Is the Renaissance man dead?
It’s been a long time since I wrote something more than a status update so I feel I might as well try writing up something that’s been niggling at me for a while & really struck home when I went to see the Codex Leicester in the Chester Beatty.
The Renaissance man or Polymath is often held up as the intellectual pinnacle to aspire to. A man who has encyclopaedic knowledge of many fields is considered a better creature than someone who has a single field of expertise.
Ask someone on the street to name a historical genius and the name which springs to most minds will be Leonardo Da Vinci. Painter, Sculptor, Mathematician, Engineer, Anatomist & Architect - sounds impressive & it is.
However, any Engineer by necessity has to be a Mathematician, a civil engineer has the ability if not the artistic flair to be an Architect and a Sculptor & painter must understand anatomy. So it compresses to Leonardo Da Vinci, Engineer & Artist. Still that’s pretty impressive.
Now, as an engineer, Da Vincii wasn’t the genius people like to assume* - many of his designs were cribbed from earlier works or fundamentally flawed, in his observations he frequently discounts evidence that he could not make fit his personal theories, his mathematical work was propped up by his teacher & collaborator Pacioli & it’s recorded that he was unable to even solve a simple static balance problem for a statue of a rearing horse (Michelangelo supposedly used to abuse him about this at every opportunity).
So why do people obsess over him when other equally broad/broader talents such as those of Ibn al-Haytham, Newton (look it up - his laws of motion weren’t the only thing he achieved) or even Michelangelo are ignored?
Simple. None of the others were bastard offspring who wrote backwards, survived on four hours sleep a night, spent their lives scurrying from location to location or left thousands of pages of cryptic, unclear & iconic looking notes behind them (regardless of what little they say - they look very much as genius writing is imagined).
Da Vinci is primarily held up as an icon because he was a larger than life romantic figure rather than because of what he actually achieved.
* It’s worth noting at this point that I’m writing this as Devil’s advocate. Da vinci was of course extremely talented (I’m still not convinced that he deserves all the attention that is lavished on him though). In fact, Da Vinci was one of the reasons I ended up studying engineering
[There’s also a second idea on the Renaissance man as an ideal which I may get round to posting sometime. I’ll probably clean this entry up later]