Lessons of Leonardo

Picture of Slave Castle in Cape Coast

This last Christmas I had an opportunity to visit my family currently living in Accra, Ghana. While there we had the sobering opportunity to visit a slave castle located in the city of Cape Coast. This year, 2019, marks 400 years since the first slaves were forcibly removed from Western Africa and transported to the United States of America. Coincidentally, this year also marks 500 years since the death of Leonardo Da Vinci. Now, I know that the events surrounding those two dates are not correlated in any way, but I started thinking about what messages did Da Vinci try to share in his lifetime that were not understood not only 100 years after his death but also 500 years after his death - today? 

Da Vinci was widely known for his intrepid experiments in engineering, but he also preached the need to create structures that complement the environment around us, as opposed to ones that impede the world. Also, as a true humanist, he desired the betterment of his fellow men and detested unnecessary suffering. In his painting, "The Last Supper" you see the emotion on the faces of each apostle, and their value as humans is communicated through the unique emotions.

East Coast of Atlantic Ocean 

There are still many in the world who do not understand what Da Vinci understood. Needless suffering, abuse, human trafficking, and slavery are still running rampant in the world. The need to protect the environment and work with the environment is lost on seemingly all governments. As I sat at the foot of the slave castle looking out into the Atlantic Ocean I saw mounds of garbage and plastic floating near the shore.

It struck me that one lesson was lost in this very spot several hundred years ago - the value of the human soul and that another important lesson is being lost - the value of the world we live in. If we each took the time to be just a little more learned about a few more things, could we leave a better world than we found?

Leonardo Da Vinci is the ultimate example of the "Renaissance Man". As more people seek a greater breadth of understanding of the world around us, as he did, we can all better embrace ideas that were realized by him more than 500 years ago. By doing so we can avoid mistakes both 400 years old, and those unique to our time.

Da Vinci: Epitome of the Renaissance Man

Leonardo da Vinci was born right at the beginning of the renaissance; perhaps that contributes to his becoming a true renaissance man. He was the illegitimate child of a notary and a peasant girl but nonetheless grew up comfortably in his father’s house reading scholarly texts and learning to paint. He was talented enough to be apprenticed to an artist at 15, and his artistic career took off from there. His paintings, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper among them, have been greatly admired for centuries. However, this renaissance man’s interests expanded past the creative arts. In fact, his broad interest and study across disciplines contributed to the impressive quality of his paintings.

Shakespeare notes the amazing potential of humankind in Hamlet, writing, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.” Shakespeare could almost have been referring to da Vinci in this passage; da Vinci certainly demonstrated how infinite in faculty a human could be, and he certainly expressed his appreciation of the form and action of humans. He extensively studied anatomy, even dissecting corpses to examine how nerves and muscles work. He was also fascinated by physics and the natural world, filling dozens of notebooks with his observations of the natural world and ideas for inventions. There is incredible precision in da Vinci’s works because the artist incorporated his knowledge of the sciences into every detail.

In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico della Mirandola discusses how part of what makes humans such high and noble beings is their ability to shape themselves into whoever they want to be. Raised an artist to eventually become a true renaissance man, a welder of the arts and sciences when many would have declared them separate entities, da Vinci certainly carved his own identity. There was so much he wanted to learn, he seldom finished the projects he started, but he was overall content with his accomplishments. This wide scope of genius and dedication to connecting the arts and sciences continue to serve as a testament to the versatility of human achievement.