I’m a light user of Mastodon.

I dunno. Everyone learns in high school that gravity causes acceleration. Da Vinci’s big idea here may have been realizing that. It seems possible to me that the common understanding at the time of these drawings was that things fell at a constant speed.

Interesting though, the article says that he had trouble proving it via experiment. That would indicate that he came up with the idea of acceleration due to gravity not from observation.

Anyways, none of this points to proto-relatvistic thinking.