I’ve been a long-time fan of Walter Isaacson’s biographies. In fact, my favorite book of all time is his biography on Steve Jobs which I read back in 2018. I recently picked up another one of his best-seller on the renaissance polymath Leonardo Da Vinci.
The book was thoroughly entertaining and often astounding. There were so many points in the book where I was left at awe by Leonardo’s brilliance. Snippets of Leonardo’s famous notebook can be found throughout the book and they were delightful every time they appear. The most impressive ones are those from his inquiry into human anatomy. His keen observational skills, combined with artistic mastery, produced some of the most beautiful anatomical drawings I’ve ever seen (seriously… Google it). The detail of each muscle fiber, fastidiously shaded and connected like clockworks, along with his impeccable sense of proportion, produced depictions that are both scientifically accurate, and visually awe-inspiring.
I learned many interesting facts about Leonardo. There were three reoccurring themes I noticed:
Leonardo was passionately curious about absolutely everything. And he seemed to enjoy learning for the sake of learning. I mean who else would put on his to-do list: “describe the tongue of a woodpecker”, or “describe a goose’s foot”, or stare at turbulent water near a river for hours and cramming 730 conclusions about water flow into eight pages of his notebook. I think it would benefit us greatly to regain some of that childish curiosity that we lost as we grew older.
What is most impressive about Leonardo is his ability to make connections between vastly different disciplines. He was a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, sculptor, architect, hydraulic engineer, military engineer, and so much more. He made contributions to anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, paleontology, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and whatever else he became curious about. Arts and Science are intricately connected and often the same to Leonardo. He studied optics for years to incorporate his knowledge into his paintings. He studied the intricate human muscle structure in order to draw the most anatomically accurate smile and posture. More often, He simply preferred obtaining knowledge for the sake of obtaining knowledge. He didn’t feel the need to execute. Coming up with concepts was enough for him.
Although Leonardo didn’t really procrastinate, he was often too much of a perfectionist. He would often abandon work or leaving things half-finished, only to resume decades later when he learns of some new technique. I think this only adds to his mystique and make the things he did complete that much more masterful.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo was famously good-looking and a distinctive character. He dressed himself in bright, colorful outfits. He was flamboyant, eccentric, and an artistically free spirit.
Leonardo was homosexual, he was accompanied by a male companion named Salai for several decades. In fact, “L’amore masculino” was not uncommon in the artistic community in Florence; so much so that “Florenzer” became a slang in German for “gay”.
Homosexual love was celebrated openly in uplifting poems and bawdy songs. Other notable figures that were homosexual include Donatello, Michelangelo, and Benvenuto Celini.
Another famous near-contemporary of Leonardo, Michelangelo Buonarroti, was the polar opposite of Leonardo. Apparently Michelangelo held great disdain towards Leonardo. He had a hunched back with an unwashed appearance. He was neurotically secretive, intense, disheveled, and irascible. Furthermore, unlike Leonardo, Michelangelo seemed to be tormented by his homosexuality and repressed it by living a very ascetic lifestyle. He often slept in his dusty studio and dined by dry bread crusts.
Some interesting to-do list items in Leonardo’s notebook:
describe a goose’s foot
Why is fish in water swifter than bird in the air when water is heavier and thicker
Describe tongue of woodpecker
Inflate the lungs of a pig to see whether they increase in length or width or both
Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men (note: he does this for both anatomical and aesthetic reasons)
Character and Interesting Quotes
Leonardo much preferred to learn things through experience rather than received wisdom. Earlier in his life, he tended to minimize the role of theory and had no desire to wrestle with abstract concepts
Christianity back in those days had created an authorized creed that left little room for inquiry or experimentation. Leonardo foreshadowed in the 1490s what would eventually be known as the scientific method, quote: “Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether tests produce the same effects”. Galileo, born a century after Leonardo, is usually credited with this rigorous empirical approach for arriving at knowledge.
Leonardo loved to connect ideas across disciplines. For example, when he was conducting anatomical study on the network of veins in the heart, he would draw along side it seeds of flowers germinating into shoots. He loved comparing the curls of hair on a person’s head to the turbulent flow of water in a river.
Math, in particular algebra which was bequeathed to Renaissance scholars by the Arabs and Persians, was not one of Leonardo’s strong suit. He much preferred geometry as opposed to arithmetic.
Quoting Leonardo: “Though human ingenuity may make various inventions, it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, and more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”
Painting
Leonardo pioneered a painting technique called “sfumato”, whereby objects are not delineated by sharp contours but rather smoky and hazy outlines. Edges are blurred just as they appear to our eyes.
Leonardo believed in painting a human body “inside-out”. He would start by sketching the bones, then the muscles, then finally the skin and face. This gave his painting a greater level of realism.
His paintings are not only beautiful, they often illustrate incredible scientific accuracy. For example, in the painting “Virgin of the Rocks”, the rock formation in the background was rendered with astounding geological accuracy. The hard-edged rock formations are diabase, an intrusive igneous rock formed by cooling of volcanic lava. Even the vertical cracks caused by rapid cooling are rendered precisely. The location didn’t exist in the real world and it’s clear that he conjured up the painting in his imagination. It’s remarkable that his vision can be so imaginative yet so real.
The “Mona Lisa effect” is a visual illusion where the object of the painting seems to be staring at the viewer regardless of the angle that a viewer is looking at the painting. Leonardo discovered that this effect works best when the eyes are slightly off-kilter.
Leonardo’s painting is also known for their movement and dynamism. Nothing is still. Everything is in motion
The Last Supper
“The Last Supper” is a painting by Leonardo that depicts the moment when Jesus tells his apostles that “one of you will betray me”. The original painting was done on the wall of a monastery. It took about 3 years to paint and there were so many interesting accounts of Leonardo working on his masterpiece. According to a priest, he would “come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding, then remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting continuously.” On other days, he would “remain in front of the wall for several hours, contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created.”
There were also dramatic accounts where he would “arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two, then suddenly depart.”
He believed that sometimes ideas need to marinate: “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least. For their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
Leonardo used a special combination of linseed oil, walnut, egg yolk, oil paint, and other ingredients for this painting. Unfortunately, his experiment was a failure and the painting was so faint in 1652 that many considered it ruined. Over the years there had been at least six major restoration efforts. The latest began in 1978 and lasted 21 years.
Anatomy
At the start of his anatomical inquires, he created an unending lists of things he would like to learn. For example: what nerve is the cause of
eye’s movement, eyebrows, parting of lips, laughing, etc…
What is sneezing, yawning, hunger, fatigue, sleep, thirst, etc…
He was also obsessed with anatomical proportions (see Vitruvian man). In his note book, he made at least eighty proportion measurements that borderline obsession. For example:
distance from top of nose to bottom of chin is 2/3 of the face
width of face id equal to space between the mouth and the roots of the hair and is 1/12 the whole height
the great toe is 1/6 part of the foot
the list goes on and on…..
During this period of intense study, Leonardo made at least 240 drawings, and 13,000 words of text. He also seemed unbothered by gore and dead bodies, as he would go on to carefully dissected at least 30 corpses of all ages.
At the time of his perfecting of Mona Lisa’s smile, Leonardo was spending his nights in the morgue under the hospital, with dead bodies all around him, trying to study every possible movement of facial muscles, tracing down each nerve.
The End
On the last page of his notebook, Leonardo was studying triangles of different lengths, trying to understand the transformation of volumes. Abruptly, he breaks off his writing with “et cetera” followed by the line:
Perche la minestra si fredda
which means:
The soup is getting cold
Leonardo had written once: “As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, so a well-employed life brings a happy death”. His came on May 2, 1519 at the age of 67.