In what way was Leonardo da Vinci more of a scientist than an artist?

Leonardo was a scientist and an artist at the same time and in a way totally unimaginable today. CP Snow's famous image of the "two cultures" of art and science, a great divide in the modern mind, did not apply in the 15th and early 16th centuries when Leonardo lived. The "scientific" knowledge available was barely scientific at all by modern standards. Most of it was inherited from ancient Greece and was a curious mixture of genuine insight, such as the existence of atoms postulated by Democritus, and the superstitious, or mythical, thinking that pervades the Hippocratic Writings. Leonardo was infinitely curious. He taught himself and experimented for himself. He drew inventions and tried to build a flying machine. But he also lived in a late medieval world that allowed him to see analogies between all natural forms: an onion as a model of the human head, a wooden flying machine as a man-made "bird". In other words, his knowledge never got in the way of his imagination.

The anatomical drawings in the Royal Collection are the closest he ever came to modern science. They record his own dissections and are observed so closely and brilliantly that modern doctors can still learn from them. He definitely made real discoveries through sheer observation – the essence of true empirical science. The exhibition makes these discoveries clearer than ever before.

in mcculloch v. maryland (1819) the supreme court ruled that congress had implied powers under the necessary and proper clause of article i, section 8 of the constitution to create the second bank of the united states and that the state of maryland lacked the power to tax the bank.

gibbons v. ogden, (1824), was a landmark decision in which the supreme court of the united states held that the power to regulate interstate commerce, granted to congress by the commerce clause of the united states constitution, encompassed the power to regulate navigation.

a phrase from a poem by ralph waldo emerson about the battle of lexington and concord. emerson's words read, “here once the embattled farmers stood / and fired the shot heard round the world.”