Incessantly sketching everything around him in his multiple-volume Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci approached engineering “war machines,” understanding human anatomy, and conceptualizing innovations as varied and ahead-of-their-time as the helicopter, glider, and water pump from a perspective that was not purely positivist or concrete, but expressive and visual. As a paradigmatic “Renaissance man,” his approach to scientific visualization blatantly ignored any absolute barriers between science and art, or amateur and professional. He saw art, science, and innovation as necessarily intertwined. For da Vinci and other interdisciplinary Renaissance figures, drawing was often just as valuable for understanding the world and creating new knowledge as arithmetic. This presentation explores da Vinci’s manner of interdisciplinary thinking to access new perspectives and scientific insights.
For images of da Vinci’s inventions, please see: https://historylists.org/other/9-incredible-leonardo-da-vinci-inventions.html
Kris Belden-Adams is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Photography, Temporality, Modernity: Time Warped (2019), and Photography, Eugenics, ‘Aristogenics’: Picturing Privilege (2020). With Dr. Karen Barber, Belden-Adams is a Content Co-Editor for Smarthistory’s/Khan Academy’s coverage on the history of photography.
