Event 2: Leonardo Da Vinci + Gravity

For my second event this quarter, I decided to attend the presentation given by Claire Farago and Matthew Landrus called "Leonardo Da Vinci on Visualizing the Forces of Nature: Gravity." Before attending this event, already expecting a discussion about Da Vinci as an artist and scientist, I decided to briefly research Da Vinci's background, as I am more familiar with him as an artist, not a scientist. Within this brief amount of research, I found that Da Vinci was devoted to his curiosity, asking questions like "How do birds fly?" amongst others that people of his time were rarely concerned with [MOS].

Screencap of Presentation: Leonardo Da Vinci and Gravity

During the presentation, Da Vinci's artistry was emphasized to me, even more than before, as it was mentioned that he had a special skill in which he was able to separate the ideas of the rate of acceleration and the rate of change over lateral distance. Synonymously with this class, I am also taking a Physics course, in which we are being trained over time to separate these different rates as separate components, so it is incredibly fascinating to think about how he was able to do this when the concept was still foreign to society. Additionally, I was not aware that certain topics that I have learned about in anatomy and physiology are due to Da Vinci, such as discoveries in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology [Pevsner].

It was also interesting to hear the scientific backgrounds of his paintings that I would have never noticed otherwise. For example, in his work "Trattato della Pittura," he modeled a person standing, and another of a person standing while holding the other. This involved the combination of science, the center of gravity, and the idea of two people becoming one when their mass is adjoined as such. 

Leonardo, Trattato della Pittura, Paris, 1651

In other paintings, Da Vinci displayed his understanding of art in less discrete ways, such as in his paintings of the sky. In these paintings, he modes the clouds moving in a circled motion, meaning he had an understanding that many had not yet acquired about motion in the clouds. Lastly, I admired how Leonardo Da Vinci's curiosity and study notes have carried on into today. As his drawings on the female anatomy that contains many overlays can be shown in the same style in ABC's "Grey's Anatomy." Within the show, one of the characters had been operated on by a machine named after Da Vinci called "Da Vinci Surgical System" [Fandom].

Leonardo Da Vinci, Female Anatomy

Works Cited

    Fandom. “Da Vinci Surgical System | Grey's Anatomy Universe Wiki | Fandom.” Grey's Anatomy               Universe Wiki, https://greysanatomy.fandom.com/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System. Accessed 19 May     2023.

    MOS. “Scientist | Leonardo Da Vinci - The Genius.” Museum of Science, Boston,                                       https://www.mos.org/leonardo/scientist. Accessed 19 May 2023.

    Pevsner, Jonathan. “Leonardo da Vinci's contributions to neuroscience.” PubMed, 2002, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11998691/. Accessed 19 May 2023.

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