Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

A review by Razaq.

When Leonardo da Vinci was at the height of his powers in 1489, he said: “As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, so a well-employed life brings a happy death.” When Leonardo passed on from this world aged 67, he certainly had a well-employed life and he accomplished things in breadth and depth in one lifetime that would occupy a multitude of lifetimes for mere mortals.

Walter Isaacson does a great job of presenting a compelling picture of the amazing person that was Leonardo. Isaacson suggests that using the word genius lightly with Leonardo minimizes the achievements of Leonardo the man, by attributing his monumental achievements to divine provenance, rather than his unstinting efforts. Recall the words of Edison: “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” In Leonardo’s case the inspiration was more than one percent, but you, dear reader, get the idea.

Isaacson starts the book off with a delightful anecdote from Leonardo’s early life. Leonardo writes to the Duke of Milan seeking employment, and he lists several of his qualifications — he can design public and private buildings, he can create light portable bridges to use on military expeditions, he can create fearsome machines of war, he can create master plans for cities et cetera et cetera, and he can paint too… I can do all these fabulous things, and oh by the way, I can paint too! Leonardo was taking some liberties here — he had conceptualized and put on paper many of the things he claimed he could do, but he had not actually executed them.

Leonardo was born the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, who belonged to a hereditary line of notaries. Being an illegitimate child meant that he could not be admitted to the guild for notaries, and in Leonardo’s case, that was a good thing! Can you imagine the person who would go on to become the creator of The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa giving up his artistic aspirations to becoming a notary?

By all accounts, being an illegitimate child in Renaissance Italy was not an insurmountable blocker, and Ser Piero encouraged Leonardo’s pursuits as an architect, engineer, and painter once he completed some basic studies at an abacus school. He also helped Leonardo get some commissions for art works by some of his own clients.

Leonardo started out as an empiricist. He derided book knowledge because he possessed very little formal education (to the extent he called himself unlettered). However, what he lacked in formal education, he made up for in loads in experiential learning — his acuity of observation was unparalleled, and he threw himself with gusto into *everything and anything* that interested him. Later in his life, he acquired many books and he studied both the ancients and his contemporaries. He took received wisdom and was able to expertly meld his experiences seamlessly. On rare occasion, his reliance on received wisdom failed — despite his first-class experience with fluid mechanics and his groundbreaking study of the human heart, he did not think that blood circulated in the human body.

Isaacson says that the world has known other thinkers who were more profound or logical, and many more who were more practical, but none who was so creative in so many different fields — “Some people are geniuses in a particular arena, such as Mozart in music and Euler in math. But Leonardo’s brilliance spanned multiple disciplines, which gave him a profound feel for nature’s patterns and crosscurrents. His curiosity impelled him to become among the handful of people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known.” One could argue that Leonardo was successful in his mission.

Leonardo’s tastes were catholic, and he plumbed the depths of his curiosity in everything he pursued — the line between enthusiastic study and obsession tended to blur. Because his interests were so wide ranging, he could be distracted by the next thing he wanted to learn. When he was commissioned to create a larger-than-life bronze statue of the founder of the state of Milan, he spent what would be to others an inordinate amount of time studying horses, dissecting them to understand their bone structure, and musculature, and drawing them in all manners of ways. Waste of time? Clearly, he did not think so.

Some of the scholarship around Leonardo laments that he was not more focused on the task at hand and regularly left projects unfinished because he was distracted by the siren call of other studies and investigations. Isaacson subscribes to the view that Leonardo was who he was and who he became precisely because of his unbridled curiosity about things — for instance, he relentlessly pursued anatomical studies (he is reported to have dissected more than 30 human bodies), he studied how a smile is controlled by various facial muscles and nerves. If some of these diversions to study anatomy meant some projects had to be abandoned, then so be it, says Isaacson. The world is richer for it because these so-called diversions helped Leonardo to create the most enigmatic smile the word has ever seen in the form of the Mona Lisa. In fact, the Mona Lisa appears to be a culmination of everything that Leonardo ever learned and mastered — anatomical studies, architecture, engineering, geology, and not to mention, masterly painting skills.

Isaacson does a great job of describing the circumstances of each of Leonardo’s major works. Paintings of that era had either a religious connotation or else they tended to be portraits of famous personages. Leonardo was so interested in exploring so many different things, he would sometimes get distracted and not complete his commissions, much to the chagrin of the people that commissioned the works. Other times, because he was so well versed in the interplay of light and shadow (through his extensive study of optics), he would be stymied by a particularly complex scene. Lesser painters might disregard or minimize these technical difficulties and plough on, but not Leonardo. He ran into this issue when he was conceptualizing the Adoration of the Magi, and a similar thing happened with his proposed painting for the Battle of Anghiari (a famous Florentine victory).

Leonardo felt that a painting must convey the mental state of the subject accurately. The motion depicted in the painting must be consonant with the emotions being felt by the subject at that point in time (almost like a candid shot in photographic terms). Isaacson also talks about how Leonardo perfected the art of sfumato (artistic blurring of lines) and chiaroscuro (interplay of shadow and light), based on his comprehensive understanding of optics, the way light hits at multiple points of the retina all at once, and how a person perceives an object. Using his multi-disciplinary approach, all the elements in his painting were faithful to his knowledge of the real (and natural) world. If he painted a certain flower in the foreground or background, it was in the right place and in the right season. If he drew some geological features like rocks, the rocks accurately reflected his deep knowledge and understanding of geology (right gradations, striations, compositions etc.), if he painted a water element, he was faithful to what he had learned about water — the turbulences and eddies around obstructions, and clean flows elsewhere.

One might even say that things could not be more real than what Leonardo painted. The author does a great job of explaining the rationale if there are some instances of inconsistency. Salvator Mundi is a painting of Jesus Christ that was authenticated as a Leonardo work relatively recently, and it sold at auction for a whopping $480 million USD, the highest price ever paid for a painting in auction. In this painting, Jesus Christ is shown gazing directly into the observer’s eye, while making the sign of a cross with his right hand and holding a crystal ball with his left. The luminous orb has three small inclusions (normal impurities that would exist in such crystal), but it does not show the portion of Jesus’ clothing right behind the orb in the (correct) inverted fashion. If you look closely at the eyes of Mona Lisa, you will notice that the pupil of the right eye is dilated more than the pupil of her left eye. For someone like Leonardo who literally could write a book or two on optics, these would be unforgivable misses. But the author conjectures that Leonardo knew what he was doing and that he did this on purpose. Showing a portion of Christ’s clothing upside down as seen through the crystal orb might feel a little disorienting to the viewer. Isaacson suggests Leonardo chose to ignore science in favor of expediency, in this case. Perhaps a similar sort of explanation for the Mona Lisa?

All in all, Isaacson stitches together a compelling picture of a genius, the likes of which we may never see again, imbuing him with a human quality through and through. Leonardo wasn’t always churning out Mona Lisas. He failed sometimes — he didn’t always complete his commissions, he made plans to divert the Arno River to help Florence in its wars against Venice but that plan never came to fruition, he spent much study and created designs for all manners of flying machines, but other than small scale theatrical spectacles, he never built a flying machine capable of supporting human flight, while he was in the employ of the Sforzas in Milan he was commissioned to do a large and heroic equestrian statue with the likeness of the Sforza progenitor riding it, but he could only get as far as the creation of the clay model, which by the way, got a rousing reception from all of Milan. The horse statue was abandoned because Milan got embroiled in a war with France, and since bronze was needed to make cannons, bronze equestrian statutes had to wait. Leonardo was pragmatic about this and moved on.

In a fitting comparison, Isaacson compares the Mona Lisa to Leonardo himself, how the painting represents the culmination of all Leonardo became as a human and as an artist. Isaacson says: “the painting became more than a portrait of a silk-merchant’s wife and certainly more than a mere commission. After a few years, and perhaps from the outset, Leonardo was painting it as a universal work for himself and for eternity rather than for Francesco del Giocondo. He never delivered the painting and, judging from his bank records, never collected any money for it. Instead, he kept it with him in Florence, Milan, Rome, and France until he died, sixteen years after he began. Over that period, he added thin layer after layer of little glaze strokes as he perfected it, retouched it, and imbued it with new depths of understanding about humans and nature. Some new insight, new appreciation, new inspiration would strike him, and the brush would alight gently on the poplar panel yet again. As it was with Leonardo, who became more profoundly layered with each step of his journey, so it was with the Mona Lisa.”

Leonardo was a dashing figure, who was collegial and loved to collaborate with others and had a series of patrons starting with the Medicis in Florence, the Sforzas in Milan, Cesare Borgia (the prince in Nicolo Machiavelli’s Prince) in Florence again when the Medicis fell out of power, and finally the king of France himself.

Alas, dear reader, just as all good things must come to an end, so it must with this review. Leonardo scaled peaks of achievement that will be unreachable to most mortals, but he did leave us with a blueprint — follow some of those principles and perhaps you too can walk in the footsteps of the giant in some small way. Isaacson summarizes:

1. Be curious, relentlessly curious

2. Seek knowledge for its own sake (he didn’t need to know how the two joints in the crocodile’s jaw helped it to achieve 30 times the biting force of a human jaw to paint the Mona Lisa, but all his knowledge enabled him to make connections that others could not)

3. Retain a childlike sense of wonder (he didn’t give up until he figured out why the sky was blue, and he was well past the age of childhood!)

4. Observe (he had unparalleled powers of observation)

5. Start with the details (he liked to say that you cannot grasp an entire page in one go, you had to read all the words)

6. See things unseen (work with your imagination)

7. Go down rabbit holes

8. Get distracted (allow yourself to learn new things, perhaps even in unrelated disciplines)

9. Respect facts (if facts do not fit your theories, be open to adjusting your theories)

10. Procrastinate (this was his way of addressing creative blocks, until inspiration came again, and he picked up the paint brush)

11. Let the perfect be the enemy of the good (he painted the Mona Lisa over a period of 15 years, so effectively, he never *finished* it… there was always a stroke to add here, or there!)

12. Think visually (geometry was his preferred mode to understanding the patterns in the natural physical world)

13. Avoid silos (Leonardo, more than anyone of his age or any other age was a master of multi-disciplinary effort)

14. Let your reach exceed your grasp (reach for the stars, in other words)

15. Indulge fantasy (not everything has to have a utility)

16. Create for yourself (a bit of self-care is important)

17. Collaborate

18. Make lists (while we may not put *observe the tongue of the woodpecker* on our to-do lists, it is nevertheless a great idea to make lists and pursue things of interest)

19. Take notes (he took notes copiously, he describes the flow of water in 70 different ways in one of his notebooks)

20. Be open to mystery (not everything has to has a nice, clear-cut answer or explanation)

By consulting first sources, and conducting deep research on the notebooks and the works Leonardo left behind, Isaacson has created a complex, but engaging and informative portrait of a once-in-a-millennium personality — a genius (even at a the risk of minimizing the man!) who strived to learn everything there was to learn, a collegial human being who liked to be around people, a master who liked to teach and collaborate, and most importantly, a human being who was occasionally fallible. Isaacson has shown that he did not have to produce a hagiography to paint Leonardo’s portrait. Leonardo is no less of a giant in our minds because we now have seen that he occasionally fell short.