“In this vision of a kind of hidden essence of nature, we can find the true nexus of Leonardo’s ‘art’ and ‘science’. We tend to think of his art as ‘lifelike’, and Vasari made the same mistake. He praises the vase of flowers that appears in one of Leonardo’s Madonnas for its ‘wonderful realism’, but then goes on, I think inadvertently, to make a telling remark by saying that the flowers ‘had on them dewdrops’ that looked more convincing then the real thing’. Leonardo might have answered that this was because he had indeed painted ‘the real thing’ and not what his eyes had shown him. His work is not photographic but stylized, synthetic, even abstract, and he admits openly that painting is a work not of imitation but of invention: ‘a subtle inventione which with philosophy and subtle speculation considers the natures of all forms’. Leonardo ‘is thinking of art not simply in technical terms’, says art historian Adrian Parr, ‘where the artist skillfully renders a form on the canvas…Rather, he takes the relationship of nature to art onto a deeper level, intending to express in his art “every kind of form produced in nature”. ‘For indeed, as the art historian Martin Kemp explains, ‘Leonardo saw nature as weaving an infinite variety of elusive patterns on the basic warp and wood of mathematical perfection.’ And so, without doubt, did D’Arcy Thompson.”

“While most painter used technique to create a simulacrum of nature, Leonardo felt that one could not imbue the picture with life until one understood how nature does it. His sketches, then, are not exactly studies but something between an experiment and a diagram—attempts to intuit the forces at play.”

Flow, Nature’s Patterns, a tapestry in three parts