Eternal Gardens Journal

Living stories shaped by conversations with our personas

Da Vinci Notes 11: The Heart and the Vortex in the Valve

I cast the root of an ox's artery in wax, blew it in glass and sent seeds through it, and watched eddies in its three pouches shut the door of the heart before the blood could return.

Leonardo finds the heart is a muscle with four chambers, builds a glass aorta, and sees vortices close the aortic valve, confirmed by Bellhouse and 4D MRI.

Da Vinci Notes 10: The Old Man's Vessels

A man who said he was a hundred died beside me at Santa Maria Nuova. I opened him to see the cause of so sweet a death, and found it in his vessels.

Leonardo's centenarian dissection of 1507 to 1508: thickened, snake-like vessels, the child of two years, the oranges, and why narrow vessels carry so little blood.

Da Vinci Notes 09: Muscles as Cords: The Arm and the Turning of the Hand

I draw each muscle as a thread from its beginning to its end, weigh the elbow as the pole of a balance, and find the cord that turns the hand palm up.

Leonardo's arm studies of 1510 to 1511: muscles drawn as threads, the elbow as a lever, why the biceps pulls nine times the weight, and how it turns the hand.

Da Vinci Notes 08: The Skull and the Seat of the Senses

I sawed a skull in two, ruled a grid of twelve fingers over it, and found the meeting of the senses where my lines cross. Twenty years later I filled the brain's cells with wax.

Leonardo's 1489 skull drawings: the proportional grid, the senso comune where his axes cross, the wax cast of the ventricles, and what neuroscience found there.

Da Vinci Notes 05: The Eye and the Camera Obscura

A whole piazza comes upside down through a hole the size of a millet grain. If the eye is such a chamber, what turns the world the right way up? I boil an eye in egg white to find out.

Leonardo darkens a room, works out how the hole trades sharpness for light, and models the eye with a second crossing that Kepler later disproved.