My highlights from the book:
1. They ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing.
2. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created, a wondrous guide to the most relentlessly curious man in history.
3. He realized that nature itself, independent of how our eyes perceive it, does not have precise lines.
4. When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper he would come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding, and then remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting continually. On other days, however, nothing would be painted. He would remain in front of it for one or two hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created.
5. Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
6. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen.
7. Vision without execution is hallucination.
8. 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, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.
9. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things Leonardo envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality.
10. “As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep,” Leonardo wrote, “so a well-employed life brings a happy death.”
11. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.
12. His science was not a separate endeavor from his art. 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. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small.
13. 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.
14. That followed Leonardo's injunction to begin any investigation by going to the source: "He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar."
15. He got bored and distracted too easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative.
16. Leonardo was mainly self-taught. 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. This freethinking attitude saved him from being an acolyte of traditional thinking.
17. I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk! They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors, but by those of others. They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe-but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. On the contrary, in his life and in his notebooks, there is much evidence that he was not ashamed of his sexual desires. Instead he seemed amused by them. In a section of his notebooks called "On the Penis," he described quite humorously how the penis had a mind of its own and acted at times without the will of the man: "The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own without the permission of its owner." He found it curious that the penis was often a source of shame and that men were shy about discussing it. "Man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it," he added, “always covering and concealing something that deserves to be adorned and displayed with ceremony."
21. There was another reason, one even more fundamental, that Leonardo did not complete the painting: he preferred the conception to the execution. As his father and others knew when they drew strict contract for his commission, Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.
22. As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Ma donnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.
23. Leonardo's notebooks are nothing less than an astonishing windfall that provides the documentary record of applied creativity.
24. What made Vitruvius's work appealing to Leonardo and Francesco was that it gave concrete expression to an analogy that went back to Plato and the ancients, one that had become a defining metaphor of Renaissance humanism: the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth.
25. In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”
26. When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event.
27. Rather than try to conform he made a point of being different.
28. Leonardo's life is very irregular and uncertain, and he seems to live for the day only.
29. We should pause to imagine the dandy-dressing Leonardo, now in his mid-fifties and at the height of his fame as a painter, spending his night hours at an old hospital in his neighborhood talking to patients and dissecting bodies. It is another example of his relentless curiosity that would astonish us if we had not become so used to it.
30. The ancients called man a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because his body is an analog for the world. As man has in him bones that support his flesh, the world has its rocks that support the earth. As man has a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls every six hours, as if the world breathed. As the blood veins originate in that pool and spread all over the human body, so likewise the ocean sea fills the body of the earth with infinite springs of water.
31. The best way to approach his life is the way he approached the world: filled with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders.
11. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.
12. His science was not a separate endeavor from his art. 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. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small.
13. 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.
14. That followed Leonardo's injunction to begin any investigation by going to the source: "He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar."
15. He got bored and distracted too easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative.
16. Leonardo was mainly self-taught. 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. This freethinking attitude saved him from being an acolyte of traditional thinking.
17. I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk! They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors, but by those of others. They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe-but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. On the contrary, in his life and in his notebooks, there is much evidence that he was not ashamed of his sexual desires. Instead he seemed amused by them. In a section of his notebooks called "On the Penis," he described quite humorously how the penis had a mind of its own and acted at times without the will of the man: "The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own without the permission of its owner." He found it curious that the penis was often a source of shame and that men were shy about discussing it. "Man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it," he added, “always covering and concealing something that deserves to be adorned and displayed with ceremony."
21. There was another reason, one even more fundamental, that Leonardo did not complete the painting: he preferred the conception to the execution. As his father and others knew when they drew strict contract for his commission, Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.
22. As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Ma donnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.
23. Leonardo's notebooks are nothing less than an astonishing windfall that provides the documentary record of applied creativity.
24. What made Vitruvius's work appealing to Leonardo and Francesco was that it gave concrete expression to an analogy that went back to Plato and the ancients, one that had become a defining metaphor of Renaissance humanism: the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth.
25. In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”
26. When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event.
27. Rather than try to conform he made a point of being different.
28. Leonardo's life is very irregular and uncertain, and he seems to live for the day only.
29. We should pause to imagine the dandy-dressing Leonardo, now in his mid-fifties and at the height of his fame as a painter, spending his night hours at an old hospital in his neighborhood talking to patients and dissecting bodies. It is another example of his relentless curiosity that would astonish us if we had not become so used to it.
30. The ancients called man a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because his body is an analog for the world. As man has in him bones that support his flesh, the world has its rocks that support the earth. As man has a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls every six hours, as if the world breathed. As the blood veins originate in that pool and spread all over the human body, so likewise the ocean sea fills the body of the earth with infinite springs of water.
31. The best way to approach his life is the way he approached the world: filled with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders.
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