Leonardo was a scientist and an artist at the same time and in a way totally unimaginable today. CP Snow's famous image of the "two cultures" of art and science, a great divide in the modern mind, did not apply in the 15th and early 16th centuries when Leonardo lived. The "scientific" knowledge available was barely scientific at all by modern standards. Most of it was inherited from ancient Greece and was a curious mixture of genuine insight, such as the existence of atoms postulated by Democritus, and the superstitious, or mythical, thinking that pervades the Hippocratic Writings. Leonardo was infinitely curious. He taught himself and experimented for himself. <u>He drew inventions and tried to build a flying machine</u>. But he also lived in a late medieval world that allowed him to see analogies between all natural forms: <em>an onion as a model of the human head, a wooden flying machine as a man-made "bird"</em>. In other words, his knowledge never got in the way of his imagination.
The <u>anatomical drawings in the Royal Collection</u> are the closest he ever came to modern science. <em>They record his own dissections and are observed so closely and brilliantly that modern doctors can still learn from them</em>. He definitely made real discoveries through sheer observation – the essence of true empirical science. The exhibition makes these discoveries clearer than ever before.
