Da Vinci: history’s greatest genius
BIOGRAPHY Walter Isaacson dives deep into enigmatic Renaissance man’s life
Monumental is barely adequate to describe journalist Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s greatest Renaissance Man, the 15th-century painter and all-round polymath Leonardo da Vinci.
But then Isaacson, himself, is no slouch in the polymath department. Currently president of the Aspen Institute think tank, onetime chair of CNN and former editor of Time magazine, he is also the author of critically acclaimed biographies of such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs. Indeed, it was Jobs who planted the seed for the da Vinci book, because the great Florentine artist was the Apple founder’s hero and role model.
In a recent interview in Forbes, Isaacson explains why: “The theme of all my books is that true creativity and innovation comes from being able to stand at the intersection of art and science. Jobs knew that engineering should be beautiful. Leonardo da Vinci is history’s ultimate example of combining art and science. That’s what made him history’s greatest genius.”
After finishing Isaacson’s, yes, monumental panegyric on Leonardo, I, for one, do not beg to disagree. Throughout his book, Isaacson cites insights, innovations and inventions of da Vinci’s that were often decades, centuries and sometime half-a-millennia ahead of their time.
His ideas about perpetual motion were a precursor to what Newton concluded two centuries later in his First Law of Motion. And then there’s da Vinci’s remarkable insight into how the heart’s aortic valve works. It took anatomists until the 1960s, 450 years later, to realize he was correct.
“Of all the amazements that Leonardo left for the ages, this one would seem to be the most extraordinary,” observed surgeon Sherwin Nuland.
One wonders if Isaacson would agree with Nuland’s assessment. Early on, he cites da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa” as “the two most famous paintings in history.” But that perhaps isolates one of the interesting peculiarities about Leonardo: being a painter was, well, his day job, the craft which made him world famous in his own time. But it was a skill for which he often displayed a deep ambivalence, or as one his contemporaries noted, “He devotes much of his time to geometry and has no time for the paintbrush.”
Throughout his career, da Vinci was infamous for leaving masterpieces incomplete (“The Adoration of the Magi” and “St. Jerome in the Wilderness”) or abandoned (“The Battle of Anghiari”). And some lay the blame at his intense extracurricular interests in science, engineering, architecture and pageantry. As art historian Kenneth Clark once noted, the book says, “It was a variety of employment which Leonardo enjoyed, but which left posterity the poorer.” Isaacson disagrees: “But if posterity is poorer … it is also true his life was richer.”
Leonardo perhaps had no choice: his insatiable curiosity was a compulsion. His intellectual/creative ambitions far exceeded those of artistic contemporaries such as Michelangelo, Raphael or Benvenuto Cellini. As Isaacson writes, “Leonardo set himself the most magnificent of all tasks: nothing less than knowing the full measure of man and how he fits into the cosmos.”
Considering his humble origins, da Vinci seems at first blush an unlikely candidate to fulfil such vaulting ambition.
Leonardo was born illegitimate, gay, left-handed — and was “unlettered,” by his own admission. But the gifts nature bestowed on him pretty much evened the score. Aside from his prodigious artistic talent that surfaced early, he was by all accounts breathtakingly handsome with an amiable disposition, or as his first biographer Vasari noted, Isaacson points out, “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace.”
Among the strengths of Isaacson’s exhaustive examination of da Vinci’s extraordinary life is the balance he strikes between chronicling the public genius and the private man.
At times, these two dimensions intersect — and nowhere more dramatically than in his conflicted relationship with the other great artistic genius of the era, Michelangelo, who was 22 years Leonardo’s junior and insanely jealous of him. Isaacson also quotes Serge Bramly, another Leonardo biographer, who said, “How could he fail to envy and detest the easy charm, the elegance, refinement, amiable sweetness of manner, dilettantism and, above all, the skepticism of Leonardo, a man of another generation, said to be without religious faith, around whom constantly a crowd of beautiful pupils.”
Well put, and for all those reasons and more — his enormous intellect for starters — Leonardo led an astonishingly interesting eventful life. And Isaacson brilliantly captures its essence.