| 58 This View of Life |
Natural History 5/97 |
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Codex
Leicester, and occupies several full pages of text--one, for example,
entitled "Of the Flood and of marine shells," and another, "Refutation
of such as say that the shells were carried a distance of many days' journey from
the sea by reason of the Deluge."
Second, Leonardo dismisses, even
more contemptuously, various Neoplatonic versions of the theory that fossils are
not remains of ancient organisms at all, but rather manifestations of some plastic
force within rocks, or some emanation from the stars, capable of precisely mimicking
a living creature in order to illustrate the symbolic harmony among realms of
nature: animal, vegetable, and mineral. If fossils really belong to the mineral
kingdom, then their position on the tops of mountains ceases to be anomalous,
as we need no longer believe that these objects ever inhabited the seas.Leonardo
made observations 7 to 9 to refute this Neoplatonic theory that fossils "grew"
within their entombing rocks and do not represent the remains of organisms. If
marine fossils are inorganic, why don't they "grow" in all strata, rather
than only in rocks carrying abundant evidence of an oceanic origin (observation
7). If fossils belong to the mineral kingdom, why should they so often grow in
fragments and jumbles looking exactly like piles of shells on our beaches, or
layers deposited by rivers in lakes and ponds (observation 8). Most convincingly,
if fossils grow from inorganic "seeds" in the rocks, how can they expand,
year by year, as indicated by growth bands in their shells, without fracturing
the surrounding matrix (observation 9).Leonardo reserved his choicest
invective for what he regarded as the lingering magical content of this Neoplatonic
theory of signs and signatures (although the issue remained alive--and quite
lively--within Western science until the late seventeenth century. The Mundus
subterraneus (1664) of the great Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher represents
the last seriously cogent defense of the Neoplatonic position). Leonardo writes:
And if you should say that these shells have been and still constantly are
being created in such places as these by the nature of the locality and through
the potency of the heavens in those spots, such an opinion cannot exist in brains
possessed of any extensive powers of reasoning because the years of their growth
are numbered upon the outer coverings of their shells [observation 9 again]; and
both small and large ones may be seen, and these would not have grown without
feeding or feed without movement, and here [that is, in solid rock] they would
not be able to move. . . .Ignoramuses maintain that nature or the
heavens have created [fossils] in these places through celestial influences.
B
ut demonstrating that Leonardo made his paleontological observations to refute the
prevailing theories of his time scarcely establishes my argument that he must
be evaluated as a thinker immersed in his own premodern context and not judged
for his remarkable foreshadowing
of twentieth-century views--for a true spaceman would also have to refute
the fallacies of his surroundings in order to introduce superior views from his
time warp (just as Hank Morgan had to reject the running messenger service in
favor of a telephone call for summoning Sir Lancelot's bicycle corps). I must
advance a further claim--one that can be particularly well documented in Leonardo's
case.
Just as Leonardo made his astute observations to
refute prevailing theories of fossils, he also urged his interpretations in support
of his own favored theory of the earth. ("All observation must be for
or against some view"). And the positive prod for Leonardo's paleontological
observations could not have been more squarely Renaissance or late medieval, more
firmly attached to his own time and concerns--and not to ours. Leonardo observed
fossils as part of his quest to support a distinctive theory of the earth--a
framework that would be seriously weakened if either Noah's flood or the Neoplatonic
theory of fossils were true. If Leonardo had not been so devoted to his "antiquated"
theory of the earth. I doubt that he would ever have been inspired to make his
wonderfully "modernist" observations about fossils--for the notebooks
invariably present his observations as arguments to support his theory. Leonardo
loomed so much larger than life, even in the eyes of his contemporaries, that
a potent mythology began to envelop him right from the start. Only thirty years
after Leonardo's death, Giorgio Vasari published a first biography full of such
touching tall tales as Leonardo's death in the arms of King Francis I. (Francis
did admire Leonardo greatly, but he and his entire court had decamped to another
town on the day of Leonardo's demise. (A. Richard Turner has written an entire,
and fascinating, book on the history of the Leonardo legend through the ages--Inventing
Leonardo, University of California Press, 1994.) One prominent component of
the myth--that Leonardo was an unlettered man who could only work by observation
and therefore gained great (if ironic) benefit from not knowing the false
traditions of medieval Scholasticism--must be refuted if my case for his medieval
impetus has merit. For how could I assert such a controlling context if Leonardo
never knew or studied the prevailing traditions of printed scholarship in his
time? As the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo grew up
in reasonably comfortable but nonscholarly circles and received only a limited
formal education. Most importantly, he did not learn Latin, then the nearly universal
language of intellectual communication. But Leonardo did study Latin assiduously
in later life, even if he never attained more than a halting knowledge. (I love
Martin Kemp's statement in his superb book Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous
Works of Nature and Man: "It is rather humbling to think of Leonardo
in his late thirties secretly |