This is the latest of the biographies authored by Walter Isaacson,
one of the contemperory writers specializing in biographies. I have already read his books (Biographies)
on Einstein, Steve Job. I read more than
50 percent of the Biography of Henry Kissinger. I have obtained biography of Benjamin Franklin
by Walter Isaacson. I will start reading
it anytime. One of my friends, C.K.
Vinod presented me this book on Leonardo Da Vinci, on my retirement. I started glancing through. It was so good
both in content and in presentation that I could not but start reading, leaving
aside other books I have yet to read/complete.
I trust this author who gives authentic information after thorough
research on every aspect of his subject’s life. I expected the same about Leanardo’s
life. I read Biography of Steve Job by
chance and I could not but finish it at the earliest. Then I read the one on Einstein with the knowledge
that the author who wrote biography of Steve Job, in whom I was not
interested, so well could not but write an excellent biography of the great
scientist. I was very happy to read biography of Einstein by Isaacson
When
I received this book on Leonardo, I liked but when I started reading it, I fell
in love with it. I propose to write an
account of this book to pay tributes to the great genius Leonardo and also to the
great writer Walter Isaacson, who has portrayed Leonardo with passion. He has brought out the life of Leanardo as a
human being. Leonardo’s obsession, curiosity to know the true nature of things
in and around him were human. His genius was not superhuman. All human beings possess the qualities which made Leonardo. As we grow we ignore
our curiosity and instead pursue the path of earning. It is not that pursuit of knowledge will not
generate economic returns. In the end,
knowledge is the fountainhead of better living and human beings are always
trying to live better than before. The central message of the book is that to
be a genius like Leonardo does not require any supernatural skill. All human beings can be like him only if we
continue with our passion for knowledge and make efforts to observe the world
more carefully. The basis of excellence is in observing wonders in ordinary
things. Since I only know Walter Isaacson by reading some of his books, I
cannot express my feeling of exhilaration to him in person. This I am doing by writing about his book.
2. Whatever tribute I pay to
this book is in part a tribute to the great innovator Leonardo and in part a
tribute to the author. Everything
connected with the production of this book is excellent. The photographs of
Leonardo’s paintings in the book are a delight. I only yearn as to when we would get books and
authors like this in Indian languages.
Only if the habit of reading in India increases, we may hope to get such
a situation. I would in this writing often quote try extensively from the book.
3. The first sentence in the
book is very provocative, original and perspective: ‘Leonardo da Vince
had the good luck to be born out of wedlock’. The author cites the reason that ‘otherwise,
he would have been expected to become a notary, like the firstborn legitimate
sons in his family stretching back at least five generations’. This shakes us from our sleep. We are
prepared for an unusual life, full of innovations, dreams about doing so many
things in so many fields of knowledge.
This is in particularly relevant in India where offsprings are guided,
coerced and spoiled by the ‘advice’ given by parents on what to
study. This also states that knowledge
is not the preserve of the cultured families brought up in traditional values. It
is for those who seek it on their own.
4. Leonardo was Steve Job’s
hero. Jobs said, ‘He saw beauty in
both art and engineering and his ability to combine them was what made him a
genius’. ‘Yes he was genius: wildly imaginative, passionately curious, and
creative across multiple disciplines.
But author cautions that we should be wary of that word. Slapping the “genius label on Leonardo oddly
minimizes him by making it seem as if he were touched by lightning. ‘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 divisions. His genius was the type we can understand,
even take lessons from. It was based on
skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such a 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.
4. In these times of
stigmatizing anything that is not normal as criminal, when our rights for
having a different opinions or different life styles or even eating habits are
threatened for what they are, it is necessary to know the kind of society at
the time of European Renaisance i.e. 15th Century. Leonardo was a misfit: illegitimate, gay,
vegetarian (in Europe), left handed, easily distracted and at times heretical.
It was an epoch of innovation. This kind of freedom from fear is necessary
prerequisite for such thinkers and innovators to emerge. In author’s words ‘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’.
5. Leonardo’s mother Caterina
was born in 1436 to a poor farmer. She
was orphaned when she was fourteen. She
and her infant brother moved in with their grandmother, who died a year later
in 1451. Left to fend for herself and
her brother, Caterina had a relationship with Piero da Vince, then twenty four
who was prominent and prosperous. There
was little likelihood they would marry.
He was born after his father had married another girl of appropriate
status. It was not a public shame (then)
to be born out of wedlock. As Jacob
Burekhardt gave a label to Renaissance Italy “a golden age for bastards”.
An advantage of being born out of wedlock was that he was not sent to one of
the “Latin Schools” meant for upper class children. He had little training in a formal school,
but was mainly self-taught. He
ironically called himself an unlettered man, though he took pride that lack of
formal schooling led him to be a disciple of experience and experiment. His lack of reverene 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. He had said ‘There arose in me two
contrary emotions, fear and desire - fear of the threatening dark cave, desire
to see whether there were any marvelous thing within” Ultimately desire
won.
6. Leonardo lived with his
grandparents and his uncle. His mother
was living with his stepfather and his father was living with his
stepmother. He was born in 1452. By the
year 1564 his step mother died in childbirth.
His father took him from vinci to Florence. At that time Florence was not ruled by
hereditary royalty. More than 100 years
before Leonardo arrived, the most prosperous merchants and guild leaders
crafted a republic whose elected members ruled. But one family dominated. Later members of this family becames dukes
and popes. It was a prosperous town. He went to school to learn maths, useful for
commerce. A left hander, Leonardo wrote
from right to left and drew each letter facing backward. They could only be read with a mirror. He had
right from his childhood this peculiar habit.
This has enabled researchers to trace his handwriting and his notes
which are distinct, after many centuries.
7. Leonardo’s
father was a notary and he was well known in his town. There is a suggestion in
the book that notary as a profession was reserved for persons born in good
families. This may be one of the reasons
that his father had sent his ilegitimate son to an artist, Verroccio to study
drawing. He thought it would be profitable. The master appreciated Leonardo’s
talent and kept him. Lacking formal
education, this artist’s workshop became Leonardo’s school. Leonardo was well built and he also became a
model for sculptures and portraits. He learned so many different skills. He observed the world around him with a sharp
eye. His skill in depicting even a very minute
detail in his paintings made his master wonder that his discipline is better
than himself. He had well developed
sense of perspective. Over a period of
time he attained perfection. Because of
his interest and curiosity he had involved himself in painting, drawing,
engineering, architechture, weaponry, city planning etc. In each of these
disciplines he tried to know as many things as possible and strove to achieve
excellence. For studying the muscles of
horses he had dissected dead animals to know exactly how many muscles are there
in its legs. His involvement in so many disciplines had the flip side too. He had not finished many of the projects he
had initiated. There are scores of
unfinished paintings, drawings, architechtural plans. One of the unfinished projects was a statue
of a duke, father of his patron, sitting on a horse standing on hind legs. He had planned and made a clay model of the
statue three times bigger than life-size. But because of a war in which his
patron was defeated, the half finished work i.e. clay model of the statue, was
destroyed by enemy soldiers.
After gaining sufficient
experience in practical knowledge, he acknowledged that ‘he shall endeavor to
satisfy you (his patron on a project of architechture) with theory and
partly with practice, sometimes showing effects from causes, sometimes
affirming principles with experiments’ and that he would ‘make use of the
authority of the ancient architects’. In
other words Leonardo was advocating our modern method of combining theory,
experiment, and handed-down knowledge-and constantly testing them against each
other’. Thus he became more
than a century before Galileo to pursue in a persistent hands-on fashion the
dialogue between experiment and theory that would lead to the modern Scientific
Revolution. He compared his
method of observation 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.
Leonardo watched how birds
fly, stay aloft and land and described them in detail in his note books. He noted the movement of feather, wings,
muscles, neck legs etc. He not only got the fluid dynamics correct but he was
able to turn his insights into rudimentary theories that foreshoadowed those of
Newton, Galileo and others. He also tried to create flying machines and
failed. But this adds to his stature
rather than diminishing.
Being a painter he could
conceive and do mechanical drawings with perspective. He was made numerous
drawings of machines most of which he could not build. However, he made a workable model of a
machine for grinding needles. His mechanical drawings were visual thought
experiments. He found that by
lubricating machines can work better.
He was the first to use ball bearings and roller bearings.
It was he, before Newton who said that ‘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’.
Leonardo was also curious to
know about Geometry. Throughout his life
he was trying to notice the shapes and how shapes can be changed. One of his
obssessions was to fit a circle in a square with the same measure of area. To
study shapes and study the changes he had made numerous drawings and notes which
are available even today for us to see.
Leonardo was the first to
draw skull drawings cross sections and placed it in a single drawing with one
half of it showing what is outside and another showing what is inside. He also studied human proportion obsessively
to the extent that he found proportion of each part of the body to the whole
and also in part (for example he noted the proportion of distance between the
nose and mouth and found its ratio to the face.
Leonardo studied friction
and recorded his studies in his note book.
He never published them. They had
to be rediscovered almost two hundred years later by French scientific
instrument maker Gullaume Amontons. He
devised an instrument Tribometer that would not be reinvented until the eighteenth
century. He made a screw jack with ball
bearings. He was three centuries ahead
of his time.
He was one of the greatest
painters. But he wanted his paintings to
be perfect. He would go to any extent to
make them perfect. In fact he had kept
some of his paintings with himself till his death for this purpose. He took
more than 15 years to finish some paintings.
He tried many versions of some paintings. Some of which were done by his
disciples, as samples to know as to which version would be the finest of the
alternatives. He was the first to study optics to clearly paint the light and
its effects on the subjects of his paintings.
He was the first to use the concept of blurring the picture of a distant
object in a painting. He disliked sharp edges in painting (as in in a sculpture. This was in contrast the painter Micheal
Angelo’s style who was a painter and sculpture and his competitor in some sense. Leonardo had represented optical effects,
authentic geographical material and painted bodies which showed the inner
emotions in their appearances. For
example, his painting the ‘Last Supper’ presents movements of each of the
disciples that show their inner thoughts on hearing Jesus say that ‘one of them
would betray him’. Hundreds of thousands
of pages have been written about this painting.
Leonardo drew many parts of
the body (internal and external features) to indicate the nature of muscles,
nerves bones in a single page and in this he was considered a pioneer. Primarily he wanted to know the muscles of
the body to perfectly paint them but then it became a passion for human
anatomy. He was also interested in the
structure and movements of animals and his records observations of animals’
movements is one of the rare examples of human desire for knowledge. For
example he was the first to study flight of birds. He saw similarities between nature
and man for example, between tree roots and blood capillaries. This he could do as he keenly observed
everything around him. What he found
about how bloods flows in aorta was confirmed after 450 years by anatomists.
The fact that he did not publish his observations diminished his impact on the
history of science but it did not diminish his genius. His grandest and
most encompassing of these analogies, in both his art and his sciences was the
comparison between the body of man and the body of the earth. He wrote ‘Man is the image of the world’.
Leonardo wrote in detail
about fossils and argued that the biblical story of the flood was
incorrect. Showing no fear of combining heresy
with blasphemy, he wrote ‘of the foolishness and simple-mindedness of those who
require that these animals should be carried by the deluge to the hills far
from the sea. He intuitively guessed
that the lands and sea were changing their heights and elevation often and this
was the reason that fossils of sea animals are available in the hills etc. HE
noted that ‘ancient bottoms of the sea have become mountain ridges. This
was a leap that was far ahead of his time.
More impressive was his realization that the moon does not emit light
but reflects the light of the sun and that a person standing on the moon wold
see that the earth reflects light in the same way. One of his
idiosyncracies was to leave any project in the middle if his interest wanes and
shift to some different work or project till he again felt inspired to return
to the original work or project or subject. This has resulted that many of the
projects he conceived had not been executed for lack of interest in his part. He never did any work for earning
money. He did any work only if he is
fully interested. Even if he was forced to do something, he would leave them
unfinished when he felt so. Most of his later paintings were done only because
he had the passion to do them. As for
Monolisa hundreds of thousands of pages have been written all over the world
about it. This books gives a sample of
its greatness. He had painted it layer after layer and never delivered it to
the man who had originally ordered. No
intrusive examination is allowed on the painting Mono lisa as it would disturb
the original and this would create public outrage in Europe. This is the kind
of respect European, countries particularly France, gives to its monuments and
historical articles. We can only sigh about India.
Leonardo waited for
perfection in everything he did. By
refusing to churn out works that he had not perfected, he sealed his reputation
as a genius rather than a master craftsman.
Isaacson the author of the
book also enumerates what we can learn from Leonardo:-
1. Be curious, relentlessly
curious
2. Seek knowledge for its own
sake
3. Retain childlike sense of
wonder
4. Observe
5. Start with details
6. See things unseen
7. Go down the rabbit hole (i.e.
go deep into the detail of the things you are interested).
8. Get distracted (Leonardo’s
willingness to pursue whatever shiny subject caught his eye made his mind
richer and filled with more connections)
9. Respect facts (Leonardo was
forerunner of the age of observational experiments and critical thinking). If
we want to be more like Leonardo we have to be fearless about changing our
minds based on new information.
10. Procrastinate.
He told his patron that “creativity requires time for ideas to marinate
and intuitions to gel. Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when
they work least”.
11. Let the perfect be the enemy
of the good.
12. Think visually.
13. Let your reach exceed your
grasp.
14. Indulge in fantasy.
15. Create for yourself , not for
the patron
16. Collaborate
17. Make lists. Leonardo’s to do lists may have been
testaments to pure curiosity the world has ever seen.
18. Take notes on paper. Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s note
books are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now our own note
books 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.
19. Be open to mystery.
---------------
This book ‘Leonardo Da Vinci’ By Walter Isaacson is one of
the most fascinating books I have ever read in my life. This may be my longest article so far. There are so many inspiring and surprising
facts and events that propel me write more that I may end up reproducing the
whole book.
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