“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”- Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519). Da Vinci is one of the most interesting personalities in the entire history of art. Like he said, “The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”, (From the book “Masters of art Leonardo da Vinci” by Sergio and Andrea Ricciardi, pg. 32) he never stopped observing, experimenting and inventing. Da Vinci was born near the Tuscan town of Vinci, but active in Florence (1472–ca. 1482, 1500–1508) and Milan (ca. 1482–99, 1508–13), spending the last years of his life in Rome (1513–16) and France (1516/17–1519), where he died.( From the book in the Library Tower …show more content…
He started his science career since he was seventeen years old when he studied with the instruction of Andrea del Verrochio in Florence. This is when he really started to observing science. In his time, the only way to study is to read bible or the writings from the previous scientists. There was a crazy belief that all the experiments are full of error so that people didn’t trust experiments at that time. However, Da Vinci was the one who could see that science need repeated experiment done to prove the undiscovered ideas. In 1489, he started to use a sketchbook on the study of anatomy. He made rough sketches of human organs that are impassible to see at his time. During the Renaissance, a growing concern for realism involved artists in more detailed and painstaking anatomical research. Artists wanted to represent and understand the movement off the limbs, muscles under stress, and facial expressions. To seek the knowledge of anatomy, da Vinci had to dissect many dead bodies to look inside, first secretly and illegally, then more openly. He had to risk the law for his own observation. (pg.37-38) Evidentially, his drawings reveal that he took a scientific, as well as a purely artistic, interest in the subject. His studies of the muscles, nervous and vascular system, and of the skeleton are fine examples of what we called the scientific drawing which clearly demonstrate the form and value of the body parts. (pg.39) Those …show more content…
Nevertheless, it is more than a fantasy for the genius, Da Vinci, who actually designed a floating device at his time. The sketch for his floating device was found in one of his notebooks dated 1483. Da Vinci’s declared: "If a man has a tent made of linen of which the apertures (openings) have all been stopped up, and it be twelve braccia (about 23 feet) across and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any great height without suffering any injury." He showed a wooden frame that is in a figure of a pyramid, attaching a bar in the middle. The whole installation was about 23 feet wide and high, like an umbrella upside down with a triangular form. Like many of da Vinci’s ideas, the invention was never actually built or tested by Leonardo himself. But, in 2000, Adrian Nichols built a model based on da Vinci’s idea and examined it. Despite some mistakes in design, da Vinci’s parachute worked as expectation and Nichols felt that it had a smoother ride than the modern