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Introduction I Can Also Paint
But even when he was engaged in blue-sky thinking, his science was not a separate endeavor from his art. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it.
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.
Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.
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.
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
“The problem with bastards was that they were part of the family, but not totally,” wrote Kuehn. That helped some be, or forced them to be, more adventurous and improvisational.
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.
But he also took pride that his lack of formal schooling led him to be a disciple of experience and experiment.
sperientia,”
Chapter 2 Apprentice
Leonardo rarely wrote in his notebooks about his own emotions, so it is hard to know what he felt about the move.
maestro
Being left-handed also affected Leonardo’s method of drawing. As with his writing, he drew from right to left so as not to smudge the lines with his hand. 16 Most artists draw hatching strokes that slope upward to the right, like this: ////. But Leonardo’s hatching was distinctive because his lines started on the lower right and moved upward to the left, like this: \. Today this style has an added advantage: the left-handed hatching in a drawing is evidence that it was made by Leonardo.
There are a few familiar landmarks from the area—a conical hill, perhaps a castle—but the aerial view seems to be, typical of Leonardo, a mix of the actual and the imagined, viewed as if by a soaring bird. The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain. “If the painter wishes to see beauties that would enrapture him, he is master of their production,” he wrote. “If he seeks valleys, if he wants to disclose great expanses of countryside from the summits of mountains, and if he subsequently wishes to see the horizon of the sea, he is lord of all of them.”
ANNUNCIATION
Chapter 3 On His Own
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).
The Adoration of the Magi thus encapsulates Leonardo’s frustrating genius: a pathbreaking and astonishing display of brilliance that was abandoned once it was conceptualized.
spectral
Almost all the characters in the picture, the infant Jesus included, are engaged in motions that are—as they would be in The Last Supper—connected to emotions: handing a gift, opening one, bowing to the ground, slapping a forehead in amazement, pointing upward.
There was another reason, one even more fundamental, that Leonardo did not complete the painting: he preferred the conception to the execution.
It probably also helped that the Italians, then as now, were expressive in their gestures, which Leonardo loved to capture in his notebooks.
As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Madonnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.
Chapter 4 Milan
When it was finally built for a television special in 2002, the contemporary engineers were unable to get it to work.
Corners provided a place for men to urinate. “The corners of square ones are always fouled,”
Chapter 5 Leonardo’S Notebooks
We can extract from his pages, as he did from nature’s, the patterns that underlie things that at first appear disconnected.
The beauty of a notebook is that it indulges provisional thoughts, half-finished ideas, unpolished sketches, and drafts for treatises not yet refined.
Chapter 6 Court Entertainer
serenaded
He was particularly fond of describing some scene of darkness and destruction, in a style that mocked the prophets and doomsayers who hung around the court, then revealing that he was actually referring to something far less apocalyptic. For example, one prophecy begins, “Many people by puffing out a breath with too much haste will thereby lose their sight and soon after all consciousness,” but then Leonardo reveals that the description refers to people “blowing out the candlelight when going to bed.”
Chapter 7 Personal Life
“Nature has given sensibility to pain to living organisms that have the power of movement, in order to preserve those parts which might be destroyed by movement,” he surmised. “Pain is not necessary in plants.”
Chapter 9 The Horse Monument
Although the original purpose was to honor the late Duke Francesco by glorifying him atop a steed, Leonardo focused more on the horse than the rider. In fact, he seemed to lose all interest in the Duke Francesco component, and the monument soon was being referred to, by himself and others, as il cavallo (the horse).
This eventually leads him into comparative anatomy; in a later set of drawings of human anatomy, he renders the muscles, bones, and tendons of a man’s left leg next to those of a dissected back leg of a horse.
His drawings are exuberant and yet detailed, as though a futurist were designing a launch pad for a rocket ship. 13
The cannons would end up doing little good, for the French would easily conquer Milan in 1499. And when they did, the French archers used Leonardo’s huge clay model for target practice, destroying it.
Chapter 10 Scientist
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.
“Although nature begins with the cause and ends with the experience, we must follow the opposite course, namely begin with the experience, and by means of it investigate the cause.” 6 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.
As the philosopher Michel Foucault noted, the “protoscience” of Leonardo’s era was based on similarities and analogies. 13 Because of his intuitive feel for the unity of nature, his mind and eye and pen darted across disciplines, sensing connections. “This constant search for basic, rhyming, organic form meant that when he looked at a heart blossoming into its network of veins he saw, and sketched alongside it, a seed germinating into shoots,” Adam Gopnik wrote. “Studying the curls on a beautiful woman’s head he thought in terms of the swirling motion of a turbulent flow of water.” 14 His drawing of a fetus in a womb hints at the similarity to a seed in a shell. When he was inventing musical instruments, he made an analogy between how the larynx works and how a glissando recorder could perform similarly. When he was competing to design the tower for Milan’s cathedral, he made a connection between architects and doctors that reflected what would become the most fundamental analogy in his art and science: that between our physical world and our human anatomy. When he dissected a limb and drew its muscles and sinews, it led him to also sketch ropes and levers.
Chapter 11 Birds And Flight
To overcome the relative weakness of human breast muscles, this cross between a flying saucer and a health club torture chamber has the operator use his legs to push pedals, his arms to crank a gear-and-pulley mechanism, his head to pump a piston, and his shoulders to pull cables. It is unclear how he would manage to steer the machine. 21
But for all the beauty of his art and all the ingenuity of his designs, he was never able to create a self-propelled human flying machine. To be fair, after five hundred years nobody else has either.
Chapter 12 The Mechanical Arts
jasper,”
“Speculators on perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras you have created in this quest!”
“Man is a machine, a bird is a machine, the whole universe is a machine,” wrote Marco Cianchi in an analysis of Leonardo’s devices. 18 As Leonardo and others led Europe into a new scientific age, he ridiculed astrologers, alchemists, and others who believed in nonmechanistic explanations of cause and effect, and he relegated the idea of religious miracles to the purview of priests.
Chapter 14 The Nature Of Man
To appreciate how ingenious this pictorial technique is, cover the right side of the picture with your hand and notice how much less informative the drawing becomes. “The originality of the skull drawings of 1489 is so fundamentally different and superior to all other extant illustrations of the time that they are completely out of character with the age,”
Chapter 16 The Milan Portraits
“The pupil of the eye dilates and contracts as it sees a less or greater light,” Leonardo noted early on in his studies of the human eye and optics. 4 He also observed how the changes in pupil size take a few moments, as the eyes adjust to the light. Almost eerily, Leonardo has the two pupils of the musician dilated to different degrees: his left eye, which faces the light more directly, has a smaller pupil, which is correct. Again Leonardo’s science intersects with his art, this time to give us, in the subtlest of ways, a sense of the passing of a moment as our eyes sweep across the face of the musician, from his left eye to his right.
Chapter 17 The Science Of Art
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;
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.