The Bastard Son of the Renaissance: Da Vinci

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the four basic new ideas, values and opinions in the notebooks of Da Vinci, as analyzed in Julia Conway Bondanella and Mark Musa's "The Italian Renaissance Reader." The paper discusses the idea of intellectual elitism, the idea that painting is subtle and sculpture is crude, the idea of creation versus reproduction and the rejection of book learning and the emphasis and preference for observation and experience.

From the Paper:

"The rejection of book learning and the emphasis and preference for observation and experience was an additional notion birthed in the period of the Renaissance. Da Vinci was not a university man, or a churchman. He highly valued experience and experimental behavior over any other type of learning. Da Vinci found that experience was far better and superior to any knowledge you could gain through institutions, such as schools and universities. He felt that learning from books, literary knowledge, was quite mediocre compared to experience. Experience and experiments were the ultimate learning tool for Da Vinci. The mere knowledge of text, without experience of what the literature spoke of was not the type of learning Da Vinci emphasized. "They will say that since I have no literary ability, I cannot properly express what I wish to deal with, but what they do not know is that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has always been the mistress of those who wrote well." Da Vinci knew that dealing with the subject itself was much better for the expanding of the mind and learning than merely reading about it, and thus greatly emphasized observation, experience, and experimentation."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Julia Conway Bondanella, Mark Musa. The Italian Renaissance Reader. (Meridian Publishing:1987), 187

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