Highlights
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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, an inspiration to all who believe that the “infinite works of nature,” as he put it, are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous patterns.
Location 140
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I embarked on this book because Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate example of the main theme of my previous biographies: how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.
Location 161
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He often seemed defensive about being an “unlettered man,” as he dubbed himself with some irony. 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,”16 he once signed himself. This freethinking attitude saved him from being an acolyte of traditional thinking.
Location 382
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His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. 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.
Location 392
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And Florence, with its booming merchant class of status-seeking patrons, had become the cradle of Renaissance art and humanism.
Location 406
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Inside the design, Verrocchio and his workshop carved carefully proportioned rectangles and half-circles in colors that were based on harmonic ratios and the Pythagorean musical scale.24 There was harmony in proportions, Leonardo learned, and math was nature’s brushstroke.
Location 703
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The construction of the ball, which was made of stone that was clad with eight sheets of copper and then gilded, also kindled in Leonardo a fascination with optics and the geometry of light rays. There were no welding torches at the time, so the triangular sheets of copper had to be soldered together using concave mirrors, about three feet wide, that would concentrate sunlight into a point of intense heat.
Location 711
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The more than 7,200 pages now extant probably represent about one-quarter of what Leonardo actually wrote,4 but that is a higher percentage after five hundred years than the percentage of Steve Jobs’s emails and digital documents from the 1990s that he and I were able to retrieve.
Location 1719
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Gypsies from the Balkans had spread throughout Europe in the fifteenth century and become such a nuisance in Milan that they were banished by a decree in 1493.
Location 1985
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Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together their diverse passions.
Location 2460
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While Europe was mired in its dark years of medieval superstition, the work of combining theory and experiment was advanced primarily in the Islamic world. Muslim scientists often also worked as scientific instrument makers, which made them experts at measurements and applying theories.
Location 2684
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Such obsession is a component of genius.
Location 3317
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Fig. 66. Study for Virgin of the Rocks.
Location 3493
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An object will display the greatest difference of light and shade when it is seen in the strongest light. . . . But this should not be much used in painting, because the works would be crude and ungraceful. An object seen in a moderate light displays little difference in its light and shade, and this is the case towards evening or when the day is cloudy; works painted then are tender, and every kind of face becomes graceful. Thus, in everything extremes are to be avoided: Too much light gives crudeness; too little prevents our seeing.3
Location 3541