It was to be Leonardo da Vinci's most impressive work yet. In 1483, the
Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, commissioned the up-and-coming artist to
create a huge bronze statue of a horse, standing over 7 metres tall. Da
Vinci spent the next 10 years perfecting a full-size clay model.
Sadly, it was never cast in bronze.
Those years in Milan were nevertheless important for da Vinci, and not
only for the many masterpieces he painted in that time. The polymath was
also
working on a very different project inspired by an intriguing feature of
the
surrounding countryside: embedded in the rocks there appeared to be a
multitude of small stone sea creatures.
Da Vinci recorded his observations of
these and other fossils in a secret
notebook now known as the "Codex Leicester". His findings have long been
known to be ahead of their time, but a new analysis suggests that the
work
was even more advanced than previously thought, with da Vinci correctly
deciphering not only the origin of body fossils, which are the direct
remains of
an animal, but also trace fossils -- the tracks and burrows left behind
by ancient creatures.
Domenico Laurenza, a Renaissance science specialist at the Galileo
Museum
in Florence, Italy, who has been commissioned by Gates to produce a new
translation of the Codex Leicester, is more cautious, particularly about
lumping da Vinci's research in with more modern ichnological work. "Da
Vinci's
general conception is pre-Darwinian," he says. "That doesn't mean that
his
studies are less scientific than those by Darwin, they are just
different."
Read more:
http://ow.ly/2MTLz
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