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 Water and its mysterious behavior-its varying flow and pressures, its intersecting currents, its ability to rearrange the countryside. In Leonardo's day, water was regarded as one of the four basic elements(along with earth, air and fire). He saw it as a major shaper of the earth, circulating in underground caverns and emerging as geysers and mountain springs, and infusing all of life-an idea he often incorporated in his art by painting curl hair as if they were twirls of a whirlpool. In premonition of the Gaia hypothesis, which compares the planet to a living organism, he writes poetically, "We may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bone are the successive strata of the rocks … its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters." from : TIME MAGAZINE December 9, 1996 |