Leonardo da Vinci: Thinker, Researcher, and Poet

available; of the remainder, we have a preliminary understanding through thematically arranged excerpts. One cannot engage with these wonderful records in a superficial manner. They do not reveal themselves easily; but once one begins to penetrate them, they hold one fast in a most divine intoxication. One finds in them—let it be said at once—not a single completed work; yet from these partial treatises—material for books—from the thousandfold ideas, observations, and drafts of these richly illustrated notebooks and journals, there wells up a nearly immeasurable abundance of thought and poetry. Here a spirit is revealed to us whose power and depth were entirely equal to the most monstrous urge to know and to understand that the earth has ever produced. There is hardly a branch of the natural sciences realen Wissenschaften: the "real" or empirical sciences, such as physics and biology in which Leonardo did not gain the most surprising insights. Not only does he teach the experimental method long before Lord Bacon Francis Bacon (1561–1626), often credited as the father of empiricism., but he also practices it as a master. He anticipated a whole series of the greatest physical discoveries by centuries. Earlier than Copernicus, he relegated the Earth to the modest role of a star among stars and denied the sun its motion original: "der Sonne die Bewegung abgesprochen" — Leonardo intuited that the sun does not revolve around the earth.. His intuitive grasp of the developmental history of our globe, his eye for its primeval past and its future, fills one with amazement; and his errors are just as brilliant as his divinations. He is one of the earliest masters of hydraulic engineering, not merely practically but also theoretically. He founded modern pictorial anatomy and was likely the first to pursue comparative anatomy in the sense that he recognized the common basic blueprint in the bodily structure of humans and animals, studying and depicting it in multiple variations. His manuscript pages are covered with designs and calculations for machines of all kinds. There is nothing he emphasizes with such pride as the fact that he is an inventor. To what extent he truly was—