Summary

Leonardo da Vinci was proud of the fact that he was a "disciple of experience" (170). He believed that too much reliance on formal education prevented one from making observations on their own. At the same time, while in Milan in the 1490s, he began to soak up some traditional learning to compliment his experiments and self-teachings. He began teaching himself Latin, acquiring books on all subjects, and seeking lessons from his friends and peers. As such, he began to realize that knowledge comes from a combination of experiment and theory. In Isaacson's words, "as a result, Leonardo became one of the major Western thinkers, more than a century before Galileo, to pursue in a persistent hands-on fashion the dialogue between experiment and theory" (175). Much of Leonardo's work involved seeing patterns in nature and making analogies, such as the connection between tree branches and...