Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section009/Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest artists with irrepressible curiosity and extremely active creative imagination, whose paintings were famous for realism. In addition, he was a scientist and an inventor. He pointed out that Renaissance Humanism has no mutually exclusive extremes between science and art. Before the Renaissance, people learned about scientific information from Aristotelian’s theories, and only believed in written records. Da Vinci encouraged people to learn from nature and seek knowledge and truth in nature. He believed that knowledge originated from practice and should start from practice to explore the mysteries of science through practice. Gradually deepening his understanding of combining science and art, Da Vinci created 13,000 pages of transcript. Da Vinci represented people at that time. Learning from Da Vinci, people gradually began to seek the pleasures of worldly life instead of the pessimistic and hopeless attitude toward the real world.