Composition Exercise 20

1. Composition Exercise 20 20.Leonardo da Vinci

2. 1. Leonardo was a genius whose powerful mind will always be heldin wonder and admiration by ordinary mortals. • 2. What we do know of the range and productivity of Leonardo’s mind is due to the careful preservation by his pupils and admirers of his sketches and notebooks,pages covered by the thousand with writings and drawings, with extracts from books. Leonardo read, and drafts for books intended to be written.

3. 3. The more one reads of these papers, the less one can understand how it was possible for one human being to excel in all these different fields of research and make important contributions to nearly all of them. • 4. One of the possible reasons is that Leonardo trainedas a Florentine artist and not as a scholar.

4. 5. Like his predecessors, he considered it the artist’s business to explorethe visibleworld, but he did so more thoroughly andwith greater intensityand accuracy than they had done. • 6. While the learned menat the universitiesrelied for authority on the admired ancient writers, Leonardo, the painter, would only trust his own eyes.

5. 7. Every time he came acrossa problem, instead of consultingthe authorities, he tried an experiment to solve it,and there was nothing in nature which failed to arouse his curiosity and challenge his ingenuity. • 8. He dissected more than thirty corpses in order to explore the secrets of the human body.

6. 9. Before him, no one probed the mysteries of thegrowth of the child in the womb, he investigated the laws of waves and currents the years he spent in observing and analyzing the flight insects and birds were to help him devise a flying machine, which ,it was his conviction, would one day become a reality. • 10.The forms of rocks and clouds how the atmosphere affects the color of objects in thedistance,what laws govern the growth of trees and plants, the harmony of sounds, all these were objects of his ceaseless research, on which his art was founded.