Leonardo Da Vinci
Overall Rating 8 /10
Idea: Da Vinci Biography
Tagline: Teasing out the good and bad
Rereadability: 5/10 Largely unuseful to reread. Only concept to remember is that Da Vinci often failed and even more often failed to complete his many many projects.
Useful Ideas:
Embracing the exploration of curiosity and the example of this in one human being
Time to Read Synopsis :
Untested
Quotes:
The ducat was the gold coin of Venice. The florin was the gold coin of Florence. Both contained 3.5 grams (0.12 ounces) of gold, which would make them worth about $ 138 in 2017. One ducat or florin was worth approximately 7 lire or 120 soldi, which were silver coins.
How the ability to make connections across disciplines— arts and sciences, humanities and technology— is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.
In fact, Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. It did not come from being the divine recipient, like Newton or Einstein, of a mind with so much processing power that we mere mortals cannot fathom it. Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children. Leonardo’s fantasies pervaded everything he touched: his theatrical productions, plans to divert rivers, designs for ideal cities, schemes for flying machines, and almost every aspect of his art as well as engineering. His letter to the ruler of Milan is an example, since his military engineering skills then existed mainly in his mind. His initial role at the court was not building weapons but conjuring up festivals and pageants. Even at the height of his career, most of his fighting and flying contraptions were more visionary than practical. At first I thought that his susceptibility to fantasia was a failing, revealing a lack of discipline and diligence that was related to his propensity to abandon artworks and treatises unfinished. To some extent, that is true. Vision without execution is hallucination. But I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.
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Scribbled alongside each other, with rhyme if not reason, are math calculations, sketches of his devilish young boyfriend, birds, flying machines, theater props, eddies of water, blood valves, grotesque heads, angels, siphons, plant stems, sawed- apart skulls, tips for painters, notes on the eye and optics, weapons of war, fables, riddles, and studies for paintings. The cross- disciplinary brilliance whirls across every page, providing a delightful display of a mind dancing with nature. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created, a wondrous guide to the person whom the eminent art historian Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history.” 6 My favorite gems in his notebooks are his to- do lists, which sparkle with his curiosity. One of them, dating from the 1490s in Milan, is that day’s list of things he wants to learn. “The measurement of Milan and its suburbs,” is the first entry. This has a practical purpose, as revealed by an item later in the list: “Draw Milan.” Others show him relentlessly seeking out people whose brains he could pick: “Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle. . . . Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled. . . . Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders. . . . Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner. . . . Get the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese, the Frenchman.” 7 He is insatiable. Over and over again, year after year, Leonardo lists things he must do and learn. Some involve the type of close observation most of us rarely pause to do. “Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.” Others involve why- is- the- sky- blue questions about phenomena so commonplace that we rarely pause to wonder about them. “Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?” 8 Best of all are the questions that seem completely random. “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,” he instructs himself. 9 Who on earth would decide one day, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like? How would you even find out? It’s not information Leonardo needed to paint a picture or even to understand the flight of birds. But there it is, and, as we shall see, there are fascinating things to learn about the tongue of the woodpecker. The reason he wanted to know was because he was Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder. Oddest of all, there is this entry: “Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men.” 10 We can imagine Leonardo wanting to do that, for reasons both anatomical and aesthetic. But did he really need to remind himself to do it? The next item on the list is “Inflate the lungs of a pig and observe whether they increase in width and in length, or only in width.” As the New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik once wrote, “Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it.”
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That followed Leonardo’s injunction to begin any investigation by going to the source: “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water- jar.”
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After immersing myself in Leonardo, I did the best I could to be more observant of phenomena that I used to ignore, making a special effort to notice things the way he did. When I saw sunlight hitting drapes, I pushed myself to pause and look at the way the shadows caressed the folds. I tried to see how light that was reflected from one object subtly colored the shadows of another object. I noticed how the glint of a lustrous spot on a shiny surface moved when I tilted my head.
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When I saw an eddy of water, I compared it to a ringlet of hair. When I couldn’t understand a math concept, I did the best I was able to visualize it. When I saw people at a supper, I studied the relationship of their motions to their emotions. When I saw the hint of a smile come across someone’s lips, I tried to fathom her inner mysteries. No, I did not come anywhere close to being Leonardo, mastering his insights, or mustering a modicum of his talents. I did not get a millimeter closer to being able to design a glider, invent a new way to draw maps, or paint the Mona Lisa. I had to push myself to be truly curious about the tongue of the woodpecker. But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.
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Many of these early accounts mention Leonardo’s looks and personality. He is described as a man of eye- catching beauty and grace. He had flowing golden curls, a muscular build, remarkable physical strength, and an elegance of bearing when he was walking through town in his colorful garb or riding on a horse. “Beautiful in person and aspect, Leonardo was well- proportioned and graceful,” according to the Anonimo. In addition, he was a charming conversationalist and a lover of nature, renowned for being sweet and gentle to both people and animals.
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I also discovered, at first to my consternation and then to my pleasure, that Leonardo was not always a giant. He made mistakes. He went off on tangents, literally, pursuing math problems that became time- sucking diversions. Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notably the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen paintings fully or mainly attributable to him.
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Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty- first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention- deficit disorder. One need not subscribe to the artist- as- troubled- genius trope to believe we are fortunate that Leonardo was left to his own devices to slay his demons while conjuring up his dragons. In one of the quirky riddles in his notebooks is this clue: “Huge figures will appear in human shape, and the nearer you get to them, the more their immense size will diminish.” The answer: “The shadow cast by a man at night with a light.” 17 Although the same may be said of Leonardo, I believe he is, in fact, not diminished by being discovered to be human. Both his shadow and his reality deserve to loom large. His lapses and oddities allow us to relate to him, to feel that we might emulate him, and to appreciate his moments of triumph even more. The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own. That is why we have much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left- handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. Florence flourished in the fifteenth century because it was comfortable with such people. Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it— to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
Chapter 1 Childhood
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“The man who has intercourse aggressively and uneasily will produce children who are irritable and untrustworthy,” he wrote, “but if the intercourse is done with great love and desire on both sides, the child will be of great intellect, witty, lively, and lovable.” 8 One assumes, or at least hopes, that he considered himself in the latter category. He split his childhood
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As Leonardo’s well- attended baptism attests, being born out of wedlock was not a cause for public shame. The nineteenth- century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt went so far as to label Renaissance Italy “a golden age for bastards.” 10 Especially among the ruling and aristocratic classes, being illegitimate was no hindrance. Pius II, who was the pope when Leonardo was born, wrote about visiting Ferrara, where his welcoming party included seven princes from the ruling Este family, among them the reigning duke, all born out of wedlock. “It is an extraordinary thing about that family,” Pius wrote, “that no legitimate heir has ever inherited the principate; the sons of their mistresses have been so much more fortunate than those of their wives.”
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Being born out of wedlock was more complex than merely being an outsider. It created an ambiguity of status. “The problem with bastards was that they were part of the family, but not totally,”
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He would have made a poor notary: he got bored and distracted too easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative. 14
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“Leonardo da Vinci, disscepolo della sperientia,”
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His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years. To that was added an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of nature. He pushed himself to perceive shapes and shadows with wondrous precision. He was particularly good at apprehending movement, from the motions of a flapping wing to the emotions flickering across a face. On this foundation he built experiments, some conducted in his mind, others with drawings, and a few with physical objects. “First I shall do some experiments before I proceed further,” he announced, “because my intention is to consult experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way.”
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“Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.
Chapter 2 Apprentice
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After Cosimo de’ Medici took over the family bank in the 1430s, it became the largest in Europe. By managing the fortunes of the continent’s wealthy families, the Medici made themselves the wealthiest of them all. They were innovators in bookkeeping, including the use of debit- and- credit accounting that became one of the great spurs to progress during the Renaissance.
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The culture rewarded, above all, those who mastered and mixed different disciplines.
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Alberti had established himself as “an avatar of grace in every word or movement,” a style that very much appealed to Leonardo. “One must apply the greatest artistry in three things,” Alberti wrote, “walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone.”12 Leonardo mastered all three.
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Leonardo’s only formal learning was at an abacus school, an elementary academy that emphasized the math skills useful in commerce. It did not teach how to formulate abstract theories; the focus was on practical cases. One skill that was emphasized was how to draw analogies between cases, a method that Leonardo would use repeatedly in his later science. Analogies and spotting patterns became for him a rudimentary method of theorizing.
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He turned out to be good in geometry, but he never mastered the use of equations or the rudimentary algebra that existed at the time. Nor did he learn Latin. In his thirties he would still be trying to remedy this deficiency by drawing up lists of Latin words, painstakingly writing out awkward translations, and wrestling with grammar rules.
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There were no welding torches at the time, so the triangular sheets of copper had to be soldered together using concave mirrors, about three feet wide, that would concentrate sunlight into a point of intense heat. An understanding of geometry was needed to calculate the precise angle of the rays and grind the curve of the mirrors accordingly. Leonardo became mesmerized—at times obsessed—by what he called “fire mirrors”; over the years he would make almost two hundred drawings in his notebooks that show how to make concave mirrors that will focus light rays from varying angles.
Chapter 3 On His Own
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Leonardo was romantically and sexually attracted to men and, unlike Michelangelo, seemed to be just fine with that. He made no effort either to hide or proclaim it, but it probably contributed to his sense of being unconventional, someone who wasn’t geared to be part of a family procession of notaries.
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Homosexuality was not uncommon in the artistic community of Florence or in Verrocchio’s circle. Verrocchio himself never married, nor did Botticelli, who was also charged with sodomy. Other artists who were gay included Donatello, Michelangelo, and Benvenuto Cellini (who was twice convicted of sodomy). Indeed, l’amore masculino, as Lomazzo quoted Leonardo calling it, was so common in Florence that the word Florenzer became slang in Germany for “gay.” When Leonardo worked for Verrocchio, a cult of Plato was arising among some Renaissance humanists, and it included an idealized view of erotic love for beautiful boys. Homosexual love was celebrated in both uplifting poems and bawdy songs. Nevertheless, sodomy was a crime, as Leonardo became painfully aware, and it was sometimes prosecuted. During the seventy years following the creation of the Officers of the Night in 1432, an average of four hundred men per year were accused of sodomy, and about sixty per year were convicted and sentenced to prison, exile, or even death.8 The Church considered homosexual acts a sin. A 1484 papal bull likened sodomy to “carnal knowledge with demons,” and preachers regularly railed against it.
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One of his maxims seems to give support to the theory that he believed in controlling his sexual urges: “Whoever does not curb lustful desires puts himself on the level of beasts.”
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On the contrary, in his life and in his notebooks, there is much evidence that he was not ashamed of his sexual desires. Instead he seemed amused by them. In a section of his notebooks called “On the Penis,” he described quite humorously how the penis had a mind of its own and acted at times without the will of the man: “The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own without the permission of its owner. Whether he is awake or sleeping, it does what it desires. Often when the man wishes to use it, it desires otherwise, and often it wishes to be used and the man forbids it. Therefore it appears that this creature possesses a life and an intelligence separate from the man.” He found it curious that the penis was often a source of shame and that men were shy about discussing it. “Man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it,” he added, “always covering and concealing something that deserves to be adorned and displayed with ceremony.”
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Leonardo went on to paint the sky in the Adoration of the Magi and some highlights of the human figures and parts of the architectural ruins. Then he stopped. Why? One possible reason is that the task he undertook became overwhelming for a perfectionist. As Vasari explained about Leonardo’s unfinished works, he was stymied because his conceptions were “so subtle and so marvelous” that they were impossible to execute faultlessly. “It seemed to him that the hand was not able to attain to the perfection of art in carrying out the things which he imagined.” According to Lomazzo, the other early biographer, “he never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.”32 Perfecting the Adoration of the Magi must have been especially daunting. There were originally more than sixty characters in his underdrawing. As he went along, he reduced this number by turning some groups of fighters or builders in the background into fewer large-scale characters, but that still left more than thirty to be rendered. He was intent on making sure each one reacted emotionally to the others so that the painting would feel like a coherent narrative and not a random assortment of isolated characters.
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There was another reason, one even more fundamental, that Leonardo did not complete the painting: he preferred the conception to the execution. As his father and others knew when they drew up the strict contract for his commission, Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence. He seems to have illustrated this personal trait, consciously or not, in an apparent self-portrait he drew on the far right side of the painting (figs. 2 and 15).
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“Movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body.”43 Leonardo was deeply influenced by Alberti’s book, and he repeatedly echoed that injunction in his own notebooks. “The good painter has to paint two principal things, man and the intention of his mind,” he wrote. “The first is easy and the second is difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.”44 He expanded on this concept in a long passage in his notes for his planned treatise on painting: “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure. The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way they can mean nothing else. Movements should announce the motions of the mind.”
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“For Florence treats her craftsmen as time treats its own works, which, when perfected, it destroys and consumes little by little.”
Chapter 4 Milan
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Leonardo estimated in his notebook that the trip was 180 miles long, which was quite accurate; he had devised a type of odometer that measured distance by counting the turns of a vehicle wheel, and he may have experimented with one on the way. It would have taken him and his companions about a week.
Chapter 6 Court Entertainer
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Leonardo accompanied these literary amusements with pranks and tricks on occasion, such as flash explosions. “Boil ten pounds of brandy to evaporate, but see that the room is completely closed, and throw up some powdered varnish among the fumes,” he wrote in his notebook. “Then enter the room suddenly with a lighted torch, and at once it will be set ablaze.”33
Chapter 7 Personal Life
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“He was friendly, precise, and generous, with a radiant, graceful expression,” Giovio wrote. “His genius for invention was astounding, and he was the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially in pageantry.”
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In his notebooks, he decried “men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.”2 As a result, he spent more time pursuing wisdom than working on jobs that would make him money beyond what he needed to support his growing household retinue. “He possessed nothing and worked little, but he always kept servants and horses,” Vasari wrote.
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Among the young men who became Leonardo’s companions, by far the most important was the scamp known as Salai, who arrived on July 22, 1490, when Leonardo was thirty-eight. “Giacomo came to live with me” is the way he recorded the event in his notebook.6 It is an oddly elusive formulation, in contrast to saying that the young man had become his student or assistant. Then again, it was an oddly elusive relationship.
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ten, but Salai was something more. Leonardo would later occasionally refer to him as “my pupil,” but that was misleading; he never was more than a mediocre artist and produced few original paintings. Instead he was Leonardo’s assistant, companion, and amanuensis, and probably at some point he became a lover.
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“Did you perhaps play with him that backside game that Florentines love so much?”“Many times!” Leonardo merrily responds. “You should know that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen,” which is perhaps an indication of when their relationship may have become physical.
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“Are you not ashamed to say this?” asks Phidias. Leonardo, or at least Lomazzo’s fictionalized version, is not. “Why ashamed? Among men of worth there is scarcely greater cause for pride. . . . Understand that masculine love is solely the product of merit [virtù] which joins together men of diverse feelings of friendship so that they may, from a tender age, arrive at manhood as stronger friends.”
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His notion of “vain dreams” appears to include sexual fantasies, and he went on to lament that they can distract a person from getting on with his work. “It is here that much precious time is wasted and many vain pleasures are enjoyed,” he wrote of a bed, “both by the mind in imagining impossible things and by the body in partaking of those pleasures that are often the cause of the failing of life.” Did this mean that Leonardo believed that some of the vain pleasures he indulged or imagined while in bed were a cause of his own failings? As he warned in his description of the phallic and “useless” reed that Pleasure holds, “If you take Pleasure know that he has behind him one who will deal you Tribulation and Repentance.”
Chapter 8 Vitruvian Man
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Leonardo made a philosophical pitch that drew on the analogy, of which he was so fond, between human bodies and buildings. “Medicines, when properly used, restore health to invalids, and a doctor will make the right use of them if he understands the nature of man,” he wrote. “This too is what the sick cathedral needs—it needs a doctor-architect, who understands the nature of the building and the laws on which correct construction is based.”4
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To shore up the unsteady parts of the Milan Cathedral, Leonardo devised a system of buttresses to stabilize the area around his proposed tower and, always a believer in experiment, designed a simple test to show how they would work: An Experiment to show that a weight placed on an arch does not discharge itself entirely on its columns; on the contrary, the greater the weight placed on the arches, the less the arch transmits the weight to the columns: Let a man be placed on a weighing-device in the middle of a well-shaft, then have him push out his hands and feet against the walls of the well. You will find that he weighs much less on the scales. If you put weights on his shoulders you will see for yourselves that the more weight you put on him, the greater will be the force with which he spreads his arms and legs and presses against the wall, and the less will be his weight on the scales.6
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Vitruvius’s descriptions of human proportions would inspire Leonardo, as part of the anatomy studies he had just begun in 1489, to compile a similar set of measurements. More broadly, Vitruvius’s belief that the proportions of man are analogous to those of a well-conceived temple—and to the macrocosm of the world—became central to Leonardo’s worldview.
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As a result, per Vitruvius’s description, the man’s navel is in the precise center of the circle, and his genitals are at the center of the square.
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Male vs female circle vs square sexuality vs food
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Male vs female circle vs square sexuality vs food
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Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together their diverse passions.
Chapter 10 Scientist
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He copied page after page of Latin words and conjugations from textbooks of his time, including one that was used by Ludovico Sforza’s young son. It appears not to have been an enjoyable exercise; in the middle of one notebook page where he copied 130 words, he drew his nutcracker man scowling and grimacing more than usual (fig. 49). Nor did he ever master Latin. For the most part his notebooks are filled with notes and transcriptions from works available in Italian.
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In addition, he liked to pick people’s brains. He was constantly peppering acquaintances with the type of questions we should all learn to pose more often. “Ask Benedetto Portinari how they walk on ice in Flanders,” reads one memorable and vivid entry on a to-do list. Over the years there were scores of others: “Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night. . . . Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner. . . . Ask Maestro Giovannino how the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes.”5 Thus Leonardo became a disciple of both experience and received wisdom. More important, he came to see that the progress of science came from a dialogue between the two. That in turn helped him realize that knowledge also came from a related dialogue: that between experiment and theory.
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As with so many things, this empirical approach put him ahead of his time. Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages had fused Aristotle’s science with Christianity to create an authorized creed that left little room for skeptical inquiry or experimentation. Even the humanists of the early Renaissance preferred to repeat the wisdom of classical texts rather than test it. Leonardo broke with this tradition by basing his science primarily on observations, then discerning patterns, and then testing their validity through more observations and experiments. Dozens of times in his notebook he wrote some variation of the phrase “this can be proved by experiment” and then proceeded to describe a real-world demonstration of his thinking. Foreshadowing what would become the scientific method, he even prescribed how experiments must be repeated and varied to assure their validity: “Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects.”7 He was aided by his ingenuity, which enabled him to devise all sorts of contraptions and clever methods for exploring a phenomenon. For example, when he was studying the human heart around 1510, he came up with the hypothesis that blood swirled into eddies when it was pumped from the heart to the aorta, and that was what caused the valves to close properly; he then devised a glass device that he could use to confirm his theory with an experiment (see chapter 27). Visualization and drawing became an important component of this process. Not comfortable wrestling with theory, he preferred dealing with knowledge that he could observe and draw. But Leonardo did not remain merely a disciple of experiments. His notebooks show that he evolved. When he began absorbing knowledge from books in the 1490s, it helped him realize the importance of being guided not only by experiential evidence but also by theoretical frameworks. More important, he came to understand that the two approaches were complementary, working hand in hand. “We can see in Leonardo a dramatic attempt to
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appraise properly the mutual relation of theory to experiment,” wrote the twentieth-century physicist Leopold Infeld.8 His proposals for the Milan Cathedral tiburio show this
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In other words, he was advocating our modern method of combining theory, experiment, and handed-down knowledge—and constantly testing them against each other.9
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He even came to be dismissive of experimenters who relied on practice without any knowledge of the underlying theories. “Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going,” he wrote in 1510. “Practice must always be founded on sound theory.”
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Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo’s “inhumanly sharp eye.” It’s a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick—for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”23 Another gambit he recommended for “giving your eye good practice” at observations was to play this game with friends: one person draws a line on a wall, and the others stand a distance away and try to cut a blade of straw to the exact length of the line. “He who has come nearest with his measure to the length of the pattern is the winner.”24 Leonardo’s eye was especially sharp when it came to observing motion. “The dragonfly flies with four wings, and when those in front are raised those behind are lowered,” he found. Imagine the effort it took to watch a dragonfly carefully enough to notice this. In his notebook he recorded that the best place to observe dragonflies was by the moat surrounding the Sforza Castle.25
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Leonardo wrestled with the concept of depicting an arrested instant that contains both the past and the future of that moment.
Chapter 14 The Nature of Man
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The distance from the top of the nose to the bottom of the chin is two-thirds of the face. . . . The width of the face is equal to the space between the mouth and the roots of the hair and is one-twelfth of the whole height. . . . From the top of the ear to the top of the head is equal to the distance from the bottom of the chin to the duct of the eye and also equal to the distance from the angle of the chin to that of the jaw. . . . The hollow of the cheek bone occurs half way between the tip of the nose and the top of the jaw bone. . . . The great toe is the sixth part of the foot, taking the measure in profile. . . . From the joint of one shoulder to the other is the length of two faces. . . . From the navel to the genitals is a face’s length.15 I am tempted to quote him at even
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Leonardo had set for himself the most magnificent of all tasks for the mind of mankind: nothing less than knowing fully the measure of man and how he fits into the cosmos. In his notebook, he proclaimed his intention to fathom what he called “universale misura del huomo,” the universal measure of man.17 It was the quest that defined Leonardo’s life, the one that tied together his art and his science.
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Leonardos main question?
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Leonardos main question?
Chapter 17 The Science of Art
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Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy. A great painter depicts both, he said.
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That, in a nutshell, was Leonardo’s signature talent: the ability to convey, by marrying observation with imagination, “not only the works of nature but also infinite things that nature never created.”
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Leonardo believed in basing knowledge on experience, but he also indulged his love of fantasy. He relished the wonders that can be seen by the eye but also those seen only by the imagination. As a result, his mind could dance magically, and sometimes frenetically, back and forth across the smudgy line that separates reality from fantasia. Take, for example, his advice about looking at a wall that is “spotted with stains or has a mix of stones.” Leonardo could stare at such a wall and observe with precision the striations of each stone and other factual details. But he also knew how to use the wall as a springboard for his imagination and as a “way to stimulate and arouse the mind to various inventions.” He wrote in his advice for young artists: You may discover in the patterns on the wall a resemblance to various landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement; or again you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could turn into complete and well-drawn forms. The effect produced by these mottled walls is like that of the sound of bells, in which you may recognize any name or word you choose to imagine. . . . It should not be hard for you to look at stains on walls, or the ashes of a fire, or the clouds, or mud, and if you consider them well you will find marvelous new ideas, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things.9 Leonardo was one of history’s most disciplined observers of nature, but his observation skills colluded rather than conflicted with his imaginative skills. Like his love of art and science, his ability to both observe and imagine were interwoven to become the warp and woof of his genius. He had a combinatory creativity. Just as he could festoon a real lizard with various animal parts to turn it into a dragon-like monster, for either a parlor trick or a fanciful drawing, he was able to perceive the details and patterns of nature and then remix them in imaginative combinations.10 Not surprisingly, Leonardo tried to find a scientific explanation for this ability. When he mapped the human brain during his anatomy investigations, he located the talent for fantasia in a ventricle where it could interact closely with the capacity for rational thinking.
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The primary goal of a painter, Leonardo declared, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane.”
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Leonardo’s insistence that all boundaries, both in nature and in art, are blurred led him to become the pioneer of sfumato, the technique of using hazy and smoky outlines such as those so notable in the Mona Lisa. Sfumato is not merely a technique for modeling reality more accurately in a painting. It is an analogy for the blurry distinction between the known and the mysterious, one of the core themes of Leonardo’s life. Just as he blurred the boundaries between art and science, he did so to the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between experience and mystery, between objects and their surroundings.
Chapter 18 The Last Supper
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All told, The Last Supper is a mix of scientific perspective and theatrical license, of intellect and fantasy, worthy of Leonardo. His study of perspective science had not made him rigid or academic as a painter. Instead, it was complemented by the cleverness and ingenuity he had picked up as a stage impresario. Once he knew the rules, he became a master at fudging and distorting them, as if creating perspectival sfumato.
Chapter 20 Florence Again
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After a couple of other unsatisfactory portraits, she tried again with a painter who worked for her family in Ferrara, but when she sent it to Milan as a gift, she apologized to Ludovico Sforza. “I am afraid that I shall weary, not only Your Highness, but all Italy with the sight of my portraits,” she wrote. “I send this one, which is not really very good and makes me look fatter than I am.” Ludovico, who apparently did not know the proper response to a woman who said a portrait made her look fat, responded that he thought the picture was a good likeness. At one point Isabella lamented, “We only wish that we could be as well served by painters as we are by men of letters.” Presumably, the many poets who dedicated poems to her could take more literary license with a subject than a painter could.
Chapter 24 Hydraulic Engineer
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This would require moving a million tons of earth, and Leonardo calculated the man-hours necessary by doing a detailed time-and-motion study, one of the first in history. He figured out everything from the weight of one shovel-load of dirt (twenty-five pounds) to how many shovel-loads would fill a wheelbarrow (twenty). His answer: it would take approximately 1.3 million man-hours, or 540 men working 100 days, to dig the Arno diversion ditch. At first he considered ways to use wheeled carts to carry the dirt away, showing why those with three wheels were more efficient than those with four. But he realized that it would be very difficult to push carts up the banks of a ditch. So he designed one of his ingenious machines (fig. 89), which features two crane-like arms that would move lines with twenty-four buckets. When a bucket deposited its dirt on top of the bank of the ditch, a worker would get in it and ride down to keep the weights counterbalanced. Leonardo also designed a treadmill system to harness human power to move the cranes.
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The Arno projects, the circular fortress, and the draining of the Piombino swamps had one thing in common with many of Leonardo’s grandest projects, and even some of his less grand ones: they never came to fruition. They showed Leonardo at his most fantastical, dreaming up schemes that darted back and forth across the boundaries of practicality. Like the construction of his flying machines, they were too fanciful to execute. This inability to ground his fantasies in reality has generally been regarded as one of Leonardo’s major failings. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Suction pumps now drain swamps. Along the route of the canal that Leonardo drew there is now a major highway. Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality.
Chapter 25 Michelangelo and the Lost Battles
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His account, more than a thousand words long, got more lurid as he warmed to his task. The brutality of war didn’t repulse him as much as it seemed to mesmerize him, and the goriness he described would be reflected in the drawings he made for his battle mural:
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“Leonardo was handsome, urbane, eloquent and dandyishly well dressed,” wrote Michelangelo’s biographer Martin Gayford. “In contrast, Michelangelo was neurotically secretive.” He was also “intense, disheveled, and irascible,” according to another biographer, Miles Unger. He had powerful feelings of love and hate toward those around him but few close companions or protégés. “My delight is in melancholy,” Michelangelo once confessed.13 Whereas Leonardo was disinterested in personal religious practice, Michelangelo was a pious Christian who found himself convulsed by the agony and the ecstasy of faith. They were both gay, but Michelangelo was tormented and apparently imposed celibacy on himself, whereas Leonardo was quite comfortable and open about having male companions. Leonardo took delight in clothes, sporting colorful short tunics and fur-lined cloaks. Michelangelo was ascetic in dress and demeanor; he slept in his dusty studio, rarely bathed or removed his dog-skin shoes, and dined on bread crusts. “How could he fail to envy and detest the easy charm, the elegance, refinement, amiable sweetness of manner, dilettantism, and above all the skepticism of Leonardo, a man of another generation, said to be without religious faith, around whom there constantly strutted a crowd of beautiful pupils, led by the insufferable Salai?” wrote Serge Bramly.14
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Leonardo, of course, was referring to Michelangelo’s sculptures, but judging from the extant copies his criticism also applied to Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina and even some of his finished paintings. In other words, he painted like a sculptor. Michelangelo was good at delineating forms with the use of sharp lines, but he showed little skill with the subtleties of sfumato, shadings, refracted lights, soft visuals, or changing color perspectives. He freely admitted that he preferred the chisel to the brush. “I am not in the right place, and I am not a painter,” he confessed in a poem when he embarked on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a few years later.27
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He was a perfectionist faced with challenges other artists would have disregarded but that he could not. So he put down his brushes. That behavior meant he would never again receive a public commission. But it is also what allowed him to go down in history as an obsessed genius rather than merely a reliable master painter.
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The unfinished battle scenes turned out to be two of the most influential lost paintings in history, and they helped to shape the High Renaissance. “These battle cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo are the turning point of the Renaissance,” according to Kenneth Clark.34 They were kept on display in Florence until 1512, and young artists flocked to see them. One of those was the sculptor Cellini, who described the competing display in his autobiography: “These cartoons stood one in the Medici Palace and the other in the Pope’s Hall, and so long as they remained there, they served as the school of the world.”35 Raphael traveled to Florence just to see the two cartoons that had caused such a sensation, Vasari reported, and he drew versions of them. The animated details of both unfinished works spurred the imaginations, and the mannerism, of subsequent generations. “Frenzied faces, monstrous armor, twisting bodies, convoluted poses, masks, and mad horses—between them the two great Council Hall images provided sixteenth-century artists with a banquet of oddities,” Jonathan Jones wrote. “In these fantastical works, two geniuses tried to outdo one another in sheer quiddity.”36
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The showdown did more than any paragone could have to raise the status of artists. Leonardo and Michelangelo had become luminaries, paving the way for other artists—who until then had rarely even signed their work—to do the same. When the pope summoned Michelangelo, and when the Milanese vied with the Florentines over the services of Leonardo, it was recognition that super-artists had their own recognizable style, artistic personality, and individual genius. Instead of being treated as somewhat interchangeable members of the craftsman’s class, the best artists were now treated as singular stars.
Chapter 26 Return to Milan
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Leonardo was then fifty-five, and he had no son or heir. Young Francesco was an aspiring artist, pretty in the slightly soft way of Salai, and possessing some talent. With his father’s permission, he was effectively adopted by Leonardo, either through an informal agreement or a legal contract, one that would be honored in Leonardo’s will a decade later. Leonardo became a mix of legal guardian, godfather, adoptive father, teacher, and employer of the young Melzi. Although the decision may seem strange in our day, it was an opportunity for the Melzis to have their son become the pupil, heir, and amanuensis of a charming and beloved family intimate who also happened to be the most creative artist of the time. Afterward, Leonardo stayed close to the entire Melzi family, even helping to design improvements to the family’s villa. For
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Whether or not Melzi was ever a lover, he became something more significant. Leonardo loved him as a son, and he needed a son to love. It helped that Melzi was appealing and pretty, which was no doubt one reason Leonardo liked to have him in his retinue. But he was also a loyal and caring companion to whom Leonardo could pass along his papers, his estate, his knowledge, and his wisdom. He could help mold him as he would have a son. By 1508 that was all the more important to Leonardo. As he passed through his fifties, his notebooks show intimations of his awareness of his mortality. His father had died. His mother had died. He was estranged from his half-brothers. He had no family, other than Francesco Melzi.
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In imagining a “garden of delights” for the estate, Leonardo indulged his love of water, proposing it as both an aesthetic feature and a method for cooling. “In the summer I shall make the water spring up fresh and bubbling and flow along in the space between the tables,” he wrote, drawing how the tables would be arranged. The water would power a mill, which would be used to force breezes. “By means of the mill I shall be able at any time to produce a current of air,” he promised, and “many water- conduits through the house, and springs in various places, and a certain passage where, when anyone passes, the water will leap up from all sides below, and so it will be there ready in case anyone should wish to give a shower- bath from below to the women or others who pass there.” The flowing water would power a large clock, copper mesh netting would cover the garden to make it an aviary, and “with the help of the mill I will make unending sounds from all sorts of instruments, which will sound for so long as the mill shall continue to move.”
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Perhaps Clark is right, in that our store of art does not include a Battle of Anghiari or other potential masterpieces. But if posterity is poorer because of the time Leonardo spent immersed in passions from pageantry to architecture, it is also true that his life was richer.
Chapter 27 Anatomy, Round Two
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Leonardo, I realized, had become fascinated by the muscles of the tongue. All of the other muscles he studied acted by pulling rather than pushing a body part, but the tongue seemed to be an exception. This was true in humans and in other animals. The most notable example is the tongue of the woodpecker. Nobody had drawn or fully written about it before, but Leonardo with his acute ability to observe objects in motion knew that there was something to be learned from it.
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There is an echo in this passage of Leonardo’s memory of coming across the mouth of a cave as a young man. As in that tale, he had to overcome his fear to go into a dark and fearful space. Although at times he was irresolute and willing to abandon tasks, his powerful curiosity tended to overcome any hesitations when it came to exploring nature’s wonders.
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It was not to be. Marcantonio died in 1511 of the plague that was devastating Italy that year. It is enticing to imagine what he and Leonardo could have accomplished. One of the things that could have most benefited Leonardo in his career was a partner who would help him follow through and publish his brilliant work. Together he and Marcantonio could have produced a groundbreaking illustrated treatise on anatomy that would have transformed a field still dominated by scholars who mainly regurgitated the notions of the second-century Greek physician Galen. Instead, Leonardo’s anatomy studies became another example of how he was disadvantaged by having few rigorous and disciplined collaborators along the lines of Luca Pacioli, whose text on geometric proportions Leonardo had illustrated. With Marcantonio dead, Leonardo retreated to the country villa of Francesco Melzi’s family to ride out the plague.
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So here is another secret to Leonardo’s unique ability to paint a facial expression: he is probably the only artist in history ever to dissect with his own hands the face of a human and that of a horse to see if the muscles that move human lips are the same ones that can raise the nostrils of the nose.
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It took 450 years for anatomists to realize that Leonardo was correct. In the 1960s a team of medical researchers led by Brian Bellhouse at Oxford used dyes and radiography methods to observe blood flows. As Leonardo had done, they used a transparent model of the aorta filled with water to observe the swirls and flow. The experiments showed that the valve required “a fluid dynamic control mechanism which positions the cusps away from the wall of the aorta, so that the slightest reversed flow will close the valve.” That mechanism, they realized, was the vortex or swirling flow of blood that Leonardo had discovered in the aorta root. “The vortices produce a thrust on both the cusp and the sinus wall, and the closure of the cusps is thus steady and synchronized,” they wrote. “Leonardo da Vinci correctly predicted the formation of vortices between the cusp and its sinus and appreciated that these would help close the valve.” The surgeon Sherwin Nuland declared, “Of all the amazements that Leonardo left for the ages, this one would seem to be the most extraordinary.”
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He was mainly motivated by his own curiosity. He may have considered, as well, that he was making a contribution to public knowledge, but here it gets murky. He wrote that he intended his findings to be published, but when it came to editing and organizing his notes he was once again dilatory rather than diligent. He was more interested in pursuing knowledge than in publishing it. And even though he was collegial in his life and work, he made little effort to share his findings. This is true for all of his studies, not just his work on anatomy. The trove of treatises that he left unpublished testifies to the unusual nature of what motivated him. He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history. Some have even said that he wrote in mirror script partly to guard his discoveries from prying eyes; I do not think that is true, but it is indisputable that his passion for gathering knowledge was not matched by one for sharing it widely. As the Leonardo scholar Charles Hope has pointed out, “He had no real understanding of the way in which the growth of knowledge was a cumulative and collaborative process.”41 Although he would occasionally let visitors glimpse his work, he did not seem to realize or care that the importance of research comes from its dissemination.
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Instead, Leonardo’s anatomical work had minimal influence. Over the years, and even centuries, his discoveries had to be rediscovered by others. The fact that he didn’t publish served to diminish his impact on the history of science. But it did not diminish his genius.
Chapter 28 The World and Its Waters
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An “infinite number”? For Leonardo, that was not just a figure of speech. When he spoke of the infinite variety in nature, and especially of phenomena such as flowing water, he was making a distinction based on his preference for analog over digital systems. In an analog system, there are infinite gradations. That applies to most of the things that fascinated him: sfumato shadows, colors, movement, waves, the passage of time, the flow of fluids. That is why he believed that geometry was better than arithmetic at describing nature, and even though calculus had not yet been invented, he seemed to sense the need for such a mathematics of continuous quantities.
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One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to revise his belief in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It was Leonardo at his best, and we have the great fortune of being able to watch that evolution as he wrote the Codex Leicester. There he engaged in a dialogue between theories and experience, and when they conflicted he was receptive to trying a new theory. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity.
Chapter 31 The Mona Lisa
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So the world’s most famous smile is inherently and fundamentally elusive, and therein lies Leonardo’s ultimate realization about human nature. His expertise was in depicting the outer manifestation of inner emotions. But here in the Mona Lisa he shows something more important: that we can never fully know true emotion from outer manifestations. There is always a sfumato quality to other people’s emotions, always a veil.
Chapter 32 France
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Unlike Michelangelo, a man consumed at times with religious fervor, Leonardo made a point of not expounding much on religion during his lifetime. He said that he would not endeavor “to write or give information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by an instance of nature,” and he left such matters “to the minds of friars, fathers of the people, who by inspiration possess the secrets.”
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It was a moment so perfect that it was later portrayed by many admiring painters, most notably Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (fig. 144). And thus we have a fitting and beautiful final scene: Leonardo cradled on his deathbed by a powerful and doting patron in a comfortable house surrounded by his favorite paintings.
Chapter 33 Conclusion
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In the introduction to this book, I suggested that it was unhelpful to toss around the word genius as if it were a superhuman trait, bestowed by heaven and not within the ken of mere mortals. As I hope you will by now agree, Leonardo was a genius, one of the few people in history who indisputably deserved—or, to be more precise, earned—that appellation. Yet it is also true that he was a mere mortal. The most obvious evidence that he was human rather than superhuman is the trail of projects he left unfinished. Among them were a horse model that archers reduced to rubble, an Adoration scene and battle mural that were abandoned, flying machines that never flew, tanks that never rolled, a river that was never diverted, and pages of brilliant treatises that piled up unpublished. “Tell me if anything was ever done,” he repeatedly scribbled in notebook after notebook. “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me if ever I did a thing. . . . Tell me if anything was ever made.”1 Of course, the things he did finish were enough to prove his genius. The Mona Lisa alone does that, as do all of his art masterpieces as well as his anatomical drawings. But by the end of writing this book, I even began to appreciate the genius inherent in his designs left unexecuted and masterpieces left unfinished. By skirting the edge of fantasy with his flying machines and water projects and military devices, he envisioned what innovators would invent centuries later. And by refusing to churn out works that he had not perfected, he sealed his reputation as a genius rather than a master craftsman. He enjoyed the challenge of conception more than the chore of completion. One reason that he was reluctant to relinquish some of his works and declare
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them completed was that he relished a world in flux. He had an uncanny ability to convey movements—of the body and the mind, of machines and horses, and of rivers and everything else that flows. No instant, he wrote, is self-contained, just as no action in a theatrical pageant nor any drop in a flowing river is self-contained. Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after. Similarly, he looked upon his art and engineering and his treatises as a part of a dynamic process, always receptive to a refinement by the application of a new insight. He updated Saint Jerome in the Wilderness after thirty years, when his anatomy experiments taught him something new about neck muscles. If he had lived another decade, he likely would have continued to refine the Mona Lisa for that much longer. Relinquishing a work, declaring it finished, froze its evolution. Leonardo did not like to do that. There was always something more to be learned, another stroke to be gleaned from nature that would make a picture closer to perfect. What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.”2 Because they “think different,” creative masterminds are sometimes considered misfits, but in the words that Steve Jobs helped craft for an Apple advertisement, “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”3 What also distinguished Leonardo’s genius was its universal nature. The world has produced other thinkers who were more profound or logical, and many who were more practical, but none who was as creative in so many different fields. Some people are geniuses in a particular arena, such as Mozart in music and Euler in math. But Leonardo’s brilliance spanned multiple disciplines, which gave him a profound feel for nature’s patterns and crosscurrents. His curiosity impelled him to become among the handful of people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known. There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.
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The fact that Leonardo was not only a genius but also very human—quirky and obsessive and playful and easily distracted—makes him more accessible. He was not graced with the type of brilliance that is completely unfathomable to us. Instead, he was self-taught and willed his way to his genius. So even though we may never be able to match his talents, we can learn from him and try to be more like him. His life offers a wealth of lessons. Be curious, relentlessly curious. “I have no special talents,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. “I am just passionately curious.”4 Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for the perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a woodpecker, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon, and the edges of shadows. Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did. Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era. Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena.
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“You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.
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Observe. Leonardo’s greatest skill was his acute ability to observe things. It was the talent that empowered his curiosity, and vice versa. It was not some magical gift but a product of his own effort. When he visited the moats surrounding Sforza Castle, he looked at the four-wing dragonflies and noticed how the wing pairs alternate in motion. When he walked around town, he observed how the facial expressions of people relate to their emotions, and he discerned how light bounces off differing surfaces. He saw which birds move their wings faster on the upswing than on the downswing, and which do the opposite. This, too, we can emulate. Water flowing into a bowl? Look, as he did, at exactly how the eddies swirl. Then wonder why. Start with the details. In his notebook, Leonardo shared a trick for observing something carefully: Do it in steps, starting with each detail. A page of a book, he noted, cannot be absorbed in one stare; you need to go word by word. “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”6 See things unseen. Leonardo’s primary activity in many of his formative years was conjuring up pageants, performances, and plays. He mixed theatrical ingenuity with fantasy. This gave him a combinatory creativity. He could see birds in flight and also angels, lions roaring and also dragons. Go down rabbit holes. He filled the opening pages of one of his notebooks with 169 attempts to square a circle. In eight pages of his Codex Leicester, he recorded 730 findings about the flow of water; in another notebook, he listed sixty-seven words that describe different types of moving water. He measured every segment of the human body, calculated their proportional relationships, and then did the same for a horse. He drilled down for the pure joy of geeking out. Get distracted. The greatest rap on Leonardo was that these passionate pursuits caused him to wander off on tangents, literally in the case of his math inquiries. It “has left posterity the poorer,” Kenneth Clark lamented. But in fact, Leonardo’s willingness to pursue whatever shiny subject caught his eye made his mind richer and filled with more connections. Respect facts. Leonardo was a forerunner of the age of observational experiments and critical thinking. When he came up with an idea, he devised an experiment to test it. And when his experience showed that a theory was flawed—such as his belief that the springs within the earth are replenished the same way as blood vessels in humans—he abandoned his theory and sought a new one. This practice became common a century later, during the age of Galileo and Bacon. It has, however, become a bit less prevalent these days. If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information. Procrastinate. While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave. He told Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he explained, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Most of us don’t need advice to procrastinate; we do it naturally. But procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer. Let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When Leonardo could not make the perspective in the Battle of Anghiari or the interaction in the Adoration of the Magi work perfectly, he abandoned them rather than produce a work that was merely good enough. He carried around masterpieces such as his Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa to the end, knowing there would always be a new stroke he could add. Likewise, Steve Jobs was such a perfectionist that he held up shipping the original Macintosh until his team could make the circuit boards inside look beautiful, even though no one would ever see them. Both he and Leonardo knew that real artists care about the beauty even of the parts unseen. Eventually, Jobs embraced a countermaxim, “Real artists ship,” which means that sometimes you ought to deliver a product even when there are still improvements that could be made. That is a good rule for daily life. But there are times when it’s nice to be like Leonardo and not let go of something until it’s perfect. Think visually. Leonardo was not blessed with the ability to formulate math equations or abstractions. So he had to visualize them, which he did with his studies of proportions, his rules of perspective, his method for calculating reflections from concave mirrors, and his ways of changing one shape into another of the same size. Too often, when we learn a formula or a rule—even one so simple as the method for multiplying numbers or mixing a paint color—we no longer visualize how it works. As a result, we lose our appreciation for the underlying beauty of nature’s laws. Avoid silos. At the end of many of his product presentations, Jobs displayed a slide of a sign that showed the intersection of “Liberal Arts” and “Technology” streets. He knew that at such crossroads lay creativity. Leonardo had a free-range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities. His knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in The Last Supper, and on a page of anatomical drawings depicting the dissection of lips he drew the smile that would reappear in the Mona Lisa. He knew that art was a science and that science was an art. Whether he was drawing a fetus in the womb or the swirls of a deluge, he blurred the distinction between the two. Let your reach exceed your grasp. Imagine, as he did, how you would build a human-powered flying machine or divert a river. Even try to devise a perpetual-motion machine or square a circle using only a ruler and a compass. There are some problems we will never solve. Learn why. Indulge fantasy. His giant crossbow? The turtle-like tanks? His plan for an ideal city? The man-powered mechanisms to flap a flying machine? Just as Leonardo blurred the lines between science and art, he did so between reality and fantasy. It may not have produced flying machines, but it allowed his imagination to soar. Create for yourself, not just for patrons. No matter how hard the rich and powerful marchesa Isabella d’Este begged, Leonardo would not paint her portrait. But he did begin one of a silk-merchant’s wife named Lisa. He did it because he wanted to, and he kept working on it for the rest of his life, never delivering it to the silk merchant. Collaborate. Genius is often considered the purview of loners who retreat to their garrets and are struck by creative lightning. Like many myths, that of the lone genius has some truth to it. But there’s usually more to the story. The Madonnas and drapery studies produced in Verrocchio’s studio, and the versions of Virgin of the Rocks and Madonna of the Yarnwinder and other paintings from Leonardo’s studio, were created in such a collaborative manner that it is hard to tell whose hand made which strokes. Vitruvian Man was produced after sharing ideas and sketches with friends. Leonardo’s best anatomy studies came when he was working in partnership with Marcantonio della Torre. And his most fun work came from collaborations on theatrical productions and evening entertainments at the Sforza court. Genius starts with individual brilliance. It requires singular vision. But executing it often entails working with others. Innovation is a team sport. Creativity is a collaborative endeavor. Make lists. And be sure to put odd things on them. Leonardo’s to-do lists may have been the greatest testaments to pure curiosity the world has ever seen. Take notes, on paper. Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start writing them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts. Be open to mystery. Not everything needs sharp lines.
Idea: Da Vinci Biography
Tagline: Teasing out the good and bad
Rereadability: 5/10 Largely unuseful to reread. Only concept to remember is that Da Vinci often failed and even more often failed to complete his many many projects.
Useful Ideas:
Embracing the exploration of curiosity and the example of this in one human being
Time to Read Synopsis :
Untested
Quotes:
The ducat was the gold coin of Venice. The florin was the gold coin of Florence. Both contained 3.5 grams (0.12 ounces) of gold, which would make them worth about $ 138 in 2017. One ducat or florin was worth approximately 7 lire or 120 soldi, which were silver coins.
How the ability to make connections across disciplines— arts and sciences, humanities and technology— is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.
In fact, Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. It did not come from being the divine recipient, like Newton or Einstein, of a mind with so much processing power that we mere mortals cannot fathom it. Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children. Leonardo’s fantasies pervaded everything he touched: his theatrical productions, plans to divert rivers, designs for ideal cities, schemes for flying machines, and almost every aspect of his art as well as engineering. His letter to the ruler of Milan is an example, since his military engineering skills then existed mainly in his mind. His initial role at the court was not building weapons but conjuring up festivals and pageants. Even at the height of his career, most of his fighting and flying contraptions were more visionary than practical. At first I thought that his susceptibility to fantasia was a failing, revealing a lack of discipline and diligence that was related to his propensity to abandon artworks and treatises unfinished. To some extent, that is true. Vision without execution is hallucination. But I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.
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Scribbled alongside each other, with rhyme if not reason, are math calculations, sketches of his devilish young boyfriend, birds, flying machines, theater props, eddies of water, blood valves, grotesque heads, angels, siphons, plant stems, sawed- apart skulls, tips for painters, notes on the eye and optics, weapons of war, fables, riddles, and studies for paintings. The cross- disciplinary brilliance whirls across every page, providing a delightful display of a mind dancing with nature. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created, a wondrous guide to the person whom the eminent art historian Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history.” 6 My favorite gems in his notebooks are his to- do lists, which sparkle with his curiosity. One of them, dating from the 1490s in Milan, is that day’s list of things he wants to learn. “The measurement of Milan and its suburbs,” is the first entry. This has a practical purpose, as revealed by an item later in the list: “Draw Milan.” Others show him relentlessly seeking out people whose brains he could pick: “Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle. . . . Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled. . . . Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders. . . . Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner. . . . Get the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese, the Frenchman.” 7 He is insatiable. Over and over again, year after year, Leonardo lists things he must do and learn. Some involve the type of close observation most of us rarely pause to do. “Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.” Others involve why- is- the- sky- blue questions about phenomena so commonplace that we rarely pause to wonder about them. “Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?” 8 Best of all are the questions that seem completely random. “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,” he instructs himself. 9 Who on earth would decide one day, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like? How would you even find out? It’s not information Leonardo needed to paint a picture or even to understand the flight of birds. But there it is, and, as we shall see, there are fascinating things to learn about the tongue of the woodpecker. The reason he wanted to know was because he was Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder. Oddest of all, there is this entry: “Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men.” 10 We can imagine Leonardo wanting to do that, for reasons both anatomical and aesthetic. But did he really need to remind himself to do it? The next item on the list is “Inflate the lungs of a pig and observe whether they increase in width and in length, or only in width.” As the New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik once wrote, “Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it.”
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That followed Leonardo’s injunction to begin any investigation by going to the source: “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water- jar.”
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After immersing myself in Leonardo, I did the best I could to be more observant of phenomena that I used to ignore, making a special effort to notice things the way he did. When I saw sunlight hitting drapes, I pushed myself to pause and look at the way the shadows caressed the folds. I tried to see how light that was reflected from one object subtly colored the shadows of another object. I noticed how the glint of a lustrous spot on a shiny surface moved when I tilted my head.
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When I saw an eddy of water, I compared it to a ringlet of hair. When I couldn’t understand a math concept, I did the best I was able to visualize it. When I saw people at a supper, I studied the relationship of their motions to their emotions. When I saw the hint of a smile come across someone’s lips, I tried to fathom her inner mysteries. No, I did not come anywhere close to being Leonardo, mastering his insights, or mustering a modicum of his talents. I did not get a millimeter closer to being able to design a glider, invent a new way to draw maps, or paint the Mona Lisa. I had to push myself to be truly curious about the tongue of the woodpecker. But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.
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Many of these early accounts mention Leonardo’s looks and personality. He is described as a man of eye- catching beauty and grace. He had flowing golden curls, a muscular build, remarkable physical strength, and an elegance of bearing when he was walking through town in his colorful garb or riding on a horse. “Beautiful in person and aspect, Leonardo was well- proportioned and graceful,” according to the Anonimo. In addition, he was a charming conversationalist and a lover of nature, renowned for being sweet and gentle to both people and animals.
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I also discovered, at first to my consternation and then to my pleasure, that Leonardo was not always a giant. He made mistakes. He went off on tangents, literally, pursuing math problems that became time- sucking diversions. Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notably the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen paintings fully or mainly attributable to him.
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Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty- first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention- deficit disorder. One need not subscribe to the artist- as- troubled- genius trope to believe we are fortunate that Leonardo was left to his own devices to slay his demons while conjuring up his dragons. In one of the quirky riddles in his notebooks is this clue: “Huge figures will appear in human shape, and the nearer you get to them, the more their immense size will diminish.” The answer: “The shadow cast by a man at night with a light.” 17 Although the same may be said of Leonardo, I believe he is, in fact, not diminished by being discovered to be human. Both his shadow and his reality deserve to loom large. His lapses and oddities allow us to relate to him, to feel that we might emulate him, and to appreciate his moments of triumph even more. The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own. That is why we have much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left- handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. Florence flourished in the fifteenth century because it was comfortable with such people. Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it— to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
Chapter 1 Childhood
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“The man who has intercourse aggressively and uneasily will produce children who are irritable and untrustworthy,” he wrote, “but if the intercourse is done with great love and desire on both sides, the child will be of great intellect, witty, lively, and lovable.” 8 One assumes, or at least hopes, that he considered himself in the latter category. He split his childhood
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As Leonardo’s well- attended baptism attests, being born out of wedlock was not a cause for public shame. The nineteenth- century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt went so far as to label Renaissance Italy “a golden age for bastards.” 10 Especially among the ruling and aristocratic classes, being illegitimate was no hindrance. Pius II, who was the pope when Leonardo was born, wrote about visiting Ferrara, where his welcoming party included seven princes from the ruling Este family, among them the reigning duke, all born out of wedlock. “It is an extraordinary thing about that family,” Pius wrote, “that no legitimate heir has ever inherited the principate; the sons of their mistresses have been so much more fortunate than those of their wives.”
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Being born out of wedlock was more complex than merely being an outsider. It created an ambiguity of status. “The problem with bastards was that they were part of the family, but not totally,”
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He would have made a poor notary: he got bored and distracted too easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative. 14
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“Leonardo da Vinci, disscepolo della sperientia,”
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His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years. To that was added an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of nature. He pushed himself to perceive shapes and shadows with wondrous precision. He was particularly good at apprehending movement, from the motions of a flapping wing to the emotions flickering across a face. On this foundation he built experiments, some conducted in his mind, others with drawings, and a few with physical objects. “First I shall do some experiments before I proceed further,” he announced, “because my intention is to consult experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way.”
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“Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.
Chapter 2 Apprentice
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After Cosimo de’ Medici took over the family bank in the 1430s, it became the largest in Europe. By managing the fortunes of the continent’s wealthy families, the Medici made themselves the wealthiest of them all. They were innovators in bookkeeping, including the use of debit- and- credit accounting that became one of the great spurs to progress during the Renaissance.
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The culture rewarded, above all, those who mastered and mixed different disciplines.
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Alberti had established himself as “an avatar of grace in every word or movement,” a style that very much appealed to Leonardo. “One must apply the greatest artistry in three things,” Alberti wrote, “walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone.”12 Leonardo mastered all three.
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Leonardo’s only formal learning was at an abacus school, an elementary academy that emphasized the math skills useful in commerce. It did not teach how to formulate abstract theories; the focus was on practical cases. One skill that was emphasized was how to draw analogies between cases, a method that Leonardo would use repeatedly in his later science. Analogies and spotting patterns became for him a rudimentary method of theorizing.
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He turned out to be good in geometry, but he never mastered the use of equations or the rudimentary algebra that existed at the time. Nor did he learn Latin. In his thirties he would still be trying to remedy this deficiency by drawing up lists of Latin words, painstakingly writing out awkward translations, and wrestling with grammar rules.
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There were no welding torches at the time, so the triangular sheets of copper had to be soldered together using concave mirrors, about three feet wide, that would concentrate sunlight into a point of intense heat. An understanding of geometry was needed to calculate the precise angle of the rays and grind the curve of the mirrors accordingly. Leonardo became mesmerized—at times obsessed—by what he called “fire mirrors”; over the years he would make almost two hundred drawings in his notebooks that show how to make concave mirrors that will focus light rays from varying angles.
Chapter 3 On His Own
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Leonardo was romantically and sexually attracted to men and, unlike Michelangelo, seemed to be just fine with that. He made no effort either to hide or proclaim it, but it probably contributed to his sense of being unconventional, someone who wasn’t geared to be part of a family procession of notaries.
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Homosexuality was not uncommon in the artistic community of Florence or in Verrocchio’s circle. Verrocchio himself never married, nor did Botticelli, who was also charged with sodomy. Other artists who were gay included Donatello, Michelangelo, and Benvenuto Cellini (who was twice convicted of sodomy). Indeed, l’amore masculino, as Lomazzo quoted Leonardo calling it, was so common in Florence that the word Florenzer became slang in Germany for “gay.” When Leonardo worked for Verrocchio, a cult of Plato was arising among some Renaissance humanists, and it included an idealized view of erotic love for beautiful boys. Homosexual love was celebrated in both uplifting poems and bawdy songs. Nevertheless, sodomy was a crime, as Leonardo became painfully aware, and it was sometimes prosecuted. During the seventy years following the creation of the Officers of the Night in 1432, an average of four hundred men per year were accused of sodomy, and about sixty per year were convicted and sentenced to prison, exile, or even death.8 The Church considered homosexual acts a sin. A 1484 papal bull likened sodomy to “carnal knowledge with demons,” and preachers regularly railed against it.
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One of his maxims seems to give support to the theory that he believed in controlling his sexual urges: “Whoever does not curb lustful desires puts himself on the level of beasts.”
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On the contrary, in his life and in his notebooks, there is much evidence that he was not ashamed of his sexual desires. Instead he seemed amused by them. In a section of his notebooks called “On the Penis,” he described quite humorously how the penis had a mind of its own and acted at times without the will of the man: “The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own without the permission of its owner. Whether he is awake or sleeping, it does what it desires. Often when the man wishes to use it, it desires otherwise, and often it wishes to be used and the man forbids it. Therefore it appears that this creature possesses a life and an intelligence separate from the man.” He found it curious that the penis was often a source of shame and that men were shy about discussing it. “Man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it,” he added, “always covering and concealing something that deserves to be adorned and displayed with ceremony.”
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Leonardo went on to paint the sky in the Adoration of the Magi and some highlights of the human figures and parts of the architectural ruins. Then he stopped. Why? One possible reason is that the task he undertook became overwhelming for a perfectionist. As Vasari explained about Leonardo’s unfinished works, he was stymied because his conceptions were “so subtle and so marvelous” that they were impossible to execute faultlessly. “It seemed to him that the hand was not able to attain to the perfection of art in carrying out the things which he imagined.” According to Lomazzo, the other early biographer, “he never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.”32 Perfecting the Adoration of the Magi must have been especially daunting. There were originally more than sixty characters in his underdrawing. As he went along, he reduced this number by turning some groups of fighters or builders in the background into fewer large-scale characters, but that still left more than thirty to be rendered. He was intent on making sure each one reacted emotionally to the others so that the painting would feel like a coherent narrative and not a random assortment of isolated characters.
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There was another reason, one even more fundamental, that Leonardo did not complete the painting: he preferred the conception to the execution. As his father and others knew when they drew up the strict contract for his commission, Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence. He seems to have illustrated this personal trait, consciously or not, in an apparent self-portrait he drew on the far right side of the painting (figs. 2 and 15).
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“Movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body.”43 Leonardo was deeply influenced by Alberti’s book, and he repeatedly echoed that injunction in his own notebooks. “The good painter has to paint two principal things, man and the intention of his mind,” he wrote. “The first is easy and the second is difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs.”44 He expanded on this concept in a long passage in his notes for his planned treatise on painting: “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure. The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way they can mean nothing else. Movements should announce the motions of the mind.”
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“For Florence treats her craftsmen as time treats its own works, which, when perfected, it destroys and consumes little by little.”
Chapter 4 Milan
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Leonardo estimated in his notebook that the trip was 180 miles long, which was quite accurate; he had devised a type of odometer that measured distance by counting the turns of a vehicle wheel, and he may have experimented with one on the way. It would have taken him and his companions about a week.
Chapter 6 Court Entertainer
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Leonardo accompanied these literary amusements with pranks and tricks on occasion, such as flash explosions. “Boil ten pounds of brandy to evaporate, but see that the room is completely closed, and throw up some powdered varnish among the fumes,” he wrote in his notebook. “Then enter the room suddenly with a lighted torch, and at once it will be set ablaze.”33
Chapter 7 Personal Life
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“He was friendly, precise, and generous, with a radiant, graceful expression,” Giovio wrote. “His genius for invention was astounding, and he was the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially in pageantry.”
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In his notebooks, he decried “men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.”2 As a result, he spent more time pursuing wisdom than working on jobs that would make him money beyond what he needed to support his growing household retinue. “He possessed nothing and worked little, but he always kept servants and horses,” Vasari wrote.
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Among the young men who became Leonardo’s companions, by far the most important was the scamp known as Salai, who arrived on July 22, 1490, when Leonardo was thirty-eight. “Giacomo came to live with me” is the way he recorded the event in his notebook.6 It is an oddly elusive formulation, in contrast to saying that the young man had become his student or assistant. Then again, it was an oddly elusive relationship.
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ten, but Salai was something more. Leonardo would later occasionally refer to him as “my pupil,” but that was misleading; he never was more than a mediocre artist and produced few original paintings. Instead he was Leonardo’s assistant, companion, and amanuensis, and probably at some point he became a lover.
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“Did you perhaps play with him that backside game that Florentines love so much?”“Many times!” Leonardo merrily responds. “You should know that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen,” which is perhaps an indication of when their relationship may have become physical.
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“Are you not ashamed to say this?” asks Phidias. Leonardo, or at least Lomazzo’s fictionalized version, is not. “Why ashamed? Among men of worth there is scarcely greater cause for pride. . . . Understand that masculine love is solely the product of merit [virtù] which joins together men of diverse feelings of friendship so that they may, from a tender age, arrive at manhood as stronger friends.”
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His notion of “vain dreams” appears to include sexual fantasies, and he went on to lament that they can distract a person from getting on with his work. “It is here that much precious time is wasted and many vain pleasures are enjoyed,” he wrote of a bed, “both by the mind in imagining impossible things and by the body in partaking of those pleasures that are often the cause of the failing of life.” Did this mean that Leonardo believed that some of the vain pleasures he indulged or imagined while in bed were a cause of his own failings? As he warned in his description of the phallic and “useless” reed that Pleasure holds, “If you take Pleasure know that he has behind him one who will deal you Tribulation and Repentance.”
Chapter 8 Vitruvian Man
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Leonardo made a philosophical pitch that drew on the analogy, of which he was so fond, between human bodies and buildings. “Medicines, when properly used, restore health to invalids, and a doctor will make the right use of them if he understands the nature of man,” he wrote. “This too is what the sick cathedral needs—it needs a doctor-architect, who understands the nature of the building and the laws on which correct construction is based.”4
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To shore up the unsteady parts of the Milan Cathedral, Leonardo devised a system of buttresses to stabilize the area around his proposed tower and, always a believer in experiment, designed a simple test to show how they would work: An Experiment to show that a weight placed on an arch does not discharge itself entirely on its columns; on the contrary, the greater the weight placed on the arches, the less the arch transmits the weight to the columns: Let a man be placed on a weighing-device in the middle of a well-shaft, then have him push out his hands and feet against the walls of the well. You will find that he weighs much less on the scales. If you put weights on his shoulders you will see for yourselves that the more weight you put on him, the greater will be the force with which he spreads his arms and legs and presses against the wall, and the less will be his weight on the scales.6
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Vitruvius’s descriptions of human proportions would inspire Leonardo, as part of the anatomy studies he had just begun in 1489, to compile a similar set of measurements. More broadly, Vitruvius’s belief that the proportions of man are analogous to those of a well-conceived temple—and to the macrocosm of the world—became central to Leonardo’s worldview.
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As a result, per Vitruvius’s description, the man’s navel is in the precise center of the circle, and his genitals are at the center of the square.
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Male vs female circle vs square sexuality vs food
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Male vs female circle vs square sexuality vs food
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Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together their diverse passions.
Chapter 10 Scientist
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He copied page after page of Latin words and conjugations from textbooks of his time, including one that was used by Ludovico Sforza’s young son. It appears not to have been an enjoyable exercise; in the middle of one notebook page where he copied 130 words, he drew his nutcracker man scowling and grimacing more than usual (fig. 49). Nor did he ever master Latin. For the most part his notebooks are filled with notes and transcriptions from works available in Italian.
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In addition, he liked to pick people’s brains. He was constantly peppering acquaintances with the type of questions we should all learn to pose more often. “Ask Benedetto Portinari how they walk on ice in Flanders,” reads one memorable and vivid entry on a to-do list. Over the years there were scores of others: “Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night. . . . Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner. . . . Ask Maestro Giovannino how the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes.”5 Thus Leonardo became a disciple of both experience and received wisdom. More important, he came to see that the progress of science came from a dialogue between the two. That in turn helped him realize that knowledge also came from a related dialogue: that between experiment and theory.
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As with so many things, this empirical approach put him ahead of his time. Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages had fused Aristotle’s science with Christianity to create an authorized creed that left little room for skeptical inquiry or experimentation. Even the humanists of the early Renaissance preferred to repeat the wisdom of classical texts rather than test it. Leonardo broke with this tradition by basing his science primarily on observations, then discerning patterns, and then testing their validity through more observations and experiments. Dozens of times in his notebook he wrote some variation of the phrase “this can be proved by experiment” and then proceeded to describe a real-world demonstration of his thinking. Foreshadowing what would become the scientific method, he even prescribed how experiments must be repeated and varied to assure their validity: “Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects.”7 He was aided by his ingenuity, which enabled him to devise all sorts of contraptions and clever methods for exploring a phenomenon. For example, when he was studying the human heart around 1510, he came up with the hypothesis that blood swirled into eddies when it was pumped from the heart to the aorta, and that was what caused the valves to close properly; he then devised a glass device that he could use to confirm his theory with an experiment (see chapter 27). Visualization and drawing became an important component of this process. Not comfortable wrestling with theory, he preferred dealing with knowledge that he could observe and draw. But Leonardo did not remain merely a disciple of experiments. His notebooks show that he evolved. When he began absorbing knowledge from books in the 1490s, it helped him realize the importance of being guided not only by experiential evidence but also by theoretical frameworks. More important, he came to understand that the two approaches were complementary, working hand in hand. “We can see in Leonardo a dramatic attempt to
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appraise properly the mutual relation of theory to experiment,” wrote the twentieth-century physicist Leopold Infeld.8 His proposals for the Milan Cathedral tiburio show this
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In other words, he was advocating our modern method of combining theory, experiment, and handed-down knowledge—and constantly testing them against each other.9
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He even came to be dismissive of experimenters who relied on practice without any knowledge of the underlying theories. “Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going,” he wrote in 1510. “Practice must always be founded on sound theory.”
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Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo’s “inhumanly sharp eye.” It’s a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick—for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”23 Another gambit he recommended for “giving your eye good practice” at observations was to play this game with friends: one person draws a line on a wall, and the others stand a distance away and try to cut a blade of straw to the exact length of the line. “He who has come nearest with his measure to the length of the pattern is the winner.”24 Leonardo’s eye was especially sharp when it came to observing motion. “The dragonfly flies with four wings, and when those in front are raised those behind are lowered,” he found. Imagine the effort it took to watch a dragonfly carefully enough to notice this. In his notebook he recorded that the best place to observe dragonflies was by the moat surrounding the Sforza Castle.25
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Leonardo wrestled with the concept of depicting an arrested instant that contains both the past and the future of that moment.
Chapter 14 The Nature of Man
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The distance from the top of the nose to the bottom of the chin is two-thirds of the face. . . . The width of the face is equal to the space between the mouth and the roots of the hair and is one-twelfth of the whole height. . . . From the top of the ear to the top of the head is equal to the distance from the bottom of the chin to the duct of the eye and also equal to the distance from the angle of the chin to that of the jaw. . . . The hollow of the cheek bone occurs half way between the tip of the nose and the top of the jaw bone. . . . The great toe is the sixth part of the foot, taking the measure in profile. . . . From the joint of one shoulder to the other is the length of two faces. . . . From the navel to the genitals is a face’s length.15 I am tempted to quote him at even
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Leonardo had set for himself the most magnificent of all tasks for the mind of mankind: nothing less than knowing fully the measure of man and how he fits into the cosmos. In his notebook, he proclaimed his intention to fathom what he called “universale misura del huomo,” the universal measure of man.17 It was the quest that defined Leonardo’s life, the one that tied together his art and his science.
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Leonardos main question?
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Leonardos main question?
Chapter 17 The Science of Art
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Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy. A great painter depicts both, he said.
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That, in a nutshell, was Leonardo’s signature talent: the ability to convey, by marrying observation with imagination, “not only the works of nature but also infinite things that nature never created.”
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Leonardo believed in basing knowledge on experience, but he also indulged his love of fantasy. He relished the wonders that can be seen by the eye but also those seen only by the imagination. As a result, his mind could dance magically, and sometimes frenetically, back and forth across the smudgy line that separates reality from fantasia. Take, for example, his advice about looking at a wall that is “spotted with stains or has a mix of stones.” Leonardo could stare at such a wall and observe with precision the striations of each stone and other factual details. But he also knew how to use the wall as a springboard for his imagination and as a “way to stimulate and arouse the mind to various inventions.” He wrote in his advice for young artists: You may discover in the patterns on the wall a resemblance to various landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement; or again you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could turn into complete and well-drawn forms. The effect produced by these mottled walls is like that of the sound of bells, in which you may recognize any name or word you choose to imagine. . . . It should not be hard for you to look at stains on walls, or the ashes of a fire, or the clouds, or mud, and if you consider them well you will find marvelous new ideas, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things.9 Leonardo was one of history’s most disciplined observers of nature, but his observation skills colluded rather than conflicted with his imaginative skills. Like his love of art and science, his ability to both observe and imagine were interwoven to become the warp and woof of his genius. He had a combinatory creativity. Just as he could festoon a real lizard with various animal parts to turn it into a dragon-like monster, for either a parlor trick or a fanciful drawing, he was able to perceive the details and patterns of nature and then remix them in imaginative combinations.10 Not surprisingly, Leonardo tried to find a scientific explanation for this ability. When he mapped the human brain during his anatomy investigations, he located the talent for fantasia in a ventricle where it could interact closely with the capacity for rational thinking.
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The primary goal of a painter, Leonardo declared, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane.”
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Leonardo’s insistence that all boundaries, both in nature and in art, are blurred led him to become the pioneer of sfumato, the technique of using hazy and smoky outlines such as those so notable in the Mona Lisa. Sfumato is not merely a technique for modeling reality more accurately in a painting. It is an analogy for the blurry distinction between the known and the mysterious, one of the core themes of Leonardo’s life. Just as he blurred the boundaries between art and science, he did so to the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between experience and mystery, between objects and their surroundings.
Chapter 18 The Last Supper
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All told, The Last Supper is a mix of scientific perspective and theatrical license, of intellect and fantasy, worthy of Leonardo. His study of perspective science had not made him rigid or academic as a painter. Instead, it was complemented by the cleverness and ingenuity he had picked up as a stage impresario. Once he knew the rules, he became a master at fudging and distorting them, as if creating perspectival sfumato.
Chapter 20 Florence Again
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After a couple of other unsatisfactory portraits, she tried again with a painter who worked for her family in Ferrara, but when she sent it to Milan as a gift, she apologized to Ludovico Sforza. “I am afraid that I shall weary, not only Your Highness, but all Italy with the sight of my portraits,” she wrote. “I send this one, which is not really very good and makes me look fatter than I am.” Ludovico, who apparently did not know the proper response to a woman who said a portrait made her look fat, responded that he thought the picture was a good likeness. At one point Isabella lamented, “We only wish that we could be as well served by painters as we are by men of letters.” Presumably, the many poets who dedicated poems to her could take more literary license with a subject than a painter could.
Chapter 24 Hydraulic Engineer
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This would require moving a million tons of earth, and Leonardo calculated the man-hours necessary by doing a detailed time-and-motion study, one of the first in history. He figured out everything from the weight of one shovel-load of dirt (twenty-five pounds) to how many shovel-loads would fill a wheelbarrow (twenty). His answer: it would take approximately 1.3 million man-hours, or 540 men working 100 days, to dig the Arno diversion ditch. At first he considered ways to use wheeled carts to carry the dirt away, showing why those with three wheels were more efficient than those with four. But he realized that it would be very difficult to push carts up the banks of a ditch. So he designed one of his ingenious machines (fig. 89), which features two crane-like arms that would move lines with twenty-four buckets. When a bucket deposited its dirt on top of the bank of the ditch, a worker would get in it and ride down to keep the weights counterbalanced. Leonardo also designed a treadmill system to harness human power to move the cranes.
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The Arno projects, the circular fortress, and the draining of the Piombino swamps had one thing in common with many of Leonardo’s grandest projects, and even some of his less grand ones: they never came to fruition. They showed Leonardo at his most fantastical, dreaming up schemes that darted back and forth across the boundaries of practicality. Like the construction of his flying machines, they were too fanciful to execute. This inability to ground his fantasies in reality has generally been regarded as one of Leonardo’s major failings. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Suction pumps now drain swamps. Along the route of the canal that Leonardo drew there is now a major highway. Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality.
Chapter 25 Michelangelo and the Lost Battles
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His account, more than a thousand words long, got more lurid as he warmed to his task. The brutality of war didn’t repulse him as much as it seemed to mesmerize him, and the goriness he described would be reflected in the drawings he made for his battle mural:
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“Leonardo was handsome, urbane, eloquent and dandyishly well dressed,” wrote Michelangelo’s biographer Martin Gayford. “In contrast, Michelangelo was neurotically secretive.” He was also “intense, disheveled, and irascible,” according to another biographer, Miles Unger. He had powerful feelings of love and hate toward those around him but few close companions or protégés. “My delight is in melancholy,” Michelangelo once confessed.13 Whereas Leonardo was disinterested in personal religious practice, Michelangelo was a pious Christian who found himself convulsed by the agony and the ecstasy of faith. They were both gay, but Michelangelo was tormented and apparently imposed celibacy on himself, whereas Leonardo was quite comfortable and open about having male companions. Leonardo took delight in clothes, sporting colorful short tunics and fur-lined cloaks. Michelangelo was ascetic in dress and demeanor; he slept in his dusty studio, rarely bathed or removed his dog-skin shoes, and dined on bread crusts. “How could he fail to envy and detest the easy charm, the elegance, refinement, amiable sweetness of manner, dilettantism, and above all the skepticism of Leonardo, a man of another generation, said to be without religious faith, around whom there constantly strutted a crowd of beautiful pupils, led by the insufferable Salai?” wrote Serge Bramly.14
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Leonardo, of course, was referring to Michelangelo’s sculptures, but judging from the extant copies his criticism also applied to Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina and even some of his finished paintings. In other words, he painted like a sculptor. Michelangelo was good at delineating forms with the use of sharp lines, but he showed little skill with the subtleties of sfumato, shadings, refracted lights, soft visuals, or changing color perspectives. He freely admitted that he preferred the chisel to the brush. “I am not in the right place, and I am not a painter,” he confessed in a poem when he embarked on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a few years later.27
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He was a perfectionist faced with challenges other artists would have disregarded but that he could not. So he put down his brushes. That behavior meant he would never again receive a public commission. But it is also what allowed him to go down in history as an obsessed genius rather than merely a reliable master painter.
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The unfinished battle scenes turned out to be two of the most influential lost paintings in history, and they helped to shape the High Renaissance. “These battle cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo are the turning point of the Renaissance,” according to Kenneth Clark.34 They were kept on display in Florence until 1512, and young artists flocked to see them. One of those was the sculptor Cellini, who described the competing display in his autobiography: “These cartoons stood one in the Medici Palace and the other in the Pope’s Hall, and so long as they remained there, they served as the school of the world.”35 Raphael traveled to Florence just to see the two cartoons that had caused such a sensation, Vasari reported, and he drew versions of them. The animated details of both unfinished works spurred the imaginations, and the mannerism, of subsequent generations. “Frenzied faces, monstrous armor, twisting bodies, convoluted poses, masks, and mad horses—between them the two great Council Hall images provided sixteenth-century artists with a banquet of oddities,” Jonathan Jones wrote. “In these fantastical works, two geniuses tried to outdo one another in sheer quiddity.”36
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The showdown did more than any paragone could have to raise the status of artists. Leonardo and Michelangelo had become luminaries, paving the way for other artists—who until then had rarely even signed their work—to do the same. When the pope summoned Michelangelo, and when the Milanese vied with the Florentines over the services of Leonardo, it was recognition that super-artists had their own recognizable style, artistic personality, and individual genius. Instead of being treated as somewhat interchangeable members of the craftsman’s class, the best artists were now treated as singular stars.
Chapter 26 Return to Milan
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Leonardo was then fifty-five, and he had no son or heir. Young Francesco was an aspiring artist, pretty in the slightly soft way of Salai, and possessing some talent. With his father’s permission, he was effectively adopted by Leonardo, either through an informal agreement or a legal contract, one that would be honored in Leonardo’s will a decade later. Leonardo became a mix of legal guardian, godfather, adoptive father, teacher, and employer of the young Melzi. Although the decision may seem strange in our day, it was an opportunity for the Melzis to have their son become the pupil, heir, and amanuensis of a charming and beloved family intimate who also happened to be the most creative artist of the time. Afterward, Leonardo stayed close to the entire Melzi family, even helping to design improvements to the family’s villa. For
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Whether or not Melzi was ever a lover, he became something more significant. Leonardo loved him as a son, and he needed a son to love. It helped that Melzi was appealing and pretty, which was no doubt one reason Leonardo liked to have him in his retinue. But he was also a loyal and caring companion to whom Leonardo could pass along his papers, his estate, his knowledge, and his wisdom. He could help mold him as he would have a son. By 1508 that was all the more important to Leonardo. As he passed through his fifties, his notebooks show intimations of his awareness of his mortality. His father had died. His mother had died. He was estranged from his half-brothers. He had no family, other than Francesco Melzi.
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In imagining a “garden of delights” for the estate, Leonardo indulged his love of water, proposing it as both an aesthetic feature and a method for cooling. “In the summer I shall make the water spring up fresh and bubbling and flow along in the space between the tables,” he wrote, drawing how the tables would be arranged. The water would power a mill, which would be used to force breezes. “By means of the mill I shall be able at any time to produce a current of air,” he promised, and “many water- conduits through the house, and springs in various places, and a certain passage where, when anyone passes, the water will leap up from all sides below, and so it will be there ready in case anyone should wish to give a shower- bath from below to the women or others who pass there.” The flowing water would power a large clock, copper mesh netting would cover the garden to make it an aviary, and “with the help of the mill I will make unending sounds from all sorts of instruments, which will sound for so long as the mill shall continue to move.”
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Perhaps Clark is right, in that our store of art does not include a Battle of Anghiari or other potential masterpieces. But if posterity is poorer because of the time Leonardo spent immersed in passions from pageantry to architecture, it is also true that his life was richer.
Chapter 27 Anatomy, Round Two
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Leonardo, I realized, had become fascinated by the muscles of the tongue. All of the other muscles he studied acted by pulling rather than pushing a body part, but the tongue seemed to be an exception. This was true in humans and in other animals. The most notable example is the tongue of the woodpecker. Nobody had drawn or fully written about it before, but Leonardo with his acute ability to observe objects in motion knew that there was something to be learned from it.
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There is an echo in this passage of Leonardo’s memory of coming across the mouth of a cave as a young man. As in that tale, he had to overcome his fear to go into a dark and fearful space. Although at times he was irresolute and willing to abandon tasks, his powerful curiosity tended to overcome any hesitations when it came to exploring nature’s wonders.
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It was not to be. Marcantonio died in 1511 of the plague that was devastating Italy that year. It is enticing to imagine what he and Leonardo could have accomplished. One of the things that could have most benefited Leonardo in his career was a partner who would help him follow through and publish his brilliant work. Together he and Marcantonio could have produced a groundbreaking illustrated treatise on anatomy that would have transformed a field still dominated by scholars who mainly regurgitated the notions of the second-century Greek physician Galen. Instead, Leonardo’s anatomy studies became another example of how he was disadvantaged by having few rigorous and disciplined collaborators along the lines of Luca Pacioli, whose text on geometric proportions Leonardo had illustrated. With Marcantonio dead, Leonardo retreated to the country villa of Francesco Melzi’s family to ride out the plague.
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So here is another secret to Leonardo’s unique ability to paint a facial expression: he is probably the only artist in history ever to dissect with his own hands the face of a human and that of a horse to see if the muscles that move human lips are the same ones that can raise the nostrils of the nose.
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It took 450 years for anatomists to realize that Leonardo was correct. In the 1960s a team of medical researchers led by Brian Bellhouse at Oxford used dyes and radiography methods to observe blood flows. As Leonardo had done, they used a transparent model of the aorta filled with water to observe the swirls and flow. The experiments showed that the valve required “a fluid dynamic control mechanism which positions the cusps away from the wall of the aorta, so that the slightest reversed flow will close the valve.” That mechanism, they realized, was the vortex or swirling flow of blood that Leonardo had discovered in the aorta root. “The vortices produce a thrust on both the cusp and the sinus wall, and the closure of the cusps is thus steady and synchronized,” they wrote. “Leonardo da Vinci correctly predicted the formation of vortices between the cusp and its sinus and appreciated that these would help close the valve.” The surgeon Sherwin Nuland declared, “Of all the amazements that Leonardo left for the ages, this one would seem to be the most extraordinary.”
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He was mainly motivated by his own curiosity. He may have considered, as well, that he was making a contribution to public knowledge, but here it gets murky. He wrote that he intended his findings to be published, but when it came to editing and organizing his notes he was once again dilatory rather than diligent. He was more interested in pursuing knowledge than in publishing it. And even though he was collegial in his life and work, he made little effort to share his findings. This is true for all of his studies, not just his work on anatomy. The trove of treatises that he left unpublished testifies to the unusual nature of what motivated him. He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history. Some have even said that he wrote in mirror script partly to guard his discoveries from prying eyes; I do not think that is true, but it is indisputable that his passion for gathering knowledge was not matched by one for sharing it widely. As the Leonardo scholar Charles Hope has pointed out, “He had no real understanding of the way in which the growth of knowledge was a cumulative and collaborative process.”41 Although he would occasionally let visitors glimpse his work, he did not seem to realize or care that the importance of research comes from its dissemination.
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Instead, Leonardo’s anatomical work had minimal influence. Over the years, and even centuries, his discoveries had to be rediscovered by others. The fact that he didn’t publish served to diminish his impact on the history of science. But it did not diminish his genius.
Chapter 28 The World and Its Waters
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An “infinite number”? For Leonardo, that was not just a figure of speech. When he spoke of the infinite variety in nature, and especially of phenomena such as flowing water, he was making a distinction based on his preference for analog over digital systems. In an analog system, there are infinite gradations. That applies to most of the things that fascinated him: sfumato shadows, colors, movement, waves, the passage of time, the flow of fluids. That is why he believed that geometry was better than arithmetic at describing nature, and even though calculus had not yet been invented, he seemed to sense the need for such a mathematics of continuous quantities.
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One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to revise his belief in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It was Leonardo at his best, and we have the great fortune of being able to watch that evolution as he wrote the Codex Leicester. There he engaged in a dialogue between theories and experience, and when they conflicted he was receptive to trying a new theory. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity.
Chapter 31 The Mona Lisa
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So the world’s most famous smile is inherently and fundamentally elusive, and therein lies Leonardo’s ultimate realization about human nature. His expertise was in depicting the outer manifestation of inner emotions. But here in the Mona Lisa he shows something more important: that we can never fully know true emotion from outer manifestations. There is always a sfumato quality to other people’s emotions, always a veil.
Chapter 32 France
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Unlike Michelangelo, a man consumed at times with religious fervor, Leonardo made a point of not expounding much on religion during his lifetime. He said that he would not endeavor “to write or give information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by an instance of nature,” and he left such matters “to the minds of friars, fathers of the people, who by inspiration possess the secrets.”
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It was a moment so perfect that it was later portrayed by many admiring painters, most notably Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (fig. 144). And thus we have a fitting and beautiful final scene: Leonardo cradled on his deathbed by a powerful and doting patron in a comfortable house surrounded by his favorite paintings.
Chapter 33 Conclusion
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In the introduction to this book, I suggested that it was unhelpful to toss around the word genius as if it were a superhuman trait, bestowed by heaven and not within the ken of mere mortals. As I hope you will by now agree, Leonardo was a genius, one of the few people in history who indisputably deserved—or, to be more precise, earned—that appellation. Yet it is also true that he was a mere mortal. The most obvious evidence that he was human rather than superhuman is the trail of projects he left unfinished. Among them were a horse model that archers reduced to rubble, an Adoration scene and battle mural that were abandoned, flying machines that never flew, tanks that never rolled, a river that was never diverted, and pages of brilliant treatises that piled up unpublished. “Tell me if anything was ever done,” he repeatedly scribbled in notebook after notebook. “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me if ever I did a thing. . . . Tell me if anything was ever made.”1 Of course, the things he did finish were enough to prove his genius. The Mona Lisa alone does that, as do all of his art masterpieces as well as his anatomical drawings. But by the end of writing this book, I even began to appreciate the genius inherent in his designs left unexecuted and masterpieces left unfinished. By skirting the edge of fantasy with his flying machines and water projects and military devices, he envisioned what innovators would invent centuries later. And by refusing to churn out works that he had not perfected, he sealed his reputation as a genius rather than a master craftsman. He enjoyed the challenge of conception more than the chore of completion. One reason that he was reluctant to relinquish some of his works and declare
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them completed was that he relished a world in flux. He had an uncanny ability to convey movements—of the body and the mind, of machines and horses, and of rivers and everything else that flows. No instant, he wrote, is self-contained, just as no action in a theatrical pageant nor any drop in a flowing river is self-contained. Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after. Similarly, he looked upon his art and engineering and his treatises as a part of a dynamic process, always receptive to a refinement by the application of a new insight. He updated Saint Jerome in the Wilderness after thirty years, when his anatomy experiments taught him something new about neck muscles. If he had lived another decade, he likely would have continued to refine the Mona Lisa for that much longer. Relinquishing a work, declaring it finished, froze its evolution. Leonardo did not like to do that. There was always something more to be learned, another stroke to be gleaned from nature that would make a picture closer to perfect. What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.”2 Because they “think different,” creative masterminds are sometimes considered misfits, but in the words that Steve Jobs helped craft for an Apple advertisement, “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”3 What also distinguished Leonardo’s genius was its universal nature. The world has produced other thinkers who were more profound or logical, and many who were more practical, but none who was as creative in so many different fields. Some people are geniuses in a particular arena, such as Mozart in music and Euler in math. But Leonardo’s brilliance spanned multiple disciplines, which gave him a profound feel for nature’s patterns and crosscurrents. His curiosity impelled him to become among the handful of people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known. There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.
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The fact that Leonardo was not only a genius but also very human—quirky and obsessive and playful and easily distracted—makes him more accessible. He was not graced with the type of brilliance that is completely unfathomable to us. Instead, he was self-taught and willed his way to his genius. So even though we may never be able to match his talents, we can learn from him and try to be more like him. His life offers a wealth of lessons. Be curious, relentlessly curious. “I have no special talents,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. “I am just passionately curious.”4 Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for the perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a woodpecker, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon, and the edges of shadows. Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did. Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era. Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena.
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“You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.
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Observe. Leonardo’s greatest skill was his acute ability to observe things. It was the talent that empowered his curiosity, and vice versa. It was not some magical gift but a product of his own effort. When he visited the moats surrounding Sforza Castle, he looked at the four-wing dragonflies and noticed how the wing pairs alternate in motion. When he walked around town, he observed how the facial expressions of people relate to their emotions, and he discerned how light bounces off differing surfaces. He saw which birds move their wings faster on the upswing than on the downswing, and which do the opposite. This, too, we can emulate. Water flowing into a bowl? Look, as he did, at exactly how the eddies swirl. Then wonder why. Start with the details. In his notebook, Leonardo shared a trick for observing something carefully: Do it in steps, starting with each detail. A page of a book, he noted, cannot be absorbed in one stare; you need to go word by word. “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”6 See things unseen. Leonardo’s primary activity in many of his formative years was conjuring up pageants, performances, and plays. He mixed theatrical ingenuity with fantasy. This gave him a combinatory creativity. He could see birds in flight and also angels, lions roaring and also dragons. Go down rabbit holes. He filled the opening pages of one of his notebooks with 169 attempts to square a circle. In eight pages of his Codex Leicester, he recorded 730 findings about the flow of water; in another notebook, he listed sixty-seven words that describe different types of moving water. He measured every segment of the human body, calculated their proportional relationships, and then did the same for a horse. He drilled down for the pure joy of geeking out. Get distracted. The greatest rap on Leonardo was that these passionate pursuits caused him to wander off on tangents, literally in the case of his math inquiries. It “has left posterity the poorer,” Kenneth Clark lamented. But in fact, Leonardo’s willingness to pursue whatever shiny subject caught his eye made his mind richer and filled with more connections. Respect facts. Leonardo was a forerunner of the age of observational experiments and critical thinking. When he came up with an idea, he devised an experiment to test it. And when his experience showed that a theory was flawed—such as his belief that the springs within the earth are replenished the same way as blood vessels in humans—he abandoned his theory and sought a new one. This practice became common a century later, during the age of Galileo and Bacon. It has, however, become a bit less prevalent these days. If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information. Procrastinate. While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave. He told Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he explained, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Most of us don’t need advice to procrastinate; we do it naturally. But procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer. Let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When Leonardo could not make the perspective in the Battle of Anghiari or the interaction in the Adoration of the Magi work perfectly, he abandoned them rather than produce a work that was merely good enough. He carried around masterpieces such as his Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa to the end, knowing there would always be a new stroke he could add. Likewise, Steve Jobs was such a perfectionist that he held up shipping the original Macintosh until his team could make the circuit boards inside look beautiful, even though no one would ever see them. Both he and Leonardo knew that real artists care about the beauty even of the parts unseen. Eventually, Jobs embraced a countermaxim, “Real artists ship,” which means that sometimes you ought to deliver a product even when there are still improvements that could be made. That is a good rule for daily life. But there are times when it’s nice to be like Leonardo and not let go of something until it’s perfect. Think visually. Leonardo was not blessed with the ability to formulate math equations or abstractions. So he had to visualize them, which he did with his studies of proportions, his rules of perspective, his method for calculating reflections from concave mirrors, and his ways of changing one shape into another of the same size. Too often, when we learn a formula or a rule—even one so simple as the method for multiplying numbers or mixing a paint color—we no longer visualize how it works. As a result, we lose our appreciation for the underlying beauty of nature’s laws. Avoid silos. At the end of many of his product presentations, Jobs displayed a slide of a sign that showed the intersection of “Liberal Arts” and “Technology” streets. He knew that at such crossroads lay creativity. Leonardo had a free-range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities. His knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in The Last Supper, and on a page of anatomical drawings depicting the dissection of lips he drew the smile that would reappear in the Mona Lisa. He knew that art was a science and that science was an art. Whether he was drawing a fetus in the womb or the swirls of a deluge, he blurred the distinction between the two. Let your reach exceed your grasp. Imagine, as he did, how you would build a human-powered flying machine or divert a river. Even try to devise a perpetual-motion machine or square a circle using only a ruler and a compass. There are some problems we will never solve. Learn why. Indulge fantasy. His giant crossbow? The turtle-like tanks? His plan for an ideal city? The man-powered mechanisms to flap a flying machine? Just as Leonardo blurred the lines between science and art, he did so between reality and fantasy. It may not have produced flying machines, but it allowed his imagination to soar. Create for yourself, not just for patrons. No matter how hard the rich and powerful marchesa Isabella d’Este begged, Leonardo would not paint her portrait. But he did begin one of a silk-merchant’s wife named Lisa. He did it because he wanted to, and he kept working on it for the rest of his life, never delivering it to the silk merchant. Collaborate. Genius is often considered the purview of loners who retreat to their garrets and are struck by creative lightning. Like many myths, that of the lone genius has some truth to it. But there’s usually more to the story. The Madonnas and drapery studies produced in Verrocchio’s studio, and the versions of Virgin of the Rocks and Madonna of the Yarnwinder and other paintings from Leonardo’s studio, were created in such a collaborative manner that it is hard to tell whose hand made which strokes. Vitruvian Man was produced after sharing ideas and sketches with friends. Leonardo’s best anatomy studies came when he was working in partnership with Marcantonio della Torre. And his most fun work came from collaborations on theatrical productions and evening entertainments at the Sforza court. Genius starts with individual brilliance. It requires singular vision. But executing it often entails working with others. Innovation is a team sport. Creativity is a collaborative endeavor. Make lists. And be sure to put odd things on them. Leonardo’s to-do lists may have been the greatest testaments to pure curiosity the world has ever seen. Take notes, on paper. Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start writing them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts. Be open to mystery. Not everything needs sharp lines.