At the same time, he continued his studies of drawing and painting. Frequently he was seen in Florence following someone whose face had interested him—sometimes for the better part of the day—and then at night he would fill a page with sketches of this same person from memory.
By developing his powers of observation in this way Leonardo came to rely more upon his own experiences and less upon what he was told or what he read. This brought him into frequent conflict with the astrologers, the alchemists and even the Church. The astrologers were men who told fortunes by the movements of the stars. The alchemists, with their knowledge of chemistry, pretended to be able to talk with ghosts and to tell the future. These men Leonardo held in contempt. Although he was a devoutly religious man, Leonardo objected to many attitudes of the Church which he considered outmoded and which stood in the way of scientific progress; because of these objections, he was frequently called a pagan.
In this same year of 1469, Leonardo met the aging Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli. Toscanelli was a famous physician, philosopher and mathematician who, just the previous year, had marked off on the cathedral floor the famous meridian line for determining the dates of the various Church holidays. The old man and the boy became not only the famous teacher and ardent pupil, but close friends.
One evening at Toscanelli’s house, the old man showed young Leonardo a globe of the world. Much of it was marked “unknown,” but Toscanelli had filled in some areas from his own careful calculations and from the stories told him by sailors and travelers. Visions of distant lands, remote mountain ranges and vast oceans filled Leonardo’s imagination as Toscanelli spoke. Then Toscanelli tapped the globe to the westward of Spain, saying:
“Here will be found a quicker route to India than the world has ever known before.” Then, turning to Leonardo he murmured, “You will see it happen, my boy, in your lifetime.”
One by one, Leonardo’s childhood questions were being answered. Toscanelli told him much about the stars, the fossils of creatures long disappeared from the world, and how he believed the earth’s early formation took place. He also taught the boy the art of drawing a map. Not only did Toscanelli greatly influence Leonardo, but the course of history as well. Ten years after Toscanelli had died, Christopher Columbus, struggling westward over the Atlantic Ocean, was using a map that old Toscanelli had sent him, carefully notated with all his accumulated wisdom.