August 6, 2019

Leonardo Da Vinci - Walter Isaacson

Leonardo Da Vinci was the son of a notary, meaning that he typically would have been obligated to follow his father into that family business. He was the bastard son of a notary though. This freed him up from any of those types of obligations and actually was a major advantage for him. Rather than having to get a formal education, he was able to indulge his curiosity on his own.
One of the first keys to Leonardo’s brilliance was the simple, but extraordinary, capacity to observe. Isaacson repeatedly references one of his favorite examples of this - in one of his to-do lists in his notebook, Da Vinci writes that he must “observe the tongue of a hummingbird.” Not only did he some random interest in knowing how a hummingbirds tongue worked, but he also prioritized it to the point that it was listed in one of his famous to-do lists! Isaacson also makes the claim that he was particularly good at combining observation with imagination. Many of his portraits were evidence of this. He could be incredibly detailed in his actual portrait of his subject but then he would use the far-ground to depict nature - likely not exactly what was actually behind the person but always naturalistically accurate to the region.
I think it is easy to miss how revolutionary past artists and thinkers were in their time when we are looking at our vantage point hundreds of years later. When I was able to shed this modern-day perspective, the excitement about Da Vinci’s art made so much more sense. First, Da Vinci was obsessed with motion. Most portraits of the day were straight on and meant to depict the subject sitting still for the artist. Da Vinci was bored by this and instead injected motion into his portrait. One of the most famous examples of this is the portrait of a young Milanese girl (can’t remember the name right now) whose torso is facing to the left and whose face is turned toward the artists as if she has just heard her name called. By doing this, Da Vinci is injecting an element of emotion into his subject. Is she happy to see this new person? Is she upset? All questions that were not in the portrait compared to previous portraits that were simply an attempt to depict the subject visually.
That is not to say that Da Vinci was not a master of the visual artistry though. He introduced plenty of artistic strategies that pushed the genre forward. Most of these artistic gains were allowed by his relentless curiosity. He might be curious about how to torso looked when the head is looking to the right, this would then lead him to his laboratory to disect a cadaver to understand what the muscles were doing this. This might lead him to another discovery that added to a painting, and the cycle would go on.
He was also a master of light and shadows - this is what gives his work their trademark foreground focus and background blur. One of his tell tale trademarks is an effect called stuffato (or something like that). He essentially made his paintings like a camera lens. The things in the front were in greater focus than the things in the background. But even the things in the front have almost blended boundaries. He didn’t think that different entities had actual clear boundaries. Like if you zoomed in and in and in, you can never really point to where one thing ends and another starts. Once again, this is based on his interest in universality - how everything is connected. The more and more that I read, it’s encouraging to see that so many different schools of thought return to some concept of interconnectedness. Spiritual thinkers, Da Vinci, Buddhist thinkers, even the
Da Vinci was also really into spirals. Can’t really remember why. But it’s a returning theme…I think there was a degree of them being visually stimulating, but they also return to the theme of universal cycles?
Like many of the most significant thinkers of all time, DaVinci was constantly thinking about how principles from one place would be applied to another place. He was always making analogies. Like how the veins in a persons body were similar to a tree branch with main branches and then smaller ones that then branch off of those

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