{"id":36,"date":"2006-07-22T12:47:53","date_gmt":"2006-07-22T12:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ivyrun.com\/wordpress\/?p=36"},"modified":"2006-07-22T12:47:53","modified_gmt":"2006-07-22T12:47:53","slug":"leonardo-da-vinci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/?p=36","title":{"rendered":"Leonardo da Vinci"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Leonardo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Leonardo da Vinci in Milan near La Scala Opera House, June 2004<\/p>\n

Read Sherwin B. Nuland’s biography of da Vinci.\u00a0 It is part of the Penguin Lives series, which are short bios (< 200 pages) written by non-biographers.\u00a0 Nuland is a surgeon who teaches at Yale.\u00a0 While his biography focuses on da Vinci’s anatomical work, there are also some interesting comments about art and vision that relate to media.<\/p>\n

Leonardo was one of the first to do drawings of actual cadavers.\u00a0 According to Nuland, most physicians of the time “regarded drawings as distractions from the text, using them only to support theoretical constructs about which the student was meant to learn by reading.” (p. 121).\u00a0 This bias continued for many centuries.\u00a0 Nuland quotes a review of the famous Gray’s Anatomy by Oliver Wendell Holmes that criticizes the text for its numerous drawings: “[L]et a student have good illustrations, and just so surely will he use them at the expense of the text” (p. 121).\u00a0 And this from 1859!<\/p>\n

John Zuern’s contemporary answer to Holmes is found in his essay, Diagram, Dialogue, Dialectic: Visual Explanations and Visual Rhetoric in the Teaching of Literary Theory. \u00a0 According to Zuern, images are not just window dressing, something to accompany the more important text.\u00a0 Instead, “at their best, images that seek to help students understand ideas are able to perform two tasks: providing a clear representation of the concepts and offering a way of testing, challenging, critiquing that concept” (p. 70).\u00a0 He laments that most images in popular books about philosophy and literary theory “almost never exploit the capacity of the image to question the concept it is supposed to convey” (p. 70).\u00a0 Da Vinci understood, as his contemporaries did not, the importance of seeing as a way of supporting thinking and understanding:<\/p>\n

“It is direct vision that differentiaties Leonardo’s studies from all that fell under the heading of Galenic.\u00a0 In order to answer his perennial question of why, he had first to understand how, which demanded a meticulous attention to accurate anatomic detail such as had never before seen so much as considered by any predecessor.\u00a0 To see clearly, to interpret objectively–these were the keys to solving nature’s riddles.\u00a0 His was the artist’s eye, but his also was the scientist’s curiosity and the scientist’s apperception that only by reducing a phenomenon to its component elements can it be fully understood.\u00a0 And only by knowing that minute particulars of structure can function even begin to be elucidated.” (p. 128).\u00a0 Nuland goes on for several pages singing the praises of Leonardo’s drawings an dillustrations.<\/p>\n

Finally, Nuland describes Leonardo’s work with the eye.\u00a0 While the thought at the time was “that vision was perceived within the lens,\u00a0 he was able to satisfy himself that seeing is in fact the result of light being focused on the retina.” (p. 134).\u00a0\u00a0 He did not, however, solve the riddle of upright images.<\/p>\n

What’s the lesson here?\u00a0 There are at least two.\u00a0 First, as long as we continue to rely on printed textbooks as our primary texts, we must be thoughtful about the images we select and include as many as possible.\u00a0 In addition, we must recognize the power of the image to expand understanding rather than simply mimic the text.\u00a0 Second, we must seek out images to share with our students and discuss them openly with them, digging into the image to pull out is meaning.\u00a0 And, as one of my professors at WM does, we need to have them construct their own images and models that help them better understand their learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leonardo da Vinci in Milan near La Scala Opera House, June 2004 Read Sherwin B. Nuland’s biography of da Vinci.\u00a0 It is part of the Penguin Lives series, which are short bios (< 200 pages) written by non-biographers.\u00a0 Nuland is a surgeon who teaches at Yale.\u00a0 While his biography focuses on da Vinci’s anatomical work, … Continue reading Leonardo da Vinci<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21,8,9,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-new-media","category-old-media","category-vision"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4X3L0-A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}