Friday, November 24, 2017

Leonardo Da Vinci - Walter Isaacson (Book Review)

Walter shows how Lenardo's genius was base on the skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity , careful observation and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

His  creativity like that of other great communications, cam  from standing at the intersection of the humanities and technology.

He peeled flesh off the faces of the corpses , draw the muscles that move the lips and then painted history's most memorable smile on Monalisa.

He explored the math of optics , showed how light rays strike at the front of the eye and produced illusions of changing perspectives in "The Last Supper."

Author also describes who Leonardo's  lifelong enthusiasm  from staging theatrical productions informed his painting and inventions.

He pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines,optics ,botany geology, water flows and weaponry with a  passion that was both playful and obsessive. Thus he became archetype of the Renaissance man , an inspiration to all won believe that effort works of nature are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous pattern.


His ability to combine art and science , made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportional and spread eagle inside a circle and square known as  Vitruvian Man . This made him history's most creative genius..

His scientific exploration informed his art.


He studied lights and optics . He used it to waste the uses of shading and perspective to model objects on a 2 dimensional surface  so that they look like 3D. The first intention of the painter is to make flat surface display a body if modeled an separate from this plane.Dimensionality became the supreme innovation of Renaissance art due to his work.


What made Leonardo a genius , what set him apart for people who were  extraordinarily smart , was creativity , the ability to apply imagination to intellect.

His facility for combing  observation with fantasy allowed him to make unexpected leaps that related things seen  to thing unseen like other creative geniuses.

The German Philosopher said
"Talent hits a target that no one else can hit . Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Steve Jobs Said
"While some may see them a s the crazy one, we see genus . Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are then whose do. "



What also distinguished  Leonardo' s genius was its universal nature. The world has produced other thinkers who were more profound o folic and many whom more practical  but none was  as c creative in so many fields. Some people were geniuses in 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 natures's patterns and crosscurrent.

His curiosity impelled him to  become  among the handful people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known.

Leonardo painted the Monalisa, produced unsurpassed anatomy drawing baed on multiple dissections  coming up with schemes to diver rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon , opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to shown how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants , using fissile to dispute the biblical account the of the deluge an then drawing th deluge.

Leonardo was a genius but more : he was the epitome of the  universal mind who sought to understand all of  creation, including  who  we fit into it.


Reference :
Leonardo Da Vinci
(Walter Isaacson)

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