Leonardo da Vinci is renowned and celebrated as a great painter, engineer, scientist, sculptor, architect and inventor, but he might be known to the world as “Leonardo da Vinci, the brilliant geologist” if his geological studies hadn’t been so overshadowed by all of his other accomplishments. This deduction can be made by analyzing some of his codices and drawings. Most of Leonardo’s statements and observations on geology and paleontology are mainly contained in the Codex Leicester.
He was born in Vinci on April 15, 1452, an illegitimate son of Piero, a successful notary of the region, and Caterina Lippi, a local peasant girl. Being born out of wedlock, he was not sent to a formal school to be taught the classics, Latin and Greek. Until Leonardo was 12, he lived primarily with his grandparents and his uncle Francisco in Vinci, but in 1464, his father brought him to Florence and arranged for him a rudimentary education. Around the time Leonardo was 14, his father was able to secure for him an apprenticeship with one of his clients, Andrea del Verrocchio, an artist and engineer who ran one of the best art workshops in Florence. Verrocchio trained Leonardo with a rigorous program that included anatomy, drawing techniques, mechanics and light studies. In the workshop, the topics of discussion included dissection, philosophy, music, poetry, geometry and math. By 1482, Leonardo moved from Florence to Milan. Once there, he presented himself before Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan, as a military engineer.
Most of Leonardo’s geological knowledge developed between Florence and Milan, where he lived from 1482 to 1499.
After a brief stay in Venice, Leonardo returned to Florence in 1500 and, after serving César Borgia in Cesena, he returned to Florence in 1503, when he began work on his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. From then on, his life passed between the cities of Florence, Milan and Rome. In 1516 Leonardo finally moved to Amboise, France, where he lived and worked in the service of King Francis I. There he died on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67.
The Codex Leicester
In the early 1480s, after his arrival in Milan, Leonardo began to keep notebooks on a fairly regular basis. Some of them started out as tabloid newspaper-sized loose sheets. Others were small leather volumes the size of a paperback book or even smaller, that he carried with him to take field notes. The Codex Leicester is one such compendium of texts and drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci, compiled between 1508 and 1510. The main topic of the Codex is water and its properties, but it also covers a wide variety of topics, including anatomy, meteorology, hydraulics, cosmology, geology, paleontology and other technical and scientific topics, along with some autobiographical writings, all supported by illustrations and drawings. The work is an example of Leonardo’s interest in the world around him, as well as his belief in the need to explain it through rigorous observation. As such, this Codex is a clear precursor to the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. Leonardo was left-handed, and composed all of his codices with mirror writing, where the text is written backward and intended to be read from right to left. The reason for this may have been an attempt to keep his private notes secret, making it difficult for third parties to read.
In 1717 Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, purchased the Codex from the Italian painter Giuseppe Ghezzi. At an auction in 1980, the Codex passed into the hands of the great American art collector and oil magnate, Armand Hammer, who acquired the manuscript at an auction in London for $5.6 million. Later, on Nov. 11, 1994, then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates purchased the Codex for the record amount of $30.8 million, through the Christie’s Auction House in New York, becoming the most expensive written work in the world.
Leonardo the Geologist
Leonardo made spectacular sketches and representations of meandering rivers, in such an analytical and conscious manner that it denoted not only an incredible knowledge of hydraulic processes but their geomorphologic aspects, and also the geological context. He analyzed different types of water flows, as documented in many sketches that today mostly rest in the Windsor Codex. Leonardo correctly understood sedimentation in terms of size classification and the roundness of grains transported by rivers. A famous sketch is the map of the city of Imola (in polar or ichnographic view), with the passage of the Santerno river to the south. Leonardo drew this map in 1502, when he was in charge of designing the fortifications for the city of Imola, ordered by Cesar Borgia.
In this map, Leonardo shows the meanderings of the river and its entire sedimentary system in such detail that it suggests a complete understanding of the erosion and sedimentation process of the river system. In the same way, it shows in a scientifically rigorous and delicate way, the deposits of point bars, the erosion of the river, its lateral migration and the changes in the position of the main current from meander to meander. On the original map, small dots are visible adjacent to the main channel, representing the sediments deposited by the river.
Leonardo provided in his writings one of the most brilliant and vivid explanation of the process of fossilization: “organisms that were alive when submerged by the mud, that later dried and, with time, petrified in rocks.” Although Leonardo did not use the word “fossil,” as it didn’t come into use until the beginning of the 17th century, he described the process before the term was coined.
Following the translations made by Edward MacCurdy in 1955, Leonardo wrote in Manuscript F, folio 79, of Codex Leicester:
“When the floods of the rivers which were turbid with fine mud deposited this upon the creatures which dwelt beneath the waters near the ocean borders, these creatures became embedded in this mud, and finding themselves entirely covered under a great weight of mud they were forced to perish for lack of a supply of the creatures on which they were accustomed to feed. In course of time the level of the sea became lower, and as the salt water flowed away this mud became changed into stone; and such of these shells as had lost their inhabitants became filled up in their stead with mud; and consequently during the process of change of all the surrounding mud into stone, this mud also which was within the frames of the half-opened shells, since by the opening of the shell it was joined to the rest of the mud, became also itself changed into stone; and therefore all the frames of these shells were left between two petrified substances, namely that which surrounded them and that which they enclosed.”
Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas and observations about the origins of fossils and sedimentary rocks remained dormant for more than a century. However, by using his geological knowledge to improve and enhance his paintings, he inspired an entire generation of later painters. Leonardo’s notes on fossils were discovered in 1690, although they were relatively unknown until 1717, when they were purchased by the Earl of Leicester (hence the name “Codex Leicester”). It is unlikely that renowned scientists such as Nicolás Steno (1638-86) or James Hutton (1726-97) knew of its existence, however, Charles Lyell (1797-1875) cites a brief paragraph from Leonardo’s explanation of the fossilization of seashells (Lyell 1872, Volume 1, Chapter 3, p. 20).
Lyell wrote:
“It was not till the earlier part of the sixteenth century that geological phenomena began to attract the attention of the Christian nations. At that period a very animated controversy sprang up in Italy, concerning the true nature and origin of marine shells, and other organized fossils, found abundantly in the strata of the peninsula. The celebrated painter Leonardo da Vinci, who in his youth had planned and executed some navigable canals in the north of Italy, was one of the first who applied sound reasoning to these subjects. The mud of rivers, he said, had covered and penetrated into the interior of fossil shells at a time when these were still at the bottom of the sea near the coast.”
And Lyell also wrote, quoting Leonardo:
“They tell us that these shells were formed in the hills by the influence of the stars; but I ask where in the hills are the stars now forming shells of distinct ages and species? and how can the stars explain the origin of gravel, occurring at different heights and composed of pebbles rounded as if by the motion of running water; or in what manner can such a cause account for the petrifaction in the same places of various leaves, sea-weeds, and marine-crabs?”
Based on these ideas of Leonardo, later published by Lyell, it is very likely that, by the end of the 19th century, knowledge of the Codex had possibly already filtered into most of the scientific world across Europe.
Despite such a vivid identification of the basic mechanism of fossilization, only a few drawings of fossils survived, apart from a small sketch on folio 25r of Codex I (Institute of France), showing a possible trace left by bioturbation and interpreted as Paleodictyon, a fossil trace in the shape of a hexagonal network, typical of turbiditic deposits. But Leonardo again provided in his writings a clear idea of what he saw and what he concluded, when he wrote in the Codex Leicester, folio 10r the following:
“How between the beds we may still recognize the traces left by worm, that used to move in between these beds when they were not yet dry.”
This is another observation that led Leonardo to recognize that the traces left by organisms (ichnofossils) were a sign of activity, on and within the muddy bottom, produced by worms or other marine organisms in a post-depositional calm phase.
Leonardo’s Paintings and Their Geology
Leonardo studied landscapes, fossils and rocks not only to satisfy his personal curiosity but also to improve the realism of his paintings. A geologically complex interpretation is proposed in the famous painting, “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne,” where Leonardo details the background with a clear stratification and with rounded pebbles, near the feet of Saint Anne, also including indications of wavy laminations farther to the right. This painting by Leonardo (exhibited in the Louvre) reveals that the base on which the feet of the figures in the painting rest is formed by layers of rock slightly inclined to the right. The layered base, lower left, represents the element of the painting that expresses Leonardo’s particular ability to observe geological details and, as revealed by observations made in recent decades, constitutes the first detailed, realistic and conscious representation of the formation of torrential pebbles, as a consequence of weather alteration and degradation, and their transport by the erosive action of the river waters; as well as the presence of layers of possible turbiditic origin, exhibiting wavy lamination, to the right.
But it is above all in his masterpieces, through the use of oil painting, where Leonardo was able to provide the most vivid images, as in “The Virgin of the Rocks,” whose two versions (Louvre and National Gallery of London), have been the subject of a “geological” dispute, since the painting exhibited in the National Gallery lacks the geological precision of the version exhibited in the Louvre Museum. In 1996, Ann Pizzorusso suggested that the version in the National Gallery was not painted by Leonardo, but probably by one of his scholars. The geology captured in the Louvre painting is extraordinary; Leonardo built in his painting a grotto with sandstones and placed rocks that looks like diabases in the background, near the head of the Virgin, both sculpted by erosion and covered by the vegetation that would have grown on this type of rock. Right at the base, the infant Jesus is sitting on impressive and lively stratified rocks, with even possible evidence of traces of bioturbation, as suggested by Andrea Baucon in 2010.
A question that several scholars have raised through time, regarding the geological realism of Leonardo’s paintings, would be: Are there really ichnological references in Leonardo’s paintings? As already analyzed, some structures similar to ichnofossils are found in “The Virgin of the Rocks” (Paris, Louvre) but also in another painting from the same Leonardo workshop, “The Madonna of the Yarnwinder” exhibited in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (on long-term loan from its owner, the Duke of Buccleuch), where several sinuous structures are shown on the upper surface of a bedding plane, reminiscent of traces of chondrites, very common in the Piacenza area. It is also true that these elements are insufficient to demonstrate the artist’s intention to represent traces of ichnofossils, although he surely could have observed them on his frequent trips through the mountains of this region.
The End of Leonardo and Its Significance
Leonardo da Vinci is universally celebrated as the genius of the Renaissance. His excellence in art, with masterpieces recognized and acclaimed by all of humanity, has obscured many of his achievements in other fields. In fact, Leonardo explored many other disciplines in his life, from anatomy to botany and the flight of birds, from engineering to cartography, from military and civil architecture to music and scenography, from complicated gadgets for war, to revolutionary concepts in physics, hydrology and geology.
What distinguished Leonardo da Vinci as a genius extraordinary beyond other geniuses of history was his creativity and his ability to apply imagination to intellect, as well as his ease in combining observation and experimentation with the fantasy. Leonardo’s brilliance spanned multiple and varied disciplines, giving him a deep feeling and knowledge of nature.