Across the centuries, each generation has interpreted
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), finding him to be
remarkably modern. At the 500th anniversary of his death
(May 2, 2019) we can consider Leonardo’s meaning in our
era. Our fundamental nature as human beings has not
changed in 500 years, but our environment has
transformed at an extraordinary rate, along with our
perspectives on his accomplishments—and our own.
THE NATURE OF GENIUS
Leonardo is a genius and a potent symbol of the “univer-
sal man” because of the breadth of his interests in the
arts, science and technology, spanning disciplines from
chemistry (he discovered acetone) to astronomy (he dis-
covered the lumen cinereum of the moon) to math (he
discovered the center of gravity of a pyramid) to working
with plastics.
Genius takes many forms, and in Leonardo’s case we
recognize his limitations. He was defensive about his lack
of formal education; he called himself “omo sanza lettere”
(a man without letters). He had trouble with basic arith-
metic operations, and his Latin skills were weak. He sure-
ly would not have performed well in a modern school sys-
tem, and his IQ might have been tested as low. (I do not
believe he can or should be diagnosed with any condition
such as autism spectrum disorder or attention-deficit/
hyperactivity disorder.)
Many people wonder if there could be a genius like
Leonardo today, or what a person of his disposition would
do. Perhaps there cannot be another like him because
today’s world requires tremendous specialization. Many
of us are in fields that demand interdisciplinary thinking.
But few scientists, physicians, poets or politicians today
are called geniuses.A UNIFIED VISION OF NATURE’S LAWS
Leonardo’s science was grounded in the Aristotelian
world as shaped by 18 centuries of interpreters. He devel-
oped a system of what he called the four powers of nature:
movement, weight, force and percussion. Although he
struggled to define these concepts, and many of the ideas
are archaic, it is telling that he developed a coherent mod-
el for all natural phenomena ranging from the macrocosm(e.g., geological forces that lead to the formation of rivers
and oceans) to the microcosm (e.g., human anatomy).
I believe he was excited about his conception of the
four powers and how they informed his art and science.
We are on a similar kind of path today, seeking the grand
unification of the laws of physics as we study natural
phenomena from subatomic particles to the history of
the universe. Few of us extend this attempt at unifica-
tion to the arts as well.VISUALIZED KNOWLEDGE
To Leonardo, vision is the noblest of the senses and of
paramount importance, and his passion for vision was
extreme. “The eye is the window of the human body
through which the soul views and enjoys the beauties of
the world. Because of it, the soul is content in its human
prison, and without it this human prison is its torment”
he writes in his Paragone (comparison of the arts). He
emphasized ways to visualize knowledge and he pio-
neered anatomical illustration.
To Leonardo, painting was a science, and the creative
act of painting is useful to visualize the world. As an anat-
omist and physiologist he decided at one point that the
sense of vision is so important that it must be mediated
by its own brain region, the “imprensiva.”
Seeing also has the meaning of paying attention, and
Leonardo did this with exquisite patience. He would
strike a dusty table and describe the pattern by which the
dust settled again. He performed repeated dissections of
the body, and when his observations conflicted with thoseJonathan Pevsner is a professor in the department of
neurology at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and in the
department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at
the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.