His enormous oeuvre, said to include over 100,000 drawings and over 6,000 pages of notes, and the extreme diversity of his interests have attracted countless scholars from a wide range of academic and artistic disciplines. However, there are surprisingly few books about Leonardo’s science, even though he left voluminous notebooks full of detailed descriptions of his experiments, magnificent drawings, and long analyses of his findings. Moreover, most authors who have discussed Leonardo’s scientific work have looked at it through Newtonian lenses, and I believe this has often prevented them from understanding its essential nature. Leonardo intended to eventually present the results of his scientific research as a coherent, integrated body of knowledge. He never managed to do so, because throughout his life he always felt more compelled to expand, refine, and document his investigations than to organize them in a systematic way. Hence, in the centuries since his death, scholars studying his celebrated Notebooks have tended to see them as disorganized and chaotic.
