Leonardo Da Vinci’s Impact on the World

Arts:
With the genius and legacy of Leonardo da Vinci having captivated authors and scholars generations after his death, many examples of "da Vinci fiction" can be found in culture and literature. The most prominent example is Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), which alleged that Leonardo da Vinci was a member of a secret society called the Priory of Sion.
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Leonardo is well known for his artistry and paintings, such as Last Supper (Ultima Cena or Cenacolo, in Milan) 1498, and the Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda, now at the Louvre in Paris), 1503-1506. Though there is significant debate whether Leonardo himself painted the Mona Lisa, or whether it was the work of his students, it is known that it was probably his favorite piece. He most likely kept it with him at all times, and not travelling without it. Thousands of people see it each year in the Louvre, perhaps drawing their own interpretation on what is known as the Mona Lisa's most infamous and enigmatic feature - her smile.

Leonardo often planned grandiose paintings with many drawings and sketches, only to leave the projects unfinished. For example, in 1481 he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece "The Adoration of the Magi". After extensive, ambitious plans and many drawings, the painting was left unfinished and Leonardo left for Milan. Only seventeen of his paintings and none of his statues survived.

In Milan he spent 17 years making plans and models for a monumental seven-metre (24-foot) high horse statue in bronze ("Gran Cavallo". Because of war with France, the project was never finished. Based on private initiative, a similar statue was completed according to some of his plans in 1999 in New York, given to Milan and erected there. The Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland has a small bronze horse, thought to be the work of an apprentice from Leonardo's original design.

After returning to Florence, he was commissioned for a large public mural, the "Battle of Anghiari"; his rival Michelangelo was to paint the opposite wall. After producing a fantastic variety of studies in preparation for the work, he left the city, with the mural unfinished due to technical difficulties.

Leonardo pioneered new painting techniques in many of his pieces. One of them, a colour shading technique called "Sfumato", used a series of custom-made glazes by Leonardo. It is characterized by subtle, almost infinitesimal, transitions between color areas, creating a atmospheric haze or smoky effect. "Chiaroscuro" is the technique of modelling and defining forms through contrasts of light and shadow.
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Science

Among his many scientific achievements were da Vinci's discoveries in anatomy. Besides artistic talent, he possessed the "stomach" to dissect of both humans and animals. Dissections weren't common in da Vinci's day, but probably weren't illegal, either. Though his understanding of the respiratory system added little to medieval knowledge, his studies of skeletal and muscle tissue, brain anatomy, and digestive and reproductive systems advanced human anatomical understanding to a new level. Interestingly, he felt that the similar appearance of branching blood vessels, branching stems, and mingling tributaries weren't just coincidence; the actually were fundamentally the same. In that same spirit of unified microcosm/macrocosm, he investigated geology.

Around 1480, some Milanese peasants brought da Vinci a bag of fossil shells. For the next quarter of a century, he pondered the shells' meaning, and apparently visited the site where they had been collected. After years of study, he not only doubted that Noah's flood had carried the fossils to their present locations, he also questioned whether there had even been such a worldwide deluge. He also suspected a much older earth than what the Bible described.

As to those who say that shells existed for a long time and were born at a distance from the sea, from the nature of the place and of the cycles, which can influence a place to produce such creatures — to them it may be answered: such an influence could not place the animals all on one line, except those of the same sort and age; and not the old with the young, nor some with an operculum and others without their operculum, nor some broken and others whole, nor some filled with sea-sand and large and small fragments of other shells inside the whole shells which remained open; nor the claws of crabs without the rest of their bodies . . . And the deluge cannot have carried them there, because things that are heavier than water do not float on the water.

Da Vinci rejected the notion that fossils were just "sports of nature," understanding instead that they belonged to once-living organisms. He noted that fossil shells appeared in several different horizons in the mountains, meaning they could not have all been deposited in a single deluge, nor could slow-moving mollusks reach the mountains in the biblical flood's short duration. He devoted years to studying the behavior of water and identified the sedimentary rocks that water deposits. He even anticipated the 20th-century theory of plate tectonics by considering the possibility of uplift in mountain building.

Perhaps most interesting of all, da Vinci may have formulated a vague notion of evolution.

Nature, being inconstant and taking pleasure in creating and continually producing new forms, because she knows that her terrestrial materials are thereby augmented, is more ready and more swift in her creating than is time in his destruction.
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