Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest of them all
If you run a search of the greatest polymaths of all time, and everyone from The ‘Artist Formerly Known as Prince’ to Steve Jobs will pop up as a possible candidate. However, among the handful of constants will at all times be Aristotle, Plato and Michelangelo, almost always led by the charismatic, multi-faceted genius of Leonardo da Vinci. And where do we go from here. Do you need me to tell you that da Vinci was an Italian renaissance ‘creator’, responsible for everything from the Mona Liza to early helicopter flight? No indeed, we all know that Leonardo applied his creative genius to everything from human anatomy to powered flight. In fact, it was he who gifted the world with the word ‘Renaissance Man’, a more colourful version of the word polymath.
The Bizarre thing about Leonardo is that he has left an almost empty record of his day to day life, so as a consequence not much is known about him. He was born in the hamlet of Vinci, just outside Florence. At age fifteen he was apprenticed to the Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio, launching the career of one of history’ most enigmatic genius. The great works of art of Leonardo were something of a by-product of his more intimate fascinations. Historian Kenneth Clark once remarked that posterity was left much poorer for the fact that Leonardo painted so little, and wasted so much time pursuing his hobbies of engineering, architecture, pageantry, military strategy, cartography, etc etc
This certain was Leonardo, but he also was a Renaissance Man in the more contemporary sense of the word. He was gay, vegetarian and extremely flamboyant, erratic in his work habits and infuriatingly difficult for anyone the, or now, to pin down. At the age of twenty-four, he was accused and charged with sodomy against a seventeen-year-old boy. A co-defendant happened to be related to the Medici family, and the whole thing was swept under the carpet.
‘Whoever does not curb lustful desires puts himself on the level of beasts,’ he once wrote, acknowledging also that his penis ‘possesses a life and an intelligence separate from the man.’
Unsurprisingly Leonardo, like Michelangelo, created infinitely more erotic portrayals of the male than the female form
Of all of the many threads of Leonardo’s polymathy, it is in anatomy that his most detailed and brilliant work was done. With his busy intellect, he delved deeper into the question of form and proportion than any other artist of the age. ‘From the top of the ear to the top of the head is equal to the distance from the bottom of the chin to the duct of the eye.’
Of all that he did investigate and report upon, there seems to also be much that he did not have time for. A scribbled not survives reminding himself to ‘Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock … Observe the goose’s foot … Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.’
Of all that Leonardo neglected to do, the most tragic is that he never wrote a memoir. One can only imagine that a Leonardian journey of introspection would have been a book very much worth reading, and one that would have done away with the centuries of speculated that has come about as a consequence.
Where did we get this stuff? Here are our sources:
“13 Most Intelligent People In The History Of The World.” Finances Online
“The Greatest Minds of All Time.” Ranker, Walter Graves.
“Who are the women polymaths?” Quora
“Voltaire.” Biography, March 2018
“Introduction to Aristotle.” University of Washington, S. Marc Cohen, Department of Philosophy, 2005
“Bertrand Russell.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 1995