make a picture, a real sustained effort, not just a lark, can really understand what a leap in thought and in presentation the Renaissance artists brought about.
There was a similar effect in the history of motion pictures. Look at movies made pre-D.W. Griffith (there are other film makers involved in this transformation, but this is getting long winded and divergent enough). They are like stage plays. Audiences had no problem with them. Then suddenly, we start to see visual tools transform the medium. Audiences were shocked and often unable to follow. It was a new, non-linear visual language.
Modern audiences, who've grown up with this language have no problem and are usually totally unaware of this. In fact when you try to show a really old movie to a modern audience it often drives them nuts. It's like trying to get a twelve year old to sit through a classically presented Shakespeare production. Also, I'm old enough, just barely, to have known people who were adults before the development of modern cinema. Many of them simply couldn't follow the story. It was too abstract and made too many assumptions.
Leonard was one of the pioneers not only of modern visual synthesis, but of modern observational method. Most intellectuals were Aristotelian. Da Vinci was in there cutting up bodies to see for himself. He made copious notes on bird flight; from observations. His flying machine drawings were some of the first serious, methodical efforts at the idea. Seems obvious now. Now that someone's done it.
This approach was not common practice at the time, it was considered a low brow, vulgar approach. Da Vinci could create an organized, methodic, proportional, visualization of an idea. In three dimensions. Backed with some actual, honest observational under pinnings.
That was new.
True Da Vinci wasn't much of an experimentalist, though the local prince found his practical output worth keeping him on the payroll; Leonardo was't a scientist or engineer in the modern sense. There weren't any yet. Fortunately another Florentine, a couple of generations later, would make some small advances in that department...
FWIW, Paul Graham has some very good essays concerning painting and its relationship to technical thought. I highly recommend them. My serious advice to anyone who wants to be a designer of any kind is to learn to draw a bit. Or a lot.
I can't help but notice that you failed to respond to what I wrote. I already agreed that he might be an excellent painter. For the fourth time now, I'm not in a position to judge that, so I'll take your word for it.
> It's cinematic. 500 years before the camera.
I never considered da Vinci to be a particularly realistic painter -- his faces look like they're made of wax and his perspective drawing is off -- I thought that was why people find his paintings special. But thanks for the explanation.
The point is that da Vinci is deified as "renaissance man", that is, a genius in science, engineering and mathematics as well as art, not just as a painter. For this I see no evidence whatsoever. I provided a concrete list of the contributions of Newton. I could do the same for Gauss and Euler and Euclid and Galilei and many others. What are da Vinci's supposed contributions to science, engineering and mathematics that are in any way comparable to those of Newton, Gauss, Galilei, Einstein or Euler? Concrete ones, please.
If you can't, then consider why that is. Why can I give great concrete contributions of all those people, yet you can't do the same for da Vinci? Might the reason be that there are none?
Da Vinci: great painter? Yes. Drew the occasional doubtful machine? Yes. Great mathematician? No. Great scientist? No. Great engineer? No.
Can't see where I didn't respond to what you wrote.
If you mean I didn't break it down into quotes, an anal compulsive check list of points and responses then, yes, I didn't respond to what you wrote. I took what you wrote as a whole and composed a response as a whole. If you are looking for the list, I'm going to disappoint you again.
If you mean, specifically, that I didn't respond to what you wrote about Da Vinci's painting ability, well, you've said both that he was a good artist and that he was mediocre; and then repeated the performance again.
I really don't care whether you appreciate his art or not. The rest of the world seems to have reached a consensus on that.
A discussion of realism, naturalism, and abstraction, and their relative merits and practitioners, while fun, is way more involved than I'm willing to go into for a wildly careening off topic post. But go and actually look at a pre-Da Vinci icon. No, really do it. If you don't I've no more time for you. You tell me what the differences are, or their lack.
Da Vinci defines the term Renaissance Man. He had his nose into everything. He was prior to the likes of Galileo and Newton and a departure from Aristotle and Plato.
This really is covered in most undergraduate history and philosophy courses. If you want a discrete list of Da Vinci's major works and his claim to fame, well, Wikipedia is your friend.
I'm not going to do your homework for you, but here, let me get you started:
You're still not really addressing Jules's main point, which is that Da Vinci made no major contributions to math or science. To compare him to Newton is absurd, as any mathematician or physicist will tell you. A large portion of a first-year engineering curriculum is spent learning things that Newton discovered (that is, calculus and classical mechanics). I read through the wikipedia page you provided, and none of the scientific results even approach the significance Newton's work. I have no problem with his artistic work being appreciated, but I am always confused about why people seem to think his work in any other area was important.
Actually it would never have occurred to me to directly compare Newton and Da Vinci's specific works. If you will look back to the dawn of the thread, I was comparing Da Vinci to Steve Jobs; specifically their achievement in changing the nature of human thought.
(Just for the record, I'd give Da Vinci the edge in that comparison...)
Jules wanted to know why people thought Da Vinci was so great and posited that he was a mediocre artist, and that his science/engineering were bogus. Of course, in the modern sense, Da Vinci wasn't a scientist, and a very different kind of engineer. Galileo, Newton, et al. gave those areas of thought their modern sense.
Kepler wasn't a scientist in the modern sense either, but he was essential for the later astronomers to do what they did. If he hadn't done what he did then someone else would have had to.
You can throw out the Greeks and a most of the Islamic theorists by the same logic as you throw out Da Vinci's achievements. Or for that matter, throw out Newton, as he's clearly been superseded.
What a bunch of amateurs!
I'm not talking about current practice and theory. And I'm not talking about a popularity contest as to who's your favorite intellectual superhero or a video game where players are leveling up to higher planes. I'm talking about the history of human thought and its milestones. People in the past thought very differently than they do today, and I don't just mean that they believed different things. Da Vinci's approach to visualization and observation were singular and in advance of his times.
He was a bellwether of things to come. And that's why people hold him in high regard.
> If you mean, specifically, that I didn't respond to what you wrote about Da Vinci's painting ability, well, you've said both that he was a good artist and that he was mediocre; and then repeated the performance again.
> I really don't care whether you appreciate his art or not. The rest of the world seems to have reached a consensus on that.
I'm sorry if what I said about his painting was confusing. I consider da Vinci to be a great painter when judging from the reputation that he has with people knowledgeable about art. His paintings are simply not to my personal taste, mostly due to the expressionless faces (now Caravaggio, he has some amazing paintings). Whether you agree or not, I think you'll agree that art is a subjective thing (unlike science/math/engineering). The world also seems to have reached consensus that da Vinci was an amazing all round genius. This is demonstrably wrong, drawing into question the judgement of the world (also note the general belief in the existence of a god, and that the world is flat).
> This really is covered in most undergraduate history and philosophy courses. If you want a discrete list of Da Vinci's major works and his claim to fame, well, Wikipedia is your friend.
The list of science and inventions you gave contains nothing of significance except in painting. Whenever it is even remotely about math/science/engineering, it's mostly about his job as an illustrator, plus a couple of bogus inventions that neither got built nor work (though I'm sure you can find something trivial that he drew that actually worked -- if you draw enough things one of them is bound to work).
> Da Vinci defines the term Renaissance Man. He had his nose into everything. He was prior to the likes of Galileo and Newton and a departure from Aristotle and Plato.
If your point is that he came before them, so he had the time against him, then I'll say again: it's about the delta not about the absolute achievement. Also note that there were lots of proper geniuses LONG before him, like Pythagoras (math; ~600BC), Eratosthenes (math, measured the diameter of the Earth; ~250BC -- what's truly astonishing is that humanity not only forgot the diameter of the Earth, it actually believed that the Earth is flat!) and Euclid (math, physics; ~300BC). On a related note: Aristotle is not in that list; his works on physics are basically bogus, why people ascribe some kind of physics genius to him in history lessons is again beyond me. For amazing engineering just look at the pyramids and the Roman empire.
Lets simplify this: name one important contribution to science, math or engineering.
If you are going to measure genius as only pertaining to math, science and engineering, in the modern senses of the word, then sure. In addition to art you are now excluding music, literature, history, politics, warfare, philosophy, finance, economics, ethics, law, and many other important areas of thought that shape our world.
Da Vinci areas of interest and activity were broad and novel. He was part of the milieu that brought about the modern world.
If you insist on one magic achievement, which seems a bit childish and over simplistic to me, call him a visual synthesist. He worked in modeling and visualization. I'll leave pigeonholing him into a modern discipline up to you. He really predated those holes, which are fuzzy and overlapping at best.
He, along with the other artists and thinkers of his time, created the modern concept of a visual representation. Something so basic and fundamental, and so divergent from what went before, that many people today, totally immersed in it, simply can't see it. It's like the air to them. Any time you see a working drawing, a photographic composition, a narrative image, or a pictorial observation, you are looking at a direct descendant of his tradition.
(Caravaggio, by the way, was a direct stylistic descendant of Da Vinci, visually quoting him several times.)
> So what's the big stink with Newton? I mean, we have much better mathematicians and scientists now? By modern standards Newton is incomplete and imprecise. <-- Note sarcasm.
Even though you mark this as sarcasm, I'd like to address this. Of course modern mathematicians and scientists do better in absolute terms. What Newton did is now common knowledge. What makes Newton so great is not his absolute level, but the things he added to science. The delta between scientific and mathematical knowledge before Newton and after Newton is huge. So what is da Vinci's delta? In concrete terms; not just a logical fallacy like "you don't know what da Vinci's contributions are, so they are so entrenched in society that they must be great!".
> (Note: Don't confuse what I'm talking about with linear perspective, developed in the west by Brunelleschi, a contemporary of Da Vinci. Linear perspective is vitally important to this, and Da Vinci made good use of it. Visually, better than anyone else at the time.)
Interestingly, perspective was already understood by Euclid in 300BC and described in his work on optics. Alas, like the Greeks' knowledge that the earth is a sphere (heck they even measured the diameter), this was largely forgotten and didn't become mainstream artistic knowledge until much later.
> Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine) was one project. I still have nightmares about it. I spent six months on it and never got anywhere close. And it's considered a lessor work.
I'm sorry if this comes of as rude, but that's hardly proof that da Vinci was an extraordinarily good painter. Still, I have no problem conceding this point the third time. When I look at da Vinci's paintings I see nothing particularly worthy of deification above all other painters (on the contrary), but then I don't have a degree in Fine Arts so I accept that people who are experts on the matter have it right and my tastes have it wrong.
The problem is that he is in general deified for being an all-round genius, not just a painter.