LEONARDO DA VINCI: EXPERIENCE, EXPERIMENT, DESIGN

The Mind's Eye

The Measure of All Things

For Leonardo, sight was the noblest and most certain sense. It provided access to “experience”, which shows us how nature works according to mathematical rules. Any knowledge that could not be certified by the eye was unreliable.

He investigated the relationship of the eye to the brain. He proposed a system in which visual information was transmitted to the intellect via the receptor of impressions and the “common sense”, an area where all sensory inputs were coordinated.

The human body was God’s most perfect design, based on a complex set of proportions. A man with outstretched arms and open legs can be inscribed within a circle and a square (as the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius had claimed).

There were also detailed proportional relationships between all the various parts of the face, torso and limbs.

The Rule of Proportion

The building blocks of basic geometry underlay the beauty of natural form. Leonardo provided ingenious illustrations for the treatise that his mathematician friend, Luca Pacioli, wrote on the five regular or “Platonic” solids and their variants. He also strove on his own behalf to solve a series of classic problems in flat and three-dimensional geometry.

Divine geometry in nature was most apparent in the action of light. Here, all the powers of nature act mathematically and obey the rules of proportion.

Proportion was also expressed in number, most notably in the harmonies of music. Proportional formulas allowed Leonardo to work complex variations on weights suspended from balances and to show why the quest for a perpetual motion machine was doomed to fail.