Leonardo Da Vinci’s art speaks on many levels, including scientific ones:
@Patrick will appreciate this article.
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Its old news to me that Leon concluded the flood was not true. he said elsewhere this. Yes his seeing seashells told him the landscape had changed and yES he drew the premature conclusion the bible taught the earth never changed. he was wrong. These mts were thrown up during the flood year and took shells with them.
leon just corrects a other incorrect idea but not the bible.
yes he would , in a lame way, be excited about his insights and put them in his paintings.
I read about him doing so before.
the writer here rightly concludes leons agenda, and so competent, but its not so secret. He mentionec other times noah story was false. he was wrong. As in many things.
Over the ensuing years, the perplexing presence of “oysters and corals and various other shells and sea snails” on “the high summits of mountains”, far from the sea, worried away at the artist’s imagination. For Leonardo, the accepted explanation by ecclesiastical scholars of a great flood, such as that described in the Old Testament, for the relocation of these shells, didn’t wash. These creatures weren’t thrown there. They were born there.
Seashells in mountains were proof, Leonardo came to believe and confided to his journal, that Alpine peaks were once the floors of seas. And the Earth was therefore much older and far more haphazardly fashioned by violent cataclysms and seismic upheavals over a vast stretch of time (not the smooth hand of God in a handful of days) than the Church was willing to admit.
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