Leonardo Da Vinci: Renaissance Humanist, Naturalist, Artist, Scientist

Leonardo Da Vinci, born in the village of Vinci in Tuscany, Italy, on April 15, 1452, was one of the most important artistic figures of the Renaissance; his skill and ability to elicit so much emotion with a few simple lines is almost unparalleled in the history of art. While people may realize that he as an important artist, though, they don't generally realize how important he was as an early skeptic, naturalist, materialist, and scientist. There is no evidence that he was an atheist, but he is a role model in how to approach both scientific and artistic problems from a naturalistic, skeptical perspective.

Leonardo Da Vinci believed that a good artist must also be a good scientist in order to best understand and describe nature. Guided by the conviction that nature always takes the shortest path, he developed early theorems of inertia, action/reaction, and force. None was as developed as those made famous by Descartes and Newton, but they demonstrate his involvement with science as well as the degree to which he placed empirical data and science above faith and revelation. This was why Leonardo was such a strong skeptic, casting doubt on many of the popular pseudosciences of his day - especially astrology, for example.

This is also why the real Leonardo Da Vinci was so unlike Dan Brown's book. The Da Vinci Code doesn't encourage the intellectual values of skepticism and critical thinking because it is founded upon a massive conspiracy of political and religious authorities and secrets that have been kept hidden for millennia. None of this is plausible - the book encourages replacing one set of religious myths with a different one based on faith in the power of conspiracies. Moreover, the very title of Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code actually means The from Vinci Code because "Da Vinci" is a reference to Leonardo's town of origin, not his surname. This is perhaps a relatively minor error, but it's representative of Brown's failure to pay attention to historical details in a book that purports to be based on historical truth.

Major eras in Leonardo's Life:

Florence (1467-1482)
Milan (1482-1499)
Italy and France (1499-1519)
Leonardo Da Vinci died on May 2, 1519, in Cloux, France

Some of Leonardo Da Vinci's surviving works include:

Annunciation, 1475-1480
Adoration of the Magi, 1481
Last Supper, 1498
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda, 1503-1505
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, 1510
St. John the Baptist, 1514