CityReads│Becoming Leonardo da Vinci

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Becoming Leonardo da Vinci

There was no place that offered a more stimulating environment for Leonardo da Vinci to become who he was than Florence in the 1400s.

Walter Isaacson, 2017.Leonardo da Vinci, Simon and Schuster.

Source:http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Leonardo-da-Vinci/Walter-Isaacson/9781501139154

Learning Leonardo da Vinci by his books

Walter Isaacson, author of multiple biographies of innovative genius, including Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, published a new biography of Leonardo da Vinci in 2017. Walter’s starting point for this book was not Leonardo’s art masterpieces but his notebooks. His mind is best revealed in the more than 7,200 pages of his notes and scribbles that, miraculously, survive to this day.

Fortunately, Leonardo could not afford to waste paper, so he crammed every inch of his pages with miscellaneous drawings and looking-glass jottings that seem random but provide intimations of his mental leaps.

Scribbled alongside each other, with rhyme if not reason, are math calculations, sketches of his devilish young boyfriend, birds, flying machines, theater props, eddies of water, blood valves, grotesque heads, angels, siphons, plant stems, sawed-apart skulls, tips for painters, notes on the eye and optics, weapons of war, fables, riddles, and studies for paintings. The cross-disciplinary brilliance whirls across every page, providing a delightful display of a mind dancing with nature. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created, a wondrous guide to the person whom the eminent art historian Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history.

The most interesting things of 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.

“Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.” Others involve why-is-the-sky-blue questions about phenomena so commonplace that we rarely pause to wonder about them. “Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?

Oddest of all, there is this entry: “Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men.” We can imagine Leonardo wanting to do that, for reasons both anatomical and aesthetic. But did he really need to remind himself to do it? The next item on the list is “Inflate the lungs of a pig and observe whether they increase in width and in length, or only in width.”

Life and death of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, or more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardo, was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci is sometimes incorrectly called “da Vinci,” as if that were his last name rather than a descriptor meaning “from Vinci.” However, the usage is not as egregious as some purists proclaim. During Leonardo’s lifetime, Italians increasingly began to regularize and register the use of hereditary surnames. Both Leonardo and his father, Piero, frequently appended “da Vinci” to their names.

Leonardo was born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, in Vinci in the region of Florence. Exercising his little-used notarial handwriting, the boy’s grandfather Antonio recorded the birth on the bottom of the last page of a notebook that had belonged to his own grandfather. “1452: There was born to me a grandson, the son of Ser Piero my son, on the 15th day of April, a Saturday, at the third hour of the night [about 10 p.m.]. He bears the name Leonardo”.

With his father living mainly in Florence and his mother nurturing a growing family of her own, Leonardo by age five was primarily living in the da Vinci family home with his leisure-loving grandfather Antonio and his wife. Also living in the household was Piero’s youngest brother, Francesco, who was only fifteen years older than his nephew Leonardo. He became Leonardo’s beloved uncle and at times surrogate father.

Leonardo’s father had never legitimized his first-born son. Despite the fact that until Leonardo was twenty-four, his father had no other children. (Piero would make up for it during his third and fourth marriages, having at least eleven children).

It can be said that Leonardo da Vinci had the good luck to be born out of wedlock. Otherwise, he would have been expected to become a notary, like the firstborn legitimate sons in his family stretching back at least five generations. His family roots can be traced to the early 1300s, when his great-great-great-grandfather, Michele, practiced as a notary in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, about seventeen miles west of Florence.

Because Florence’s guild of notaries barred those who were non legittimo, Leonardo was able to benefit from the note-taking instincts that were ingrained in his family heritage while being free to pursue his own creative passions.

Other than a little training in commercial math at what was known as an “abacus school,” Leonardo was mainly self-taught. But he also took pride that his lack of formal schooling led him to be a disciple of experience and experiment. “Leonardo da Vinci, disscepolo della sperientia”. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years.

Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter Andrea del Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I of France.

Legend has it that leonardo died in the arms of Francois I

He is described as a man of eye-catching beauty and grace. He had flowing golden curls, a muscular build, remarkable physical strength, and an elegance of bearing when he was walking through town in his colorful garb or riding on a horse. “Beautiful in person and aspect, Leonardo was well-proportioned and graceful,” according to the Anonimo. In addition, he was a charming conversationalist and a lover of nature, renowned for being sweet and gentle to both people and animals.

With a passion that was both playful and obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines,

optics, botany, geology, water flows, and weaponry. Thus he became the archetype of the Renaissance Man. His ability to combine art and science, made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportioned man spread-eagle inside a circle and square, known as Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.

His scientific explorations informed his art. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, delineated the muscles that move the lips, and then painted the world’s most memorable smile. He studied human skulls, made layered drawings of the bones and teeth, and conveyed the skeletal agony of Saint Jerome in the Wilderness. He explored the mathematics of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced magical illusions of changing visual perspectives in The Last Supper.

As he aged, he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation. 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. Leonardo da Vinci possessed the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technolog, which is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

Leonardo was Steve Jobs’s hero. “He saw beauty in both art and engineering,” Jobs said, “and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius

Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. 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. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy.

He made mistakes. He went off on tangents, literally, pursuing math problems that became time-sucking diversions. Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notably the Adoration of the Magi, Saint

Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen paintings fully or mainly attributable to him.

Adoration of the Magi

A golden age for genius

There is no accident that Leonardo emerged in the 15^th Florence. It was a good time for a child with such ambitions and talents to be born. In 1452 Johannes Gutenberg had just opened his publishing house, and soon others were using his moveable-type press to print books that would empower unschooled but brilliant people like Leonardo. Italy was beginning a rare forty-year period during which it was not wracked by wars among its city-states. Literacy, numeracy, and income were rising dramatically as power shifted from titled landowners to urban merchants and bankers, who benefited from advances in law, accounting, credit, and insurance. The Ottoman Turks were about to capture Constantinople, unleashing on Italy a migration of fleeing scholars with bundles of manuscripts containing the ancient wisdom of Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, and Aristotle. Born within 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 statusseeking patrons, had become the cradle of Renaissance art and humanism.

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. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity.

Florence: the right place for genius

There was no place then, and few places ever, that offered a more stimulating environment for creativity than Florence in the 1400s. Its economy, once dominated by unskilled wool-spinners, had flourished by becoming one that, like our own time, interwove art, technology, and commerce. It featured artisans working with silk makers and merchants to create fabrics that were works of art. 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. It was also a center of banking; the florin, noted for its gold purity, was the dominant standard currency in all of Europe, and the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping that recorded debits and credits permitted commerce to flourish. 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. Fully a third of Florence’s population was literate, the highest rate in Europe. By embracing trade, it became a center of finance and a cauldron of ideas.

“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 city’s cathedral was the most beautiful in Italy. In the 1430s it had been crowned with the world’s largest dome, built by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, which was a triumph of both art and engineering, and linking those two disciplines was a key to Florence’s creativity. Many of the city’s artists were also architects, and its fabric industry had been built by combining technology, design, chemistry, and commerce.

When Leonardo arrived, Florence’s population was 40,000, which is about what it had been for a century but down from the 100,000 or so who lived there in 1300, before the Black Death and subsequent waves of plague. There were at least a hundred families that could be considered very wealthy, plus some five thousand guild members, shopkeepers, and merchants who were part of a prosperous middle class. Because most of them were new to wealth, they had to establish and assert their status. They did so by commissioning distinctive works of art, buying luxurious clothes of silk and gold, building palatial mansions (thirty went up between 1450 and 1470), and becoming patrons of literature, poetry, and humanist philosophy. Consumption was conspicuous but tasteful. By the time Leonardo arrived, Florence had more wood-carvers than butchers. The city itself had become a work of art.

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s patronage of the arts, autocratic rule, and ability to maintain a peaceful balance of power with rival city-states helped to make Florence a cradle of art and commerce during Leonardo’s early career there. He also kept his citizenry amused with dazzling public spectacles and grandly produced entertainments. The work done for these pageants was ephemeral, but it was lucrative and stimulated the creative imagination of many of the artists involved, most notably young Leonardo.

Florence’s festive culture was spiced by the ability to inspire those with creative minds to combine ideas from disparate disciplines. In narrow streets, cloth dyers worked next to goldbeaters next to lens crafters, and during their breaks they went to the piazza to engage in animated discussions. At the Pollaiuolo workshop, anatomy was being studied so that the young sculptors and painters could better understand the human form. Artists learned the science of perspective and how angles of light produce shadows and the perception of depth. The culture rewarded, above all, those who mastered and mixed different disciplines.

So, too, was Leonardo’s ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, lefthanded, easily distracted, and at times heretical. Indeed, l’amore masculino, as Lomazzo quoted Leonardo calling it, was so common in Florence that the word Florenzer became slang in Germany for “gay.”

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