La Botanica di Leonardo in Florence

During the summer, strange structures appeared in Florentine squares: a dodecahedron in piazza della Signoria containing a mulberry tree, a hexahedron (or cube) in piazza Bambini di Beslan, a tetrahedron in Piazza Stazione and an icosahedron in Piazza Santa Maria Novella.

They are part of the exhibition that has opened yesterday to the public, La Botanica di Leonardo, set up in the complex of Santa Maria Novella, where Leonardo lived in the period during which he was working on the cardboard for the Battle of Anghiari.

The exhibition, curated by  Florentine neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, and founder of the pharmaceutical company Aboca, Valentino Mercati; is entirely dedicated to Leonardo's studies on botany. Avant-garde studies that are still of relevance today.

Although Leonardo is considered one of the most famous intellectuals in history, not much is known about his science.

Therefore, this exhibition aims to put the focus on Leonardo’s science, in particular on the numerous botanic studies conducted by the master. His writings allow us to know Leonardo as a systemic thinker, capable of thinking in terms of connections, relationships and context.
We discover a scientist with an ecological soul and a huge respect for nature, which gives us the opportunity to reflect on scientific evolution and environmental sustainability; a topic that has never been as relevant as right now.
Through the study sheets on the form and structure of plants exctracted from the Atlantic Codex of the Ambrosian library, we come to understand how Leonardo was the first to discovered phyllotaxis, that is, the way in which leaves arrange themselves on a branch; he observed how plants move and discovered how much light and gravity are two very important factors for the development of plants, already in the sixteenth century.
To accompany the folios of the Atlantic Codex on display, there are also various specimens of plants, interactive installations, videos and the spectacular polyhedrons that we have admired in the Florentine squares.

In fact, mathematical and geometric studies related to polyhedra can be found in numerous manuscripts written by Leonardo. The master places particular attention on their constructive processes and on their philosophical and cosmological implications: in the past it was thought that each element was made up of infinite particles with a specific geometric structure, corresponding to five regular base solids.
These solids were designed in detail and with perfect perspective by Leonardo da Vinci, in the treatise "De Divina Proportione" by Luca Pacioli.
Earth, immobile and very stable, was associated with the cube, or hexahedron, the most stable of all solids.

Fire was connected to the tetrahedron, whose pyramidal shape recalls the flames that rise upwards.
Air was associated with the octahedron, whose form expands upwards and downwards, like air does.
Water was linked to the icosahedron, a solid composed of 20 triangular faces that allow for it to roll and move with agility, just like water.
Finally, the quintessence was associated with the dodecahedron, which for the ancient Greeks and Renaissance Neoplatonists, represented the entire universe: “still remaining a form of composition, which is the fifth, God had benefited from it for the design of the 'universe."

One of Leonardo's most beloved plants, the mulberry, is associated with the dodecahedron and placed inside it, to represent the mystery of the connection among all things. It was this mystery that fascinated Leonardo throughout his life and inspired his studies, which have reached us to our days.
An unusual exhibition, which for once, does not focus only on Leonardo da Vinci as a master painter, but on Leonardo as a great man of science.