Leonardo Da Vinci
✒️ Author: Walter Isaacson | 📖 Published: 2017 | 🗓 Read: January 29, 2021 | 📄 Pages: 600
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Leonardo Da Vinci was the illegitimate, uneducated son who did not come from wealth, but did not let that hold him back in life.
Through his relentless curiosity and insatiable desire to record everything, he ended up leading a rich life.
Although he is known for his published works and paintings, there was far work and knowledge that Da Vinci left unpublished or unfinished.
🎨 Impressions
Da Vinci was the world's greatest polymath, spanning an insane amount of disciplines such as art, anatomy, engineering, and geometry.
While he went where ever his curiosity took him, he wasn't disciplined in finishing or publishing his projects.
His greatness isn't in just what he created, but in his failings to create and share his greater knowledge. He is human and relatable in this way.
How I Discovered It
I read the book with my brother. It's the first read of our biography book club.
Who Should Read It?
Anybody who needs to spark their creativity muscle, but to also know that you don't need to be creating all the time to make an impact.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
Be curious, relentlessly curious.
Seek knowledge for its own sake.
Retain a childlike sense of wonder.
Observe. Leonardo’s greatest skill was his acute ability to observe things. It was the talent that empowered his curiosity, and vice versa.
Start with the details. Be specific before I expand out.
See things unseen. Be present.
Go down rabbit holes.
Get distracted.
Avoid silos and collaborate as much as possible. Genius starts with individual brilliance. It requires a singular vision. But executing it often entails working with others.
Think visually. This will help your reach exceed your grasp
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
"Vision without execution is hallucination."
"While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die."
"True creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy. A great painter depicts both."
Notable Highlights
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.
Vision without execution is hallucination.
Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.
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.”
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.
“First of all, it enjoys complete liberty; second, it has a large, rich, and elegantly dressed population; third, it has a river with clear, pure water, and mills within its walls; fourth, it rules over castles, towns, lands and people; fifth, it has a university, and both Greek and accounting are taught; sixth, it has masters in every art; seventh, it has banks and business agents all over the world.”6 Each one of those assets was valuable for a city, just as they are today: not only the “liberty” and “pure water,” but also that the population was “elegantly dressed” and that the university was renowned for teaching accounting as well as Greek.
**Note:** What makes a city great
Many of the city’s artists were also architects, and its fabric industry had been built by combining technology, design, chemistry, and commerce.
Silk makers worked with goldbeaters to create enchanted fashions. Architects and artists developed the science of perspective.
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s patronage of the arts, autocratic rule, and ability to maintain a peaceful balance of power with rival city-states helped to make Florence a cradle of art and commerce during Leonardo’s early career there. He also kept his citizenry amused with dazzling public spectacles and grandly produced entertainments, ranging from Passion Plays to pre-Lenten carnivals. The work done for these pageants was ephemeral, but it was lucrative and stimulated the creative imagination of many of the artists involved, most notably young Leonardo.
Florence’s festive culture was spiced by the ability to inspire those with creative minds to combine ideas from disparate disciplines.
The culture rewarded, above all, those who mastered and mixed different disciplines.
Alberti, on the other hand, was dedicated to sharing his work, gathering a community of intellectual colleagues who could build on each other’s discoveries, and promoting open discussion and publication as a way to advance the accumulation of learning.
**Note:** Reason why you should share your work
Being left-handed was not a major handicap, but it was considered a bit of an oddity, a trait that conjured up words like sinister and gauche rather than dexterous and adroit, and it was one more way in which Leonardo was regarded, and regarded himself, as distinctive.
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.”
He did not like to let go. That is why he would die with some of his masterpieces still near his bedside. As frustrating as it is to us today, there was a poignant and inspiring aspect to Leonardo’s unwillingness to declare a painting done and relinquish it: he knew that there was always more he might learn, new techniques he might master, and further inspirations that might strike him. And he was right.
“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.”
“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”
The lyre and Leonardo’s services were a diplomatic gift. Lorenzo de’ Medici, eager to navigate the swirling rivalries and alliances among the Italian city-states, saw Florence’s artistic culture as a source of influence. Botticelli and some of his other favorite artists went to Rome to please the pope, Verrocchio and others to Venice.
Unlike Florence, Milan was not well-stocked with master artists. That made it more fertile territory for Leonardo. Because he was an aspiring polymath, he also enjoyed that Milan was filled with scholars and intellectuals in a wide variety of fields, partly due to the esteemed university in nearby Pavia, which was officially founded in 1361 but had roots stretching back to 825. It boasted some of Europe’s best lawyers, philosophers, medical researchers, and mathematicians.
Here is our gentle and beloved Leonardo, who became a vegetarian because of his fondness for all creatures, wallowing in horrifying depictions of death. It is, perhaps, yet another glimpse of his inner turmoil. Within his dark cave was a demon imagination.
In collecting such a medley of ideas, Leonardo was following a practice that had become popular in Renaissance Italy of keeping a commonplace and sketch book, known as a zibaldone. But in their content, Leonardo’s were like nothing the world had ever, or has ever, seen. His notebooks have been rightly called “the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper.”3
the early notebook known as Paris Ms. B, begun around 1487, contains drawings of possible submarines, black-sailed stealth ships, and steam-powered cannons, as well as some architectural designs for churches and ideal cities. Later notebooks show Leonardo pursuing curiosity for its own sake, and that in turn evolved into glimmerings of profound scientific inquiry. He became interested not only in how things work but why.
The beauty of a notebook is that it indulges provisional thoughts, half-finished ideas, unpolished sketches, and drafts for treatises not yet refined. That, too, suited Leonardo’s leaps of the imagination, in which brilliance was often unfettered by diligence or discipline.
The mechanical elements of the theatrical events interested Leonardo as much as the artistic ones, and he saw them as connected. He delighted in making ingenious contraptions that would fly, descend, and animate in ways that would excite his audiences.
Leonardo’s work producing theatrical pageants was enjoyable and remunerative, but it also served a larger purpose. It required him to execute his fantasies. Unlike paintings, performances had real deadlines. They had to be ready when the curtains parted. He could not cling to them and seek to perfect them indefinitely.
“Leonardo, with great fanfare, was brought to the duke to play for him, since the duke had a great liking for the sound of the lyre, and Leonardo brought the instrument which he had built with his own hands. With this, he surpassed all the musicians who came there to play. In addition, he was the best improviser of verses of his time.”
The grotesques are examples of how Leonardo’s observational skills became fodder for his imagination. He would walk the streets with a notebook dangling from his belt, find a group of people with exaggerated features who would make good models, and invite them over for supper.
“Take a note of them with slight strokes in a little book which you should always carry with you,” he wrote. “The positions of the people are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, which is why you should keep these sketches as your guides.”
In his notebooks, Leonardo mentioned a portrayal of a gypsy in a list of his drawings, and he also recorded spending 6 soldi for a fortune-teller. All of this is speculative, and that is one of the many things that make Leonardo’s works, including those with a bit of mystery, so wonderful: his fantasia is infectious.
“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.”
Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe. It also symbolizes an ideal of humanism that celebrates the dignity, value, and rational agency of humans as individuals. Inside the square and the circle we can see the essence of Leonardo da Vinci, and the essence of ourselves, standing naked at the intersection of the earthly and the cosmic.
Conceiving ideas was for Leonardo, as it has been throughout history for most other cross-disciplinary thinkers, a collaborative endeavor.
Leonardo enjoyed being surrounded by friends, companions, students, assistants, fellow courtiers, and thinkers.
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.
In that regard, Leonardo was born at a fortunate moment. In 1452 Johannes Gutenberg began selling Bibles from his new printing press, just when the development of rag processing was making paper more readily available. By the time Leonardo became an apprentice in Florence, Gutenberg’s technology had crossed the Alps into Italy.
Leonardo thus was able to become the first major European thinker to acquire a serious knowledge of science without being formally schooled in Latin or Greek.
His notebooks are filled with lists of books he acquired and passages he copied. In the late 1480s he itemized five books he owned: the Pliny, a Latin grammar book, a text on minerals and precious stones, an arithmetic text, and a humorous epic poem, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, about the adventures of a knight and the giant he converted to Christianity, which was often performed at the Medici court.
A natural observer and experimenter, he was neither wired nor trained to wrestle with abstract concepts. He preferred to induce from experiments rather than deduce from theoretical principles. “My intention is to consult experience first, and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way,”
“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.”
observations should lead to a hypothesis, which should then be tested by precise experiments, which would then be used to refine the original hypothesis.
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.”
“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed, and the first of that which comes,” he observed. “So with time present.”
Leonardo had a strategy he used to refine his observational skills. He would write down marching orders to himself, determining how he would sequence his observations in a methodical step-by-step way. “First define the motion of the wind and then describe how the birds steer through it with only the simple balancing of the wings and tail,” he wrote in one example. “Do this after the description of their anatomy.”
Leonardo thus realized, before other scientists, that a bird stays aloft not merely because the wings beat downward against the air but also because the wings propel the bird forward and the air lessens in pressure as it rushes over the wing’s curved top surface.
To capture human energy most efficiently, he broke the human body into components; he illustrated how each muscle works, calculated its power, and showed methods for leveraging it.
If you were able to eliminate all forces slowing down an object in motion, then it should be possible, Leonardo thought, for a body to stay in motion forever.
He looked for ways to prevent the momentum of an object from draining away, and he studied ways that a system could create or replenish its own impetus.
His drawings served as visual thought experiments. By rendering the mechanisms in his notebooks rather than actually constructing them, he could envision how they would work and assess whether they would achieve perpetual motion.
In reasoning so, he showed that, as we go through life, there is a value in trying to do such tasks as designing a perpetual-motion machine: there are some problems that we will never be able to solve, and it’s useful to understand why.
What prevents perpetual motion, Leonardo realized, is the inevitable loss of momentum in a system when it rubs against reality. Friction causes energy to be lost and prevents motion from being perpetual. So do air and water resistance, as he knew from his studies of bird flight and fish movement.
Through a set of experiments with heavy objects moving down a slope, he discovered the relationship among three determinants of friction: the weight of the object, the smoothness or roughness of the incline’s surface, and the steepness of the incline.
Through his work on machinery, Leonardo developed a mechanistic view of the world foreshadowing that of Newton. All movements in the universe—of human limbs and of cogs in machines, of blood in our veins and of water in rivers—operate according to the same laws, he concluded.
Using geometry to understand the laws of perspective taught him how math could extract from nature the secrets of its beauty and reveal the beauty of its secrets.
In the mid-1490s Leonardo put aside his work on anatomy; he would not return to the subject for another decade.
he was right in his general view that the human brain receives visual and other stimuli, processes them into perceptions, then transmits reactions through the nervous system to the muscles. More important, his fascination with the connection between the mind and the body became a key component of his artistic genius: showing how inner emotions are manifest in outward gestures.
“In painting, the actions of the figures are, in all cases, expressive of the purpose of their minds,”
As he was finishing his first round of anatomical studies, he was beginning work on what would be the greatest expression in the history of art of that maxim, The Last Supper.
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.
Between the first and second versions, Leonardo had been studying light and optics, and the result is an artistic use of light that was new in the history of art.
The questions about what contributions Leonardo’s colleagues made to the second Virgin of the Rocks highlight the role that collaboration played in his studio.
But as evident in his notebooks and in the process that led to his drawing of Vitruvian Man, much of Leonardo’s thinking was collegial.
In order to make money, Leonardo at times helped his apprentices produce pieces as if on an assembly line, as had been the practice in Verrocchio’s studio.
“Designs circulated between master and pupil using a kind of cut and paste technique involving master drawings and cartoons,”
Leonardo would create the compositions, cartoons, studies, and sketches. His students would copy them with pinpricks and work together on painting the finished version, often with Leonardo adding his own touches and making corrections.
The angel, like the one he painted for Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, is an example of Leonardo’s proclivity for gender fluidity. Some nineteenth-century critics saw it as a mark of his homosexuality, especially since the positioning and outward gaze of the disturbingly alluring angel make him seem a proxy for the artist.
The androgynous nature of the figure is heightened by comparing the angel to what is generally regarded as a preparatory study for it, a drawing by Leonardo, called Head of a Young Woman. The facial features of the young woman are virtually identical to those of Uriel/Gabriel.
With a few simple lines and brilliant strokes, concise and precise, he is able to create a sketch of unsurpassed beauty. At first glance it captivates you, then its deceptive simplicity draws you into a prolonged and profound engagement. The pioneering Renaissance art historian Bernard Berenson called it “one of the finest achievements of all draftsmanship,” and his protégé Kenneth Clark proclaimed it “one of the most beautiful, I dare say, in the world.”
The goal of Leonardo’s argument was to elevate the work of painters—and their social status—by linking their art to the science of optics and the mathematics of perspective. By exalting the interplay between art and science,
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.
“The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the brain’s sensory receptor may fully and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature.”
“Hearing is less noble than sight; as soon as it is born it dies, and its death is as swift as its birth. This does not apply to the sense of sight, because if you represent to the eye a beautiful human body composed of proportionately beautiful parts, this beauty . . . has great permanence and remains to be seen.”
Painting had been classified as mechanical because it was a craft based on handiwork, like that of goldsmiths and tapestry weavers. Leonardo refuted this by arguing that painting is not only an art but also a science. In order to convey three-dimensional objects on a flat surface, the painter needs to understand perspective and optics. These are sciences that are grounded in mathematics. Therefore, painting is a creation of the intellect as well as the hands.
Leonardo then went one step further. Painting requires not only intellect, he said, but also imagination.
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.”
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.
But as with many of his paintings and all of his treatises, Leonardo had a higher standard for using the word finished, and he never released his paragone nor any treatise on painting for publication. Pacioli was being overly kind when he ascribed to Leonardo the virtue of diligence.
Instead of publishing his notes on painting, Leonardo fiddled with them for the rest of his career, just as he did with many of his paintings. More than a decade later, he was still adding thoughts and making new outlines for a treatise. The result is a medley of notes in a variety of forms: entries he made in two notebooks during the early 1490s, known as Paris Manuscripts A and C; a set of ideas compiled around 1508, later repackaged in what is now called the Codex Atlanticus; and a lost compilation from the 1490s, Libro W. After Leonardo’s death, his assistant and heir, Francesco Melzi, drew on these notebook pages to produce in the 1540s what is known, in various versions and lengths, as Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting. In most editions of that work, Leonardo’s paragone was published as the opening section.
Leonardo’s reliance on shadows, rather than contour lines, to define the shape of most objects stemmed from a radical insight, one that he derived from both observation and mathematics: there was no such thing in nature as a precisely visible outline or border to an object. It was not just our way of perceiving objects that made their borders look blurred. He realized that nature itself, independent of how our eyes perceive it, does not have precise lines.
“You must diminish the sharpness of those objects in proportion to their increasing distance from the eye of the spectator,” he instructed. “The parts that are near in the foreground should be finished in a bold determined manner; but those in the distance must be unfinished, and confused in their outlines.” Because things appear smaller at a distance, he explained, the tiny details of an object vanish, and then even larger details begin to vanish. At a great distance, the outlines of the forms are indistinct.
When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
His ingenious composition shows his mastery of complex rules of natural and artificial perspective, but it also shows his flexibility at fudging those rules when necessary. His ability to convey motion is evident in the gestures of each of the apostles, and so is his famed ability to follow Alberti’s injunction to make movements of the soul—emotions—known through movements of the body. In the same way that he used sfumato to blur hard lines delineating objects, Leonardo blurred the preciseness of perspective and of instants in time.
It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.
Leonardo was masterful at conveying moti dell’anima, motions of the soul. “A picture of human figures ought to be done in such a way as that the viewer may easily recognize, by means of their attitudes, the intentions of their minds,” he wrote. The Last Supper is the grandest and most vibrant example of this in the history of art.
In most of his portraits, and all of those that were fully painted, Leonardo avoided the conventional approach of the period, which was to portray subjects in profile. Instead, he preferred to show his subjects facing the viewer or in three-quarters view, which allowed him to imbue them with a sense of motion and psychological engagement. Ginevra de’ Benci, Cecilia Gallerani, Lucrezia Crivelli, and Mona Lisa are posed this way.
Isabella instead insisted on being portrayed in the classical profile that conveyed courtly decorum. As a result, Leonardo’s drawing of her is lackluster. We cannot see into her eyes or mind or soul. She seems to be posing. No thoughts or emotions seem to be churning inside. The fact that she could have viewed Cecilia’s Lady with an Ermine and then asked Leonardo for a conventional pose indicates that she had more money than taste. That may be one reason Leonardo had no desire to turn the drawing into a painting.
Had he wished to comply with Isabella, it would have been a lucrative commission, one that he could have mostly delegated to his assistants. But Leonardo, although not wealthy, was beyond that. He occasionally led his patrons on—perhaps he even thought he might eventually gratify their wishes—but he rarely allowed himself to be subservient to them.
**Note:** Leonardo didn't prioritize monetization
He was pursuing more ambitious paintings as well as his endeavors in anatomy, engineering, math, and science. Painting a conventional portrait for a pushy patron did not interest him. Nor did money motivate him. He painted portraits if the subject struck his fancy,
we should put aside our romantic image of the artist alone in his studio creating works of genius. Instead, Leonardo’s studio was like a shop in which he devised a painting and his assistants worked with him to make multiple copies. This is similar to the way it had been in Verrocchio’s bottega. “The process of production is more in keeping with the commissioning of a superbly made chair from a major designer-craftsman,” Kemp wrote after the results of the technical analysis. “We do not ask if a certain glued joint in the chair was made by the head of the workshop or one of his assistants—providing the joint holds and looks good.”
Instead, the proper and more interesting questions to ask are: How did the collaboration occur? What was the nature of the team and the teamwork? As with so many examples in history where creativity was turned into products, Leonardo’s Florence studio involved individual genius combined with teamwork. Both vision and execution were required.
“It has always been thought that Leonardo’s pupils and assistants created these works by copying Leonardo’s painting or his cartoons or even his drawings,” Francesca Fiorani noted, “but these ‘copies’ were actually produced while the original was in the making and they reflect alternative solutions Leonardo imagined for it.”
The image of a squirming boy with what looks like two mothers conjures up Leonardo’s own childhood being raised by both his birth mother, Caterina, and his slightly younger stepmother. Freud made much of this, writing, “Leonardo gave the boy two mothers, the one who stretched out her arms after him and another who is seen in the background, both are represented with the blissful smile of maternal happiness. Leonardo’s childhood was precisely as remarkable as this picture. He had two mothers.”
For most people, “unfinished perfection” would seem to be a contradiction in terms, but sometimes it suits Leonardo. Among other things, he was the master of the unfinished. Vespucci was correct when he said that Leonardo was the new Apelles in that regard.
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.
To understand Leonardo, it is necessary to understand why he moved away from Florence, this time for good. One reason is simple: he liked Milan better. It had no Michelangelo, no cadre of half-brothers suing him, no ghost of his father hovering. It had royalty rather than republicans, with jubilant pageants rather than the after-stench of bonfires of the vanities. It had doting patrons rather than oversight committees. And the foremost patron there was the one who loved Leonardo the most, Charles d’Amboise, the French royal governor who had written a flowery letter reminding the Florentines how brilliant their native son was.
Florence was the artistic center of the Italian Renaissance, but Milan and its nearby university town of Pavia had become more intellectually diverse. Charles d’Amboise was dedicated to creating a court like that of the Sforzas, which included painters, entertainers, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Leonardo was the most valued jewel because he embodied all of those vocations.
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.
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.
Leonardo was among the first to fully appreciate that the heart, not the liver, was the center of the blood system. “All the veins and arteries arise from the heart,” he wrote on the page that includes the drawings comparing the branches and roots of a seed with the veins and arteries emanating from the heart.
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. ... “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.
During the period when he was probing the human body, Leonardo was also studying the body of the earth. True to form, he made analogies between the two. He was skillful at discerning how patterns resonate in nature, and the grandest and most encompassing of these analogies, in both his art and his science, was the comparison between the body of man and the body of the earth. “Man is the image of the world,” he wrote.
“The body of the earth, like the bodies of animals, is interwoven with ramifications of veins, which are all joined together and are formed for the nutrition and vivification of this earth and of its creatures,” he wrote, echoing his words from almost two decades earlier.5 And on the following page he added, “Its flesh is the soil, its bones are the arrangements of the connections of the rocks of which the mountains are composed, its cartilage is the porous rock, its blood is the veins of waters; the lake of the blood, which is throughout the heart, is the ocean; its breathing and the increase and decrease of the blood through the pulses in the earth is thus: it is the flow and ebb of the sea.”
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.
Throughout his life, he was brilliant at discerning patterns and abstracting from them a framework that could be applied across disciplines. His geology studies show an even greater talent: not letting these patterns blind him. He came to appreciate not only nature’s similarities but also its infinite variety. Yet even as he abandoned the simplistic version of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, he retained the aesthetic and spiritual concept underlying it: the harmonies of the cosmos are reflected in the beauty of living creatures.
But I suspect the main reason that Leonardo decided to paint Lisa del Giocondo is that he wanted to paint her. Because she was somewhat obscure, not a famed noble or even the mistress of one, he could portray her as he wished. There was no need to cater to or take directions from a powerful patron. Most important, she was beautiful and enticing—and she had an alluring smile.
Was he observant enough to notice a case of anisocoria, in which one eye is more dilated than the other, which occurs in 20 percent of humans?
**Note:** I have this
By being around him, viewers are stimulated to observe the little details of nature, like the cause of a dilated pupil, and to regain our sense of wonder about them. Inspired by his desire to notice every detail, we try to do the same.
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.
“As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep,” Leonardo had written thirty years earlier, “so a well-employed life brings a happy death.”
He enjoyed the challenge of conception more than the chore of completion.
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.
Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure.
Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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… ([Location 7650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071Y385Q1&location=7650)) “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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Genius starts with individual brilliance. It requires singular vision. But executing it often entails working with others. Innovation is a team sport.…
Make lists. And be sure to put odd things on them. Leonardo’s to-do lists may have been the greatest testaments to pure…
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…
Be open to mystery. Not everything needs…