Leonardo da Vinci: Codex on the Flight of Birds

Leonardo da Vinci: Codex on the Flight of Birds

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is considered to be the most important universal genius of the Italian Renaissance. He busied himself not only with the visual arts, but was also especially passionate about researching natural phenomena. This passion has been transmitted to today in numerous written and graphical pieces of evidence. A particularly interesting and beautiful example thereof is a notebook, which is stored today in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin: the famous Codex on the Flight of Birds.

Research into one of Mankind’s Dreams

To this day, it is one of mankind’s dreams to simply spread one’s wings and float weightlessly through the air like a bird. One of the first people to concern himself with the actual fulfilment of this dream in reality was Leonardo da Vinci. For him it was no reverie, but rather an interplay of physics, weather phenomena, and anatomy that had to be explored. He recorded his observations and thoughts regarding this research in the year 1505–6 in a notebook about the flight of birds.

The Flight of Birds in Drawings and Writings

Leonardo observed the flight paths of birds and thus followed his studies of gravity and the influence of weight taking wind, movement, and anatomy into account. These statements are accompanied by numerous drawings, which record Leonardo’s observations and conclusions in complicated schematic representations. Leonardo pursued plans for a flying machine with moveable “wings” that was supposed to be based on the operating principles of the flight of birds. His studies of this theme were studied in turn by aviation pioneers like Otto Lilienthal and the Wright Brothers. This research into the flight of birds was appended with notes about the mechanics, botany, architectural plans, and water studies for the gardens of Charles d’Amboise’s villa.