Leonardo da Vinci and Geology

Battista Vai, Gian ¹
(1)University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.

Many North American textbooks of geology acknowledge Leonardo da Vinci’s role as a pioneer in paleontology for explaining the origin of marine fossils found in mountains as lithified remains of true former organisms.

This was a great step indeed made by Leonardo and other Italians almost two centuries before English scientists began to do so.

However, Leonardo did much more for geology. The two basic sources of Leonardo’s geological thinking are his paintings and notebooks. Perhaps more than 80% of the paintings have been preserved, but only 10% of his notebooks have survived. In spite of this dramatic loss, hundreds of books and articles on Leonardo and some aspects of its relation to geology have been published soon after Venturi began to publish the first transcriptions of Leonardo’s notebooks in Paris at the very end of 18th century.

In my personal experience of geologist born and walking in the Romagna Apennines, a region frequently visited by Leonardo for professional and study trips, I can witness at least the following results of Leonardo’s geological investigations.

A synthetic treatise of sedimentary geology as we teach it today, with sections on Uniformitarianism, paleogeography, paleoecology, biostratinomy, in-situ fossil communities and bioclastic assemblages, can be derived from folios 9 and 10 of the Hammer Codex and folio 79 of F Codex, in which references to the opening of Gibraltar Strait, the Mediterranean desiccation (together with a drawing explaining how to measure its evaporation) are also found. Moreover, Leonardo has recently been referred to as the father of ichnology. Special interest are the turbidite structures figured in the Saint Anne basement at the Louvre museum and the weathering processes represented in the same painting and the Battesimo at the Uffizi gallery.

Operational definition of original horizontality and continuity of the strata of the Earth and their superposition as individual and groups of beds are available in the Hammer Codex, together with the remark that the uppermost group of beds overlies unconformably the underlying and more inclined strata. Thus, more than 150 years before Steno’s Prodromus (1669), Leonardo had formulated the same general Steno’s principles of geology studying almost the same area of the Northern Apennines. More than Steno, he had illustrated their folding and faulting in remarkable geological profiles. As an example, after frequently crossing the Romagna Apennines from Florence to Imola or Cesena, Leonardo concluded that:

"going down the Apennine valleys northwards, after having left the true lithic beds, dipping for a short distance at the root of the mountains, one can see beds or soils, made of earth used for pottery, full of shells; this last group of beds still dips for some distance at the foot of the hills, until common earth or terrain appears, just where the rivers, flowing down the Marche and Romagna regions, go out of the Apennines."

Geological 3-D cross-section by Leonardo. View from the Southern Alps, possibly Venice mainland or Lombardy, drawn while Leonardo sojourned in Milan (1510 to 1513). Windsor Royal collection, no. 12394.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90135©2011 AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Milan, Italy, 23-26 October 2011.