Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Leonardo’s Lesson
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Ten minutes ago near Amboise, France, a yellow, billowy hot air balloon lifted off from an island in the middle of the Loire River. Swaying below the balloon, the gondola looks like an over-sized, sturdy wicker market basket. I am one of eight fruits or vegetables crammed into it.
Our pilot is a stringy, swaggering man, perhaps in his mid-thirties. Jeans and a bluish-grey jacket are his disheveled uniform. Before the flight, I watched him roll a cigarette. He operates a squawking two-flame burner spewing fire and noise while he talks by radiophone to ground control or, judging by his dopey grin, his girlfriend.
As we drift over the town, I spot the Amboise Castle where Leonardo Da Vinci is buried. Nearby, his former mansion is now a museum.
In 1516, with flattery and financial underwriting, King Francis enticed Leonardo to move here from Italy. He brought his scientific notebooks, his aide-de-camp and the Mona Lisa. More of his artworks hang in the Louvre than any other museum.
The air currents bring us twenty feet over the forest canopy—lush, leafy, virginal. Where royalty once hunted deer and wild boar, the countryside is dotted with castles and chateaux, like stone tombstones, memorializing opulence and economic injustice.
Gliding low over open fields, right below me—seemingly touchable--are cows the mottled beige color of stained wood. They don’t trouble themselves to look up. Perhaps they are jaded from hundreds of overflights. Perhaps their moms taught them not to stare.
After we land with a bone-jarring thump, I head to the Leonardo museum to collect a few engaging, entertaining, enticing facts for my high school classes. I want to get a feel for his unconquerable curiosity. About his unquenchable need to understand the structure of flowers, the hydraulics of water, the inner workings of the human body. To explore with his mind.
Without any formal schooling—a biography detail I will skip over in class--he was a painter, sculptor, architect and engineer. He was a self-taught botanist before botany was a recognized science.
Besides his artistic masterpieces, he invented designs for the parachute, the ball bearing, water mills, paddle-wheelers, a bridge to span the Bosphorus. His war machines included the first tank, a machine gun prototype, an armored troop carrier. At the nearby Chateau Chambord, I walk up and down his ‘double helix’ staircase.
Leonardo produced 5000 pages of engineering schematics. He “utilized leverage and cantilevering, pulleys, cranks, gears, including angle gears and rack and pinion gears; parallel linkage, lubrication systems and bearings. He understood…momentum, centripetal force, friction and the aerofoil and applied these to his inventions.”
As if Leonardo might return to his old studio at any minute, the working tools of his genius wait for him. Easels, a writing desk, paintbrushes and pigments, engineering models, maquettes, sketches, cabinets of curiosities.
My legs stall. My heart rate slows. The chatter around me subsides into murmuring white noise.
In the crevice of my brain where hope lives, I imagine that, if I stand in his workspace long enough, I might possibly learn to learn.
