A san of one of his sketches of his proposed 'Ideal City"
Hello, I'm martian expatriate and I'll be posting morning threads on Tuesdays for awhile. I'll try to keep it interesting. I'm writing this diary while in Pueblo Colorado. The temperature was in the 90s here for a long itme, but things seem to slowly be cooling off.
Leonarda da Vinci is well known as an artist, and many are generally familiar with his background in Science, because they are familiar with his technical drawings of the helicopter he wished to build, or even the tank. I think some people's takeaway from that however is simply that he had a vivid imagination and had a lot of wild ideas which never actually worked. Nothing could be further from the truth.
One of his many titles was “beloved court architect and engineer general” to Cesare Borgia. He designed canals and made highly geographic maps which were thought to give Borgia an advantage in battle because of their accuracy was so much greater than other maps in that era. His most respected canal project was commissioned by the Florentine Republic in 1503 to bring water to Pisa.
Today many clocks feature what is known as a Hindley gear, but the truth is that Leonarda da Vinci actually invented them 300 years before he did. He called them 'endless gears,' and they were an improvement on the gears of the time which failed more often.
After the outbreak of a plague in Milan, he created the plans for what he called the “ideal city.” It relied on a tiered system of upper walkways and lower reads, separating citizens from a network of canals which provided transportation while also removing waste. Those plans were compared with the great civil engineers of the time. He was hired by the court based on those plans, but the ideal city was never built, probably because of expense issues though no specific reason was ever given.
His work fascinated me even as young as when I was twelve. I frequently wondered how a man in those times could achieve so much. I think one of the reasons was the approach he used in both art and science.
Da Vinci frequently espoused always starting from nature. When he wished to know how a useful thing was to be built, he studied how nature accomplished something similar. Whenever he began to create a painting, he studied people. Sometimes he used models, and other times he made quick sketches of someone he happened to see.