Write like you’re in the 1500s

This post originally appeared six years ago, before AI further challenged the societal value assigned to personal erudition. But Leonardo remains a guiding light for me, as for so many others.

• Describe the tongue of the woodpecker
• Ask Benedetto Portinari how they walk on ice in Flanders
• Describe the beginning of a human when it is in the womb
• Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night
• Which nerve causes the eye to move so that the motion of one eye moves the other?
• Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner
• Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle
• Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled
• Get the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese, the Frenchman
• Draw Milan

The daily to-do lists and life of Leonardo Da Vinci have much to teach a science communicator like me.

The man was an autodidact, a practice that all modern-day knowledge workers must cultivate. As an illegitimate child he didn’t go to the Latin school to become a notary as he would have if he were born to his notary father’s wife. Instead he took a very short course in business calculations at the ‘abacus school’ and called it a day. But the learning went on, all day, every day, and his way of being an autodidact didn’t just involve reading in isolation—Gutenberg had only recently made his mark and Leonardo had access to just a handful of books. His was every bit as much a reporter’s life, both eye-witness reporting and interview-based scientific muckraking. He recorded it all meticulously on thousands of pages of yellow legal pads—or the contemporary equivalent.

Leonardo’s attitude toward this intensive on-the-ground reporting was that his was the greatest possible approach to learning. Why go to school and be fed the received wisdom when you can observe the laws of nature for yourself? “He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water jar,” says he. But part of this was a defensive maneuver. He was at a disadvantage, mostly because of his time, but also because of his education. While all of his friends were excited about the newly rediscovered texts of antiquity—including the writings of Vitruvius, who described the configuration that Leonardo would illustrate in Vitruvian Man—Leonardo’s Latin was so garbage that he had to take others’ word for what it said.

His math was weak, too. He often made basic arithmetic mistakes, couldn’t do algebra and could really have done with some access to trigonometry for the sorts of problems he was working on. He had a lifelong interest in geometry.

While reading Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of the man, I would often catch myself gazing away from the book and fantasizing about Leonardo appearing in the present day, Encino Man style, and my being the one to show him around. How would I explain everything to him? What’s the first invention he should understand—the harnessing of electricity or the internal combustion engine? That we actualized his idea of subterranean sewers or that we finally made his idea of a flying machine work?

Through his dogged work on mathematics, he eventually gained respect for theory in general, as an important tool to supplement and form a cycle with his beloved experimentation and observation.

As a science journalist, I am barred from using the language of mathematics in which my sources communicate. I must instead revert to Leonardo’s toolset and translate it into the language of analogy, jumping among disciplines to find my parallels. Analogy was the language of Leonardo’s problem solving.  “The understanding of water will serve as a ladder to arrive at the knowledge of things flying in the air,” he writes. And he was forever comparing engineering and architecture to anatomy, a study he knew well through his mastery of figure painting.

That background in art was put to use as he tried to understand various phenomena, as well as potential machines, through detailed drawings. Looking at his sketching work I am reminded of the underappreciated value of scientific illustrators and the urgency of our need to work more closely with them.

We can no longer be true Renaissance men and women—the depth of knowledge has progressed too far in every field—but we can at least construct a collective Renaissance generation by connecting networks of thinkers in every field, using Leonardo’s toolset: maniacal attention to what’s really happening, insatiable curiosity, and a knack for connecting the dots for non-specialists, between the latest scientific findings and their context in theory, using analogy.

As for Leo’s constant tendency to blow through deadlines and leave commissioned projects unfinished? That just proves he’s one of us.

Image: Presumed self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci

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