Secrets of the Dead: "Leonardo: The Man Who Saved Science" (GA&A Productions, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, Program 33, Discovery Channel, History Channel, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 21) I watched a Secrets of the Dead episode on KPBS from 2017 with the rather grandiose title, “Leonardo: The Man Who Saved Science.” What made that quite odd is that the entire point of the show, written and directed by Mark Daniels, is that while Leonardo da Vinci was undoubtedly a very smart man who was especially good both as artist and scientist, a lot of innovations he’s often credited with were actually built on other people’s ideas. Some of them originated with the scientists of ancient Greece and Rome, while others came from people closer to his own time, including one Mariano di Jacopo (1382-c. 1453), known as “Taccola” – “The Jackdaw.” Taccola presumably died the year Leonardo was born, and his books existed only as manuscripts, but at least three of them survive to this day and his treatise De Ingenis (“On Engines”) was first printed and published in 1969. Leonardo almost certainly got to see Taccola’s manuscripts in his apprentice years in Florence, and among the designs Taccola drew well before Leonardo did was the first parachute. Ironically, Leonardo borrowed a lot of his designs from Taccola and others around him but made key improvements that rendered the gadgets practical: it was Leonardo, not Taccola, who made the parachute actually work by figuring a way to coat the fabric so it would be both airtight and watertight – though even here there’s a report that an Arab inventor 500 years earlier had not only made a parachute but successfully tested it himself, hurling himself off the minaret of a mosque and landing with only minor injuries. Indeed, one of the most fascinating subtexts of this program was that during the Middle Ages Christian authorities were deeming the great books of ancient Greece and Rome heretical and destroying them right and left, while Arab scholars living under Islam not only read them but carefully preserved them. Indeed, it’s my understanding that a lot of important scientific and technological works from Greece and Rome survive only in Arabic translations.

Leonardo was born in a small town called Vinci, product of an extramarital liaison between Florentine notary Ser Piero da Vinci d'Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido and Caterina di Meo Lippi. Vinci was about 20 miles north of Florence, and at age 14 Leonardo moved to the big city and apprenticed in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, a leading Florentine artist of the time. While there, Leonardo helped work out the technique for transferring a giant copper sphere onto the top of the dome of one of the major churches, the Cathedral of St. Mary’s, though he’d had nothing to do with building the dome in the first place and that was itself a major engineering feat for the time. Because he was illegitimate, Leonardo never had a formal education but picked it all up himself, reading voluminously and teaching himself Latin so he could read the scientific and technological treatises of his time, which were almost all in Latin. Leonardo was also almost certainly Gay; according to his Wikipedia page, “[C]ourt records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal.” (In the early 20th century, Marcel Duchamp would famously paint a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and exhibit it as an artwork of his own, L.H.O.O.Q. – which if you read it in the French pronunciation sounds like “She has a hot tail.” His explanation was that because Leonardo was Gay, his ideal of beauty was male, and Duchamp was essentially “outing” the Mona Lisa as Gay by supplying “her” with a moustache to reveal that “she” was actually a “he.”)

In 1482, Leonardo applied for and won a position at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza in Milan, writing a letter that’s been called the world’s first résumé. In it, he offered copies of drawings by Taccola and others and claimed they were his own inventions. Sforza was unusually familiar with the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and Rome because he’d hosted the last Byzantine Roman Emperor on a state visit to Italy 15 years before he was overthrown by the Ottoman Turks – who were also Muslims but had a much lower threshold of interest in science, especially science that couldn’t be used for military purposes, than the Arab Muslims had had. While in Sforza’s service in Milan, Leonardo worked on a number of inventions, often improving them so they would actually work – as he did with the parachute and also with Taccola’s design for a screw-pump for water. The show pretty much leaves Leonardo behind after he gets to Milan, though the rest of his biography is pretty hectic: in 1499 he was forced to flee Milan after the French invaders conquered the city and forced Sforza into exile. Thereupon he went to Venice in 1500 and returned to Florence in 1503. There he painted the first version of the Mona Lisa (which, at least according to a previous PBS documentary, is in the hands of a private collector in London; the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is allegedly a copy Leonardo painted from memory during his final years in France), then went back to Milan in 1508, was summoned to Rome by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Giovanni, who became Pope Leo X in 1513, and in 1517 he cut a deal with Francis I, King of France, to settle in France, where he died two years later.

This Secrets of the Dead show featured a mix of documentary-style talking heads and re-creations of Leonardo’s life with actors playing him and his associates and employers. I suspect these were shot for an Italian-language movie and then dubbed into English, because the actors’ lip movements were frequently at odds with what they were saying on the soundtrack. Also, a number of the interviewees were speaking either Italian or French, with English voice-overs, and the actor playing the adult Leonardo, Giuseppe Lanino, was quite attractive, with an almost angelic face and a really nice ass (appropriate given that the real Leonardo was Gay). I usually don’t care for these hybrids of documentary and dramatized footage, but this time I didn’t mind so much and the story is so compelling it overcame my usual distaste for the format. It’s also yet another illustration that scientific progress depends on the free interchange of ideas between researchers, and modern intellectual property laws, far from encouraging invention, actually sometimes inhibit it because later researchers tend to shy away from building on previous work and risking being sued and potentially bankrupted by patent litigation. Ironically, both Taccola and Leonardo published almost nothing about science and technology during their lifetimes, and Taccola at least was quite frank about why: he was worried about others stealing his ideas. In one of his manuscripts Taccola wrote, “My speech has been veiled. ... I say what I say because of the ingratitude of some people, and not of all men.” Leonardo’s manuscripts were literally indecipherable for centuries because he wrote them in a backwards-style script that was hard to read (which has led some researchers to conclude he was dyslexic), and though he continued to work in science and technology almost all his life he kept virtually all that information secret. As a result, Leonardo was remembered for the first four centuries after his death almost exclusively as an artist, and his contributions to science were largely ignored until researchers started transcribing and translating his diaries, journals and private papers in the early 20th century.