Worlds Apart: Leonardo da Vinci and Electronic Mapping

Elizabeth Hill
Clemson University
Clemson, South Carolina
eshill@g.clemson.edu

ABSTRACT
Leonardo was able to put himself at the forefront of cartography
by drawing out these accurate maps that hadn’t really been done
before. It was because of his insight into the micro-processes that
created the land that he was able to form a completed picture about
what the terrain could look like from above. By taking small parts
and adding them together, he was able to make deductions about
how the land acted to create mountains and other geologic features.
Much like the particle accumulation he describes in his notes, we
are able to use him and his revolutionary work as small rocks to be
added to other points of data in order to create a more complete and
thorough electronic mapping system that has the most accurate
and up to date information.

KEYWORDS
Leonardo da Vinci, Electronic Mapping, Cartography, GPS, Google
Maps, Geology
ACM Reference Format:
Elizabeth Hill. 2018. Worlds Apart: Leonardo da Vinci and Electronic Map-
ping . In Proceedings of ENGL3140. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages.
https://doi.org/10.475/123_4

1 INTRODUCTION
Leonardo da Vinci was clearly a man ahead of his time, hence the
nickname of Renaissance Man. He was able to see things that other
people couldn’t, as his perspective was unique for the times; the
illustration being analyzed (as shown in Figure 1) epitomizes this.
This illustration depicts a bird’s eye view of Italy, including the
lakes, rivers, and terrain in extreme detail. He was a man of many
trades, and cartographer is definitely one of them. He had obviously
never been in the air before to see this view yet could conceptualize
how the birds could see his town.
To him, maps and landscapes were much more than that. They Figure 1: Leonardo da Vinci’s birds-eye-view sketching of
were diagrams that represented how the earth lived. He saw the city in Italy. This illustration inspired this paper. [3]
earth as a living and breathing body that has a heartbeat and soul.
He compared water to the blood of man, and how it flows in the
body. This dynamic and artistic take on something as everyday as
the ground shows how he sees in a more abstract way. 2 LEONARDO DA VINCI
Because of the lack of technological advances (relative to modern
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or day), Leonardo and his peers didn’t have the information necessary
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation to understanding the terrain. This information includes the entirety
on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM of geology, along with biology, physics, and even mathematics.
must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,
to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
Since this knowledge hadn’t been developed quite yet, Leonardo
fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. began to turn towards things he knew and understood to try make
ENGL3140, Spring 2018, Clemson, South Carolina USA sense of how the land works and came to be. Something that he
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 123-4567-24-567/08/06. . . $15.00
understood well enough to create a connecting model about the
https://doi.org/10.475/123_4 terrain was the human body. When looking at the human body as a
ENGL3140, Spring 2018, Clemson, South Carolina USA
whole, he was able to connect bits and pieces to fill in an abstraction
of the processes of the land.
The water that rises in the mountains is the
blood which keeps the mountain in life... I say
that just as the natural heat of the blood in the
veins keeps it in the head of man- for when
the man is dead the cold blood sinks to the
lower parts- and when the sun is hot on the
head of a man the blood increases and rises so
much, with other humors, that by pressure in
the veins pains in the head are often caused; in
the same way veins ramify through the body
of the earth, and by the natural heat which is
distributed throughout the containing body, the
water is raised through the veins to the tops of
mountains.
–da Vinci
3 ELECTRONIC MAPPING
Whenever any modern day human wants to go on a trip, they im-
mediately resort to using Electronic Mapping. Electronic Mapping
consists of the database of all locations, roads, cities, coordinates,
etcetera that all combine to create a cohesive and total mapping
of Earth. We use this data to find our way through our daily lives,
helping us get from place to place. An example of one of the most
popular electronic mapping applications, Google Maps, is seen in
Figure 2.
Modern humans no longer rely on their own devices to get to
where they need to go; they rely on their mobile devices. The ease
of use and portability of electronic mapping on our mobile devices
makes it so that we don’t have to think about how we are going to
remember all of the complex paths we need in order to maneuver
about our cities’ infrastructures.
4 COMPARISON
4.1 Abstraction
In regards to cartography being alive and abstract, now we have
applications that live inside of our portable electric devices that
would only be explained to Leonardo as magic if he were to see
them today. Like Leonardo, electronic cartography gives life to
maps in a way that is perfectly integrated and helps us look and
think deeper about our surroundings.
Comparing Leo’s maps with modern day maps provides incredi-
ble insight to what it actually means to traverse through this earth,
and perhaps other planets in the future. Leonardo’s maps were
artistic personifications that showed the underlying and invisible
energy of the sediment, rivers, roads, mountains, and all other geo-
logic features. App maps show the underlying and invisible data,
routes, destinations, and other modern day infrastructural features.
4.2 Accumulation
Things of the earth are made up by tiny pieces like fine sand and
small rocks come together to make coarser sands and bigger rocks.
[4] They contribute to the whole, just like how the tiny bits and
Elizabeth Hill
Figure 2: An example of a city viewed with Google Maps, an
example of electronic mapping. [2]
pieces of data that we have are able to construct an entire electronic
mapping of our planet.
With this electronic mapping we are able to go from smaller
to bigger as well, starting at a person’s location, seeing the street
address they are on, then on to the neighborhood they are in, in
which town, then city, then state, then country, then continent as
we zoom out and are able to see the whole world.
Leonardo took what he knew about the earth, the things he was
able to feel and see and study, such as the grains of sands, pebbles,
and rocks, and started from there to see what happens when they
are built upon each other to create a collective.
We were able to do the same thing by taking the data points of
one place and then adding more and more to a database to increase
it and make it bigger until we had the entire world mapped out.
Leonardo even describes the process of the way that rocks and
sands and grains are made in order to take those grains and piece
them back together and explain how they came to be mountains.
This is why leaves are found whole within the
rocks that are formed at the bases of the moun-
tains, together with a mixture of different kinds
of things, just as they have been left there by the
floods from the rivers which have occurred in
the autumn seasons. And there the mud caused
by the successive inundations has covered them
over, and then this mud grows into one mass
together with the aforesaid paste, and becomes
changed into successive layers of stone, which
correspond with the layers of the mud.
–da Vinci
From these tiny pieces of data he was able to look back into the
past and construct a corresponding timeline from how these sands
and rocks came to be.
Worlds Apart: Leonardo da Vinci and Electronic Mapping ENGL3140, Spring 2018, Clemson, South Carolina USA

We are also able to do the same things from all of the electronic
data that we have accrued over time to see how the land has changed
since we have developed these new technologies to track the earths
progression. We have data that almost goes back as far as Leonardo’s
time, thanks to him, and because of that we were able to build and
build our knowledge bases to continue to learn about how the earth
moves and acts as a whole as well as in all of its tiny pieces.

5 CONCLUSION
This comparison is important to link the sketchings of rivers in the
past, to the GPS mapping of the present, to the possibilities of in-
terplanetary mappings of the future. By analyzing our relationship
with the land we live on, we can understand what it means to be a
part of this universe.

6 REFERENCES
1. Leonardo, and Juliana Barone. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebook:
the Codex Arundel. British Library, 2008.
2. Fisher, Allie. ÒMap of Vacation Location.Ó Wired, Conde
Nast, 21 Nov. 2016, www.wired.com/2016/11/use-google-maps-plan-
awesome-vacation/.
3. Leonardo, and H. Anna Suh. Leonardo’s Notebooks: Writing
and Art of the Great Master. Black Dog and Leventhal, 2013.
4. Lutgens, Frederick K., et al. Essentials of Geology. Pearson,
2018.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Dr. Brian Gaines for teaching Tech-
nical Writing and helping guide her through this assignment.