DYK Leonardo da Vinci made a satellite map in 1502?
Just the mention of the name Leonardo da Vinci brings a lot to mind, most famously the Monalisa, the Vitruvian man, the Last Supper among many others. The Italian genius was a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. He is undoubtedly one of history’s greatest minds. You can see all his works here.
Da Vinci was ahead of his time in perhaps every field he dabbled in. So it’s hardly surprising to discover that the legend dipped his toe into the field of cartography as well, and produced a satellite map hundreds of years before satellites existed within the fringes of scientists’ minds in the mid 90's.
What were the circumstances that guided his imagination towards this direction?
At the time cartography was primarily done for aesthetic purposes. The maps were designed purely from the artist’s perspective, which was usually taken at a bird’s eye or hill side view: such maps rarely won any awards for accuracy, they often had buildings obstructing others, the scale was off. Such maps cannot be used as reference material for military strategy.
In 1502 Leonardo had landed himself a plum position as a military engineer in Imola, Italy, a position to which he was installed by politician Cesare Borgia (By this time he had already painted The Last Supper and Lady with Ermine). His main role at Imola was to provide material that would help Borgia better understand the layout of the town.
To achieve this da Vinci tapped into his first class artistic imagination, coupled with various surveying techniques, the result was a first for cartography, an ‘ichnographic’ map.
How did he do it, you ask?
Vox’s Phil Edwards explains that Leonardo likely used a circular disk known as the ‘Bussola’, which had a pointer (‘alidade’) that always pointed North. He used this to mark the angles in relation to a stable point; North. Edwards’ suggests that Da Vinci may have used a compass to determine the orientation of the town’s surrounding walls, doing this turn by turn as he walked along the wall. This helped him translate the walls’ shape on the paper.
If you look closely, you can see the circular shape of the Bussola overlaid atop the map.
In order to correctly translate the scale onto paper, he had to measure the distance between the angles and may have done this by pacing on foot, or by use of an odometer, as one does. The odometer would have had to be on wheels which turned gears that measured distance by dropping a ball into a bucket at set intervals.
The result of combining the angles and distances, he came up with an accurate plan of the city’s layout.
And just in case you think it’s not accurate enough to cut it today, here is da Vinci’s map overlaid over some satellite imagery from 2018. The match is so close, it’s uncanny!
While the plan is impressive, it had its flaws. Da Vinci supposedly measured the walls precisely, but was a bit more liberal angles taken within the towns interior; they just didn’t match. To some extent he seemed to have favored aesthetic value over scale and accuracy.
Nonetheless, he had just leaped hundreds of years into the future with the ichnographic map, much like he had with literally everything else he laid his hands on.
This article was directly inspired by Vox’s mini doc on the same, in which Vox’s Phil Edwards explores how it was made.
Fun Fact: Da Vinci may perhaps be the greatest mind to ever have roamed the earth, a mind whose inner working we may never be able to fathom; However, scientists speculate that his artistic genius can be attributed to an unusual eye disorder. Strabismus this is the condition where a person’s eyes appear to be pointing in different directions, while only one eye is being used to process the visual scene at any one time. This allowed Da Vinci to switch between using two eyes (stereoscopic vision) to give him depth perception, and using just one eye (monocular vision) when he wanted to interpret a three-dimensional image on a flat, two-dimensional canvas. Talk about the icing on the cake.
