I didn’t buy this book because I was fascinated by Leonardo. I bought it because several people whose opinions I value said it was a great book and because the other books I’ve read by Walter Isaacson were excellent. I’m glad I bought it and read it.
Before I started reading, I thought I knew the basics. Leonardo was the painter of perhaps the two most famous paintings in history: The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. I had that right. But most of the rest of what I thought I knew turned out to be either wrong or incomplete.
The man certainly was a creative genius, but a lot of the things that I’d read about him, like that bit about the “first helicopter,” turned out to be wrong. I didn’t know how much he did beyond painting and how deep he went on so many topics.
Leonardo was certainly the prototype of the Renaissance Man, and looking back, we can see that he was born at the right time for someone with broad interests and many talents. Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. That gave him a long, productive life of 67 years. He was a bastard, which wasn’t a problem in Florence when he was born and may even have given him some advantages. He didn’t get a lot of formal schooling, which meant that he started to learn on his own and developed methods that worked for him.
He started out in Florence, where he was apprenticed to an excellent master, and learned the craft of painting. But early in his life, he moved to Milan. That turned out to be a good thing, too. Florence was more artistic, but Milan had a much more diverse culture of people interested in the sciences. And it was in the sciences and engineering that Leonardo would do a lot of work I knew nothing about and now shake my head at, in wonder.
Leonardo’s work in science included the development of thinking on perspective. I always thought perspective was a kind of geometric thing about painting. But it turns out that he developed three views of perspective. One was the standard vanishing point thing, but the others were the way color changes as distance increases, and the way that we lose detail on things the further they are away.
He made contributions to anatomy by doing dissections of cadavers of both humans and animals. He certainly learned from his dissections, and he also captured what he observed in drawings and notes.
He may have made even more contributions to engineering. He did a lot of military engineering, and a lot that revolves around water flows, including water systems for cities and diverting rivers. By the time I got to the end of the book, it seemed like Leonardo had done some work in almost any area of human knowledge. Not all of that work was great, or groundbreaking, but an awful lot of it was. So, the question is, how did he do it? That’s where I got my biggest takeaways from the book.
Leonardo was very smart. Okay, we got that out of the way. Most of the people we call geniuses are very smart. But there are an awful lot of very smart people who aren’t geniuses. What really separates geniuses from the rest of the pack is what they do, not raw brainpower.
The good news is that we have a pretty good idea of what Leonardo did. Isaacson developed his book primarily from the 7,000+ pages we have from Leonardo’s notebooks. That’s a lot, but it’s probably only about a quarter of the total he created. Here’s what Leonardo did to produce the quantity of quality insight and production that characterized his life.
Leonardo captured his ideas. Early in his life, he developed a habit of walking around with a notebook that he used to jot down observations and make quick sketches. He even developed a shorthand that would help him recreate things he’d seen when he got back to his studio and wanted to draw them in detail.
Leonardo was an acute observer who trained himself to be better. It helped that he was also a facile drawer. But the main driver of his close observations was curiosity.
He developed his own process for observing things. It began with what Isaacson calls “marching orders.” Leonardo described what he needed to do to learn or properly observe something. Then he would go and observe.
Leonardo learned by experimenting. Besides observing, Leonardo was an avid experimenter and he recorded both the experiments and what he learned from them.
Leonardo got ideas and sharpened ideas through his reading. The printing press was invented the year Leonardo was born. By the time he was 40, books were increasingly common, and an autodidact like Leonardo could learn and get ideas from books.
Leonardo had many friendships and collaborators over the years. This was not the lone genius retiring to his studio and producing bursts of insight. This is a man who went out into the world to observe, made careful observations, and then hone his understanding with reading, discussion, and experiment.
Isaacson includes a final chapter in the book about things you can learn from Leonardo, and it’s a chapter worth reading. But there’s a statement of Isaacson’s near the beginning of the book that sums up the takeaway for me.
“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.”
And, I would add, experiment and collaboration.
Before you read the book straight through, read that final chapter about what you can learn from Leonardo. It will give you a frame for learning as you go.
In A Nutshell
This is a thorough and well-written biography of one of history’s most fascinating individuals. You’ll enjoy the read. You’ll learn a lot. With a little effort, you can improve the way you see the world and develop some discipline so that you can be more like Leonardo than you are today.
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- Leonardo's Notebooks: Writing and Art of the Great Master (Notebook Series)Leonardo da VinciFlexibound
Popular Highlights in this book
But 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.Highlighted by 4,419 Kindle readers- The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain.Highlighted by 3,276 Kindle readers
- 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.Highlighted by 3,233 Kindle readers
- Largely due to his work, dimensionality became the supreme innovation of Renaissance art.Highlighted by 2,809 Kindle readers
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Strive to think, and live, like Leonardo da Vinci.
Perhaps the finest test for a non-fiction book is whether reading it sparks a desire for more information. Leonardo da Vinci, as written by Walter Isaacson, is as good as it gets in this regard. Both the man and the writer share credit, but one gets the feeling that even a novice writer would have a hard time diminishing the fascinating life of Leonardo.Strive to think, and live, like Leonardo da Vinci. He was a man that never lost that childlike wonder we all seem to grow out of. What does a woodpecker's tongue look like? When you next see a bird, do its wings flap downward faster than upward? Does this vary from bird to bird? These are the types of questions that filled his notebooks.A surprising trait of da Vinci, one that in my estimation makes him more accessible and understandable, was his tendency to leave work unfinished. He would regularly set out to create vast manuscripts of detailed analysis on the human body, or hydraulics or even how to paint. None of which would ever reach publication. Luckily though, a large percentage of his notebooks have survived and we can see his unfinished genius at work. He left a similar trail of unfinished artistic works, including paintings and sculptures, which if completed would no doubt stand next to the Mona Lisa and his other works as some of the greatest in all of human history. Understanding why this was his tendency is key to understanding his genius.As is typical of an expert biographer, the history of Leonardo da Vinci is not written as if it is a sure thing. Isaacson clearly presents the known information on a particular topic and offers what he considers to be the truth of the matter. In the end it is up to the reader to decide what to believe.I have never read a book that analyzed art in such depth. I have gained a new respect for art history and wish I could revisit all the museums I have been to in my life. I would be doing so with a newfound appreciation as well as a more critical eye thanks to Isaacson. Of course, I wish more than anything else that I could see the Mona Lisa again. My knowledge and respect of the painting when I was luckily enough to see it was severely lacking (to say the least, but can you blame a 20 year old?).Mona Lisa smile... the depth of this subject is astounding. Sfumato, maybe the most important word when it comes to understanding what made da Vinci different. To understand the genius of Leonardo is to understand sfumato. There are no clear delineations between subjects, whether in a painting or in life and philosophy. How much of life is a Mona Lisa smile... shifting... unclear upon inspection... confounding... ever changing.I could go on and on... suffice to say, read this book. You'll be better off for it.
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2018
- Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2020
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Sarah alafandiReviewed in Mexico on June 2, 2023
Un libro excepcional
Todavía no lo termino pero cada página es mejor que la anterior. Si eres fan de da Vinci, no dudes en leerlo porque te hará todavía más fan.Sarah alafandiUn libro excepcional
Reviewed in Mexico on June 2, 2023
Está muy fácil de digerir y súper bien explicado, sientes que te sumerges en el mundo de Leonardo
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- CarolynReviewed in Canada on October 26, 2017
but was amazed at how much still remains after more than 500 ...
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MarcelloReviewed in Italy on February 15, 2018
Consigliato a tutti coloro che non vogliono fermarsi alla Gioconda
