Why we remain in awe of da Vinci
IT IS A SPLENDID THING TO FLY INTO LEONARDO DA VINCI AIRPORT. — DE SOUZA
Here’s a helpful travel advisory you won’t get elsewhere. If you are flying out of Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport (Fiumicino) go at least three, if not four, hours before your flight. No, check-in formalities and security have not become nightmarish — though if you find yourself behind a flight’s worth of Chinese or Korean tourists in the tax- free refund queue you could easily expend hours there alone.
Rather go early because in the departure terminals — before security and so accessible to the general public as well — are fascinating exhibitions to mark the quincentennial of the death of the airport’s namesake in 1519. You can easily spend an hour or two and learn a lot about the many things that da Vinci knew, or discovered, or invented, or created — to use the precise term in relation to his works of art.
It’s not the Louvre, which is now staging a da Vinci exhibition worthy of a 500th anniversary, bringing together in Paris almost all the known da Vinci paintings. The airport exhibition focuses on da Vinci’s attempts to invent “flying machines,” including a stunning recreation of “the flying man” — a contraption to fit a man with wings stretching out to an 11-metre span.
The exhibition, entitled Leonardo’s Wings: The Genius and Flight explores how da Vinci carefully studied avian flight to see how man might imitate it. How carefully? The exhibition features 32 pages from the “codex on the flight of birds,” which includes da Vinci’s detailed drawings of avian anatomy, with some of his mathematical calculations and engineering sketches. The curators deserve credit for giving harried passengers who might only spend 10 minutes in the exhibits a glimpse into how one of the greatest minds in history worked.
That really is the great lesson that Leonardo offers to our age, that of a gifted mind that ranged widely across the various fields of knowledge. Today, especially in the universities, specialization has become separation, so that knowledge is both deeper and narrower.
Obviously there were narrow specialists in da Vinci’s time, and more obviously Leonardo was not in any way typical. Yet the integration of different fields of knowledge — especially science with philosophy and theology — was the starting point, the default position. There is endless trumpeting today about this or that program being “interdisciplinary” in approach, which is a step in the right direction, but hardly the integration of all fields of inquiry that Leonardo practised.
Earlier in the year I had the chance to see da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine in the National Museum in Kraków, Poland. I was fascinated by the detailed, lifelike depiction of both the lady and the ermine. The accompanying material in the exhibition gave the key to Leonardo’s precision; he studied the anatomy of cadavers, both human and feline, in order to understand exactly how the bones and muscles and sinews and skin fit together.
That same “primary” research of anatomy, found expression in both engineering (flying machines) and painting. The sketch books of the wings and the cranial cavities and the lungs of birds already show something of the master painter at work. Moreover, the accurate depiction of the bodies in painting are in service of both psychology and spirituality. It’s all of a piece.
We use the term “Renaissance Man” to describe someone who can do many things in different fields well, or at least has a trained appreciation for business and music and physics and literature. But the Renaissance of which Leonardo was the proud fruit was not a matter of doing as much as it was a way of looking at the entire world as a unified whole. Mathematics could be mastered as much for astronomy or transport as for architecture or music.
A final note. I know few people share my interest in airport names, but it is a splendid thing to fly into Leonardo da Vinci airport. Fitting, noble, inspiring.
In Canada — like the United States — we give far too much honour to politicians in our airport names. Flying from Toronto ( Pearson) to Montreal ( Trudeau) suggests that our range of human achievement stretches from one Liberal prime minister to his successor. Flying from Saskatoon (Diefenbaker) to Halifax ( Stanfield), from one Conservative leader to his successor.
That’s a narrow view of the human project, giving pride of place to politics. Italy does better — there are airports named after scientists (Galileo in Pisa), artists ( Caravaggio in Bergamo) and explorers (Cristoforo Colombo in Genoa and Amerigo Vespucci in Florence).
Poland is the world model, with its four principal airports named after a musician ( Chopin in Warsaw), a saint (John Paul II in Kraków), a scientist ( Copernicus in Wroclaw) and a champion of political freedom ( Walesa in Gdansk).
Airports open up the world. Why not open up the mind, too?