Leonardo Da Vinci
von Walter Isaacson
I embarked on this book because Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate example of the main theme of my previous biographies: how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius. Benjamin Franklin, a previous subject of mine, was a Leonardo of his era: with no formal education, he taught himself to become an imaginative polymath who was Enlightenment America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist.
And Steve Jobs climaxed his product launches with an image of street signs showing the intersection of the liberal arts and technology. Leonardo was his hero. “He saw beauty in both art and engineering,” Jobs said, “and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius.”
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. My
The reason he wanted to know was because he was Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder.
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.
This was fortunate. He would have made a poor notary: he got bored and distracted too easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative.14
I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk! . . . They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors, but by those of others. . . . They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe—but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.17
Born within about a year of Leonardo were Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, who would lead an era of exploration. And Florence, with its booming merchant class of status-seeking patrons, had become the cradle of Renaissance art and humanism.
Its economy, once dominated by unskilled wool-spinners, had flourished by becoming one that, like our own time, interwove art, technology, and commerce.
In 1472 there were eighty-four wood-carvers, eighty-three silk workers, thirty master painters, and forty-four goldsmiths and jewelry craftsmen working in Florence.
Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge.
“Beautiful Florence has all seven of the fundamental things a city requires for perfection,” the essayist Benedetto Dei wrote in 1472, when Leonardo was living there. “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.”
The culture rewarded, above all, those who mastered and mixed different disciplines.
Vasari also noted that Leonardo was interested in so many things that he got easily distracted. 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.
Leonardo would far exceed his master in all things, including in his propensity to get distracted, walk away from projects, and linger over paintings for years.
On a deeper level, Leonardo’s homosexuality seems to have been manifest in his sense of himself as somewhat different, an outsider who didn’t quite fit in. By the time he was thirty, his increasingly successful father was an establishment insider and a legal adviser to the Medici, the top guilds, and churches. He was also an exemplar of traditional masculinity; by then he’d had at least one mistress, three wives, and five children. Leonardo, on the contrary, was essentially an outsider.
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
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.
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.
Ludovico spent profligately on his personal desires: 140,000 ducats to refurbish the rooms of his palace and 16,000 ducats for his hunting hawks, hounds, and horses.I He was stingier with the intellectual and entertainment retainers in his court: his astrologer had an annual stipend of 290 ducats, high-level government officials got 150 ducats, and the artist-architect Donato Bramante, who would become Leonardo’s friend, complained of getting only 62 ducats.
His letter to Ludovico is thus best regarded not as a reliable catalogue of his actual engineering accomplishments but instead as a glimpse into his hopes and ambitions.
The more than 7,200 pages now extant probably represent about one-quarter of what Leonardo actually wrote,4 but that is a higher percentage after five hundred years than the percentage of Steve Jobs’s emails and digital documents from the 1990s that he and I were able to retrieve. Leonardo’s notebooks are nothing less than an astonishing windfall that provides the documentary record of applied creativity.
In contrast, the Codex Leicester contains 72 pages, mainly on geology and water studies, that have remained together since Leonardo composed them around 1508 to 1510; it is now owned by Bill Gates.
the interconnectedness of nature, the unity of its patterns, and the analogy between the workings of the human body and those of the earth.
Leonardo’s triumph designing The Masque of the Planets brought him a modest amount of fame—more than he had received as a painter of unfinished panels and certainly more than he had ever earned as a military engineer.
It was typical of Leonardo’s desire to indulge in the scary and exotic; he had an affinity for bizarre demons and dragons.
Let’s pause to marvel at Leonardo walking out in the evening, no doubt dandily dressed, standing at the edge of a moat, intensely watching the motions of each of the four wings of a dragonfly.
There is a paradox, which goes back to Zeno in the fifth century BC, involving the apparent contradiction of an object being in motion yet also being at a precise place at a given instant. Leonardo wrestled with the concept of depicting an arrested instant that contains both the past and the future of that moment.
The first two folios of his Codex on the Flight of Birds deal with the laws of gravity, which he calls the “attraction of one object to another.” The force of gravity, he wrote, acts in the direction of “an imaginary line between the centers of each object.”13 He then described how to calculate the center of gravity of a bird, a pyramid, and other complex shapes.
“Water cannot be compressed like air,” he wrote.14 In other words, a wing beating down on air will compact the air into a smaller space, and as a result the air pressure underneath the wing will be higher than the pressure of the rarefied air above it.
“Every movement tends to maintain itself; or, rather, every body in motion continues to move so long as the influence of the force that set it in motion is maintained in it.”9 Leonardo’s insights were a precursor to what Newton, two hundred years later, would make his first law of motion: that a body in motion will stay in the same motion unless acted upon by another force.
“Among the impossible delusions of man is the search for continuous motion, called by some perpetual wheel,” he wrote in the introduction to his Codex Madrid I. “Speculators on perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras you have created in this quest!”
Such obsession is a component of genius.
maîtresse-en-titre (official mistress),
The interdisciplinary effort, which wove together art and science, was worthy of Leonardo, who would have appreciated the interplay between those who love the humanities and those who love technology.
She told him, “This drawing shows dual influences: Florentine in its delicate beauty and Lombard in the costume and braid, or coazzone, which were typical of a court lady of the late fifteenth century. Of course, the most obvious artist to come to mind is Leonardo, one of the few artists who made the transition from Florentine to Milanese.” She encouraged Silverman to investigate further.
The picture that Silverman had bought for around $20,000 was now estimated to be worth close to $150 million.
As a result, The Last Supper, both in its creation and in its current state, becomes not just an example of Leonardo’s genius but also a metaphor for it. It was innovative in its art and too innovative in its methods. The conception was brilliant but the execution flawed. The emotional narrative is profound but slightly mysterious, and the current state of the painting adds another thin veil of mystery to the ones that so often shroud Leonardo’s life and work.
Like many of his visionary schemes, it was never implemented.
Rather than try to conform, he made a point of being different, dressing and carrying himself as a dandy.
Leonardo made sure that his companion Salai, then twenty-four, was dressed with similar brio, usually also in pink and rose. In one entry Leonardo noted, “On this day I paid Salai three gold ducats which he said he wanted for a pair of rose-colored hose with their trimming.” The trimmings on the stocking must have been jewels. Four days later, he bought Salai a cloak of silver cloth with green velvet trim.
It’s reassuring to discover that Leonardo spent as much on books as he did on clothes. In the inventories he made in 1504, he listed 116 volumes.
that she had more money than taste.
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, such as the Musician, or if a powerful ruler demanded it, as in the case of Ludovico with his mistresses. But he didn’t dance to the music of patrons.
Given the lack of a historical record or documentary trail, people have used other methods to try to determine which of the Yarnwinder contenders is the “original.” One approach is connoisseurship, the ability of a true art expert with a refined eye to discern paintings by the master. Unfortunately, connoisseurship over the years, both in this case and others, has created more disagreements than it has resolved, and it has sometimes been proven wrong when new evidence arises.
In other words, 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.
“Leonardo da Vinci’s ultimate masterpiece” (l’ultime chef d’oeuvre)
He thinks by sketching. It is a process he called “componimento inculto,” an uncultivated composition that helps work out ideas through an intuitive process.
One of the veils blurring our knowledge of Leonardo is the mystery surrounding the authenticity and dates of some of his paintings, including ones we think are lost and others we think are finds. Like most artist-craftsmen of his era, he did not sign his work.
As a result, the art consortium was able to sell it for close to $80 million in 2013 to a Swiss art dealer, who then resold it to a Russian fertilizer billionaire for $127 million.
Even though neither painting was finished—like Leonardo’s, Michelangelo’s work is known to us only through copies and preparatory drawings—the saga provides a fascinating look at how the contrasting styles of Leonardo, then fifty-one, and Michelangelo, twenty-eight, each transformed the history of art.
A revised contract was signed by Leonardo and witnessed by his friend Machiavelli in May 1504. By then the Florentines were beginning to worry about Leonardo’s proclivity to procrastinate, so they wrote into the new contract that he would have to repay all his fees and forfeit all the work he had done if he did not finish by February 1505.
By 1500 the two artists were back in Florence. Michelangelo, then twenty-five, was a celebrated but petulant sculptor, and Leonardo, forty-eight, was a genial and generous painter who had a following of friends and young students. It is enticing to think of what might have occurred if Michelangelo had treated him as a mentor. But that did not happen. As Vasari reported, he displayed instead “a very great disdain” toward Leonardo.
“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
Leonardo rarely criticized other painters,22 but after seeing Michelangelo’s bathing nudes he repeatedly disparaged what he called the “anatomical painter.” Clearly referring to his rival, he mocked those who “draw their nude figures looking like wood, devoid of grace, so that you would think you were looking at a sack of walnuts rather than the human form, or a bundle of radishes rather than the muscles of figures.”
“universal” nature of his subjects. He believed “The painter should aim at universality, because there is a great want of self-respect in doing one thing well and another badly, as many do who study only the nude figure and do not seek after variety,”
Michelangelo’s painting has the sharp, delineated outlines that Leonardo, with his love of sfumato and blurred borders, scorned as a matter of philosophy, optics, mathematics, and aesthetics. To define objects, Michelangelo used lines rather than following Leonardo’s practice of using shadows, which is why Michelangelo’s look flat rather than three-dimensional.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.