- Sample: the man who wanted to know everything
The cloister of the church of Santa María Novella preserves the frescoes with which Renaissance artists decorated its walls. It is also an oasis of tranquility in the heart of the bustling Florence. Strolling through its halls, it is not difficult to imagine all those masters of Quattrocento and Cinquecento who made the Tuscan city the center of world innovation. Leonardo da Vinci was one of them.
He occupied one of the old bedrooms of this cloister between 1504 and 1505, while preparing the sketch for The Battle of Anghiari he painted for the Palazzo Vecchio. Already in those years he had in mind the portrait of the Mona Lisa that would become his most famous work. Works that combined with his exhaustive studies on human anatomy, animals and plants that fascinated him so much, and whose observation was essential to achieve the realism he wanted in his works.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) spent his entire life trying to understand the functioning of the human body, the flight of birds, the arrangement of the leaves of plants or the relationship between tree rings and their age because for him not there were borders between nature, art and science.
«He was a systemic thinker and an environmentalist ; a scientist and an artist who felt a deep respect for all living beings ”, summarizes the physicist Fritjof Capra, an expert in Systems Theory and one of the curators of the Leonardo Botany exhibition : towards a new science between art and nature , inaugurated on Friday at the Santa Maria Novella complex in Florence. The sample, organized as if it were a plant organism, reviews the little-known Da Vinci botanical studies, addressing its universal scientific thinking.
And 500 years after his death, his ideas on the relationship between human beings and nature are surprisingly modern and timely at a time when the climate crisis has become one of the main concerns of many citizens.
The neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, another of the curators, defines him as "one of the first ecologists", as he pioneered the talk of environmental sustainability: "Leonardo is incredibly modern. More than 500 years ago he understood that the survival of the human species is impossible if what we call an ecosystem today is not preserved ». Life, he adds, is a network of relationships: «But today we have lost this idea, we think that we are so strong that we can survive alone , that we no longer need nature. It is an act of incredible arrogance, because we are totally dependent on it: what we eat, what we breathe comes from plants. Without them, animal life would disappear quickly »reflects Mancuso, director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology at the University of Florence.
In 2019, the year in which the 500th anniversary of his death is commemorated, the versatile Italian is more fashionable than ever. While tourists queue at the Louvre Museum to be portrayed alongside its Gioconda, Florence culminates a year of tributes with this exhibition focused on his passion for botany, which he designed and funded by the Italian company Aboca.
«We return to Leonardo's places to talk about a different, little-known Leonardo. Our goal is for citizens not only to see him as the author of La Gioconda , but as one of the greatest scholars of botany, the history of art and science of all mankind, ”says Dario Nardella, mayor of Florence .
"It is a fairly unique exhibition because it is not a sample of works of art but of philosophical and scientific ideas , which we explain in detail with images, texts and illustrations from the point of view of modern botany," says Fritjof Capra, who defines the visit as "an intellectual journey."
As highlighted by Valentino Mercati, founder of Aboca and curator of the exhibition, the exhibition also delves into the importance that 15th-century Florence had in the development of alchemy , for which Da Vinci was also interested. He designed ovens and various instruments, such as a distiller that he used to obtain ethyl alcohol and that has been rebuilt following his design.
«We have, on the one hand, the practical Leonardo who studies the plants to see what he can obtain from them, for example, the fundamental colors for him. He even wrote the recipes to get them. But on the other hand, he was a scientist, the first true scientist . I used to say that knowledge derives from experience; if you don't do experiments you don't know, and this is essentially the scientific method, which he described long before Galileo, ”explains Mancusi. «Da Vinci was a pioneer when he asked himself how a plant grows, how he knows where the light is, the water ... And for each of these questions he found true answers».
Many of Da Vinci's scientific discoveries arose from his need to understand how plants worked and from his desire to represent nature perfectly: “He was the one who discovered phylaxis, which is the arrangement of leaves in a plant, because I was interested in drawing them, ”says Stefano Mancuso. The theory of the constancy of the internal flows of a tree, which was called Leonardo's principle, was also his.
«He studied the interior of the plants and with his artistic mastery he rebuilt, with much poetry, his appearance», points Valentina Zucchi, scientific coordinator of the exhibition, which highlights his extraordinary ability to observe.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Science and Health
- science
ENVIRONMENT: demonstration against reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees
SpaceTwo parachute failures threaten to postpone the ExoMars mission to Mars
TrafficThe elephant, against the ropes also for the legal sale of ivory