The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book about one of the world’s most celebrated artists and scientists, Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.

The TU Library collection owns several other books about different aspects of the creativity of Leonardo.

Although Leonardo is remembered as the painter of the famous portrait known as the Mona Lisa, he was interested in science and invention; among the subjects he investigated in the 1400s were anatomy, cartography, painting, and palaeontology.

He thought about the possibility of flying machines and different devices to be used in battle. He also considered a way to concentrate solar power and design an adding machine.

Most of these innovations could not be built during his lifetime. Among concepts he dealt with early on that later proved possible were the parachute, helicopter, and tank.

He made discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology, optics, and hydrodynamics.

For this reason, TU students in many different faculties may find subjects of interest in Leonardo da Vinci’s work.

Thailand and Leonardo

As The Nation reported last year, Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit was chosen as the host for an exhibit, A Taste of Leonardo, featuring copies of works by Leonardo da Vinci.

The art was displayed from December 2 to 14, including a copy of da Vinci’s Codex Leicester. This scientific journal focuses on da Vinci’s thoughts about water, tides, eddies and dams, and the relationship between the moon, the earth, and the sun.

Also last year, The Italian Festival in Thailand celebrated the 500th anniversary of Leonardo with the exhibition Leonardo Opera Omnia, a Latin phrase meaning the complete works of Leonardo. It was a digital showcase of the artist’s paintings.

Organised by the Italian Embassy in collaboration with the public broadcaster RaiCom, the show was on view from September 4 to October 7 on the third floor of River City Bangkok shopping center.

It consisted of 17 da Vinci painting reproduced in digital form in the dimensions of the original artworks. Included were the Mona Lisa, The Annunication, and The Last Supper.

During Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown in April, The Bangkok Post recommended a virtual visit to the Louvre museum in Paris, where the Mona Lisa is displayed:

Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass is the first virtual reality (VR) experience presented by the Louvre. An extended home version of the VR experience is now available for download through VIVEPORT and other VR platforms, including mobile VR on iOS and Android, for audiences across the globe.

As The Bangkok Post explains,

The Mona Lisa Beyond The Glass app can blend virtual reality with animation technology. The presentation will let you know how the artwork was originally created, along with numerous details about the painting. 

If you are looking for the world-renowned Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, you should download the museum’s virtual reality app, “Mona Lisa Beyond The Glass”. The app allows you to see and know more about Lisa Gherardini, whose portrait was painted more than 500 years ago.

The app is available at Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store. With your mobile phone, you can move your direction left, right, up or down to see an overview of the Louvre before the programme will lead you directly to the Mona Lisa. During the introduction, you can see other paintings in the room. If you have a virtual reality headset, it will give you a much different feeling than watching the presentation on a screen.

Here are some thoughts by Leonardo da Vinci:

• I know that many will call this useless work.
• Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen. These two arts, you may call them both either poetry or painting, have here interchanged the senses by which they penetrate to the intellect.

A Treatise on Painting (1651)

• Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one, it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.
• The painter strives and competes with nature…There is nothing in all nature without its reason. If you know the reason, you do not need the experience…

Thoughts on Art and Life by Leonardo da Vinci (1906)

• Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
• It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
• Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.
• Darkness is absence of light. Shadow is diminution of light.
• A picture or representation of human figures, ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds.
• Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.
• When you wish to represent a man speaking to a number of people, consider the matter of which he has to treat and adapt his action to the subject. Thus, if he speaks persuasively, let his action be appropriate to it. If the matter in hand be to set forth an argument, let the speaker, with the fingers of the right hand hold one finger of the left hand, having the two smaller ones closed; and his face alert, and turned towards the people with mouth a little open, to look as though he spoke; and if he is sitting let him appear as though about to rise, with his head forward. If you represent him standing make him leaning slightly forward with body and head towards the people. These you must represent as silent and attentive, all looking at the orator’s face with gestures of admiration; and make some old men in astonishment at the things they hear, with the corners of their mouths pulled down and drawn in, their cheeks full of furrows, and their eyebrows raised, and wrinkling the forehead where they meet.
• The earth is not in the centre of the Sun’s orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and the earth would light it as it lights us.
• People born in hot countries love the night because it refreshes them and have a horror of light because it burns them; and therefore they are of the colour of night, that is black. And in cold countries it is just the opposite.
• The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.
• The knowledge of past times and of the places on the earth is both an ornament and nutriment to the human mind.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)