![]() Here’s a classic example: After Leonardo won a coveted commission to create a large statue of a nobleman perched on a horse, Leonardo procrastinated by going down multiple rabbit roles. There was one downside to having such broad interests: He often switched his focus to new domains right in the middle of a project, leaving works unfinished. After listing interests from military engineering to science to designing sets for plays, he included almost as an afterthought, “I can also paint.” When he was about 30 years old, he applied for a job with the ruler of Milan. “Tracing which of those nerves are cranial and which are spinal may not have been necessary for painting a smile, but Leonardo needed to know.”ĭespite his remarkable artistic talent, Leonardo barely thought of himself as a painter. “He became fascinated about how a smile begins to form and instructed himself to analyze every possible movement of each part of the face and determine the origin of every nerve that controls each facial muscle,” he writes. But Walter shows how Leonardo’s genius is in the details. Unless you’re an art historian, you might even wonder if paintings like the Mona Lisa are famous just for being famous. Isaacson also does a great job of explaining why Leonardo’s work is so revered. He became, in his own words, “a disciple of experience.” Leonardo got free time to wander, look at nature, and start creating notebooks full of observations and ideas. But because Leonardo was born out of wedlock (his mother was a poor, orphaned peasant girl), he was not sent off to school. His father was a notary, a profession that gave him some prominence and prosperity, so Leonardo never had to work in the fields. He studied, in meticulous detail, everything from the flow of water and the rise of smoke to the muscles you use when you smile.Īmazingly, he did it with almost no formal schooling. That’s partly because scientific knowledge was relatively limited back then, partly because he had a high IQ, but mostly because he was insatiably curious about pretty much every area of natural science and the human experience. He came close to understanding almost all of what was known on the planet at the time. More than any other Leonardo book I’ve read, this one helps you see him as a complete human being and understand just how special he was. If you liked Walter’s major biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, you’ll probably appreciate this one. ![]() Walter-a talented journalist and author I’ve gotten to know over the years-did a great job pulling it all together. I’ve read a lot about Leonardo over the years, but I had never found one book that satisfactorily covered all the different facets of his life and work. Given my fascination with Leonardo, I was eager to read Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson’s new biography. In fact, there are insights, such as one about how blood flows through the heart, that were so far ahead of their time that researchers finally verified them only a few decades ago. And Dan Brown fans will be disappointed to know that it doesn’t contain codes protecting age-old secrets. The Codex Leicester is not nearly as famous as artworks such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. I was supposed to change the name from Codex Hammer (the previous owner was the industrialist Armand Hammer) to Codex Gates, but I thought that sounded silly and I changed the name back to Codex Leicester, the name it held from 1719 until 1980. ![]() The notebook in question was one of the 32 surviving journals of Leonardo da Vinci.Īfter I won the bid, I broke a longstanding tradition. And by “old-fashioned,” I meant really old-fashioned, as in more than 500 years old. I explained that by “notebook,” I meant the old-fashioned kind. “Don’t you already have a great portable computer?” she asked. Ppi 500 Republisher_date 20120813113722 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120809201551 Scanner scribe6.nj.archive.Shortly after Melinda and I got married, I told her I was bidding on a notebook that could wind up costing a lot of money. Permission from the appropriate copyright holder is required to publish or reproduce. OL16791497W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 97.88 Pages 1272 Pdf_module_version 0.0.20 Possible copyright status The publication, and the images and texts within it, may be protected by copyright use of such materials beyond fair use or other exceptions provided under applicable copyright law may violate the copyright laws of the United States and/or the laws of other countries. Urn:oclc:record:1049953464 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier noteboo00leon Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6xw5mm25 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.7 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Openlibrary_edition 1871 Bookplateleaf 0007 Call number 43403 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II External-identifier Addeddate 11:34:48 Associated-names McCurdy, Edward, b.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |