Leonardo’s Shou Sugi Ban: Wood Charring Origins Revealed

ROME, December 29, 2025 – Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance master, may have foreshadowed modern wood preservation techniques centuries before they were formally codified in Japan. A recent study suggests da Vinci documented the protective benefits of charring wood-a process known as yakisugi-over 100 years before its written documentation in the 17th and 18th centuries.

A Renaissance Insight into Bioarchitecture

This finding highlights da Vinci’s remarkably prescient understanding of materials science and its potential applications.

A page from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving notebooks,revealing his extensive observations and sketches.

• Da Vinci’s notes detail observations about charring wood for preservation.
• The technique, known as yakisugi, protects wood from fire, water, insects, and fungi.
• His anatomical studies anticipated discoveries in circulatory system function by 150 years.
• Leonardo also experimented with materials that foreshadowed the creation of plastics.

Da Vinci’s notebooks, comprising over 13,000 pages (though less than a third have survived), are a treasure trove of forward-thinking ideas. Beyond his artistic achievements, he sketched designs for flying machines, bicycles, cranes, and even an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship. In his Codex Atlanticus (1490), he envisioned a telescope-a century before its actual invention-writing of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged.”

Did you know? – Da Vinci wrote in mirror script, reading right to left. Scholars believe this was a way to maintain secrecy or prevent smudging his ink while writing.

The breadth of da Vinci’s curiosity extended to chemistry.In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, stumbled upon recipes for unusual mixtures within the notebooks. Experimentation with these recipes yielded a substance remarkably similar to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 20th century, suggesting da Vinci may have inadvertently created the frist man-made plastic.

What was Leonardo da Vinci’s understanding of the human heart? da Vinci’s detailed anatomical studies, particularly his drawings of the human heart, accurately depicted the function of heart valves in controlling blood flow-a full 150 years before William Harvey established the fundamentals of the human circulatory system.In 2005, British heart surgeon Francis wells even pioneered a new heart repair procedure based on da Vinci’s sketches, later documenting his experience in the book The Heart of Leonardo.

Pro tip – Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings weren’t created from dissection, which was largely forbidden at the time. He relied on careful observation and extrapolation from animal anatomy.

Da Vinci died on May 2, 1519, in Amboise, France, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire awe and examination. His work wasn’t widely recognized during his lifetime, but subsequent generations have hailed him as a genius whose insights spanned art, science, and engineering. The recent findings regarding yakisugi are just the latest example of how his observations continue to resonate with modern scientific understanding, solidifying his place as not just an artist, but a scientist and inventor whose insights continue to resonate today.