Isaacson shows his own genius in ‘da Vinci’
Movieworthy treasure manages to offer new insight on a very old subject
Calling all living geniuses. Your mission is to find a way
to keep author Wal
ter Isaacson alive for the next 100 years so that he can keep writing about dead geniuses.
There’s just something about the way that the onetime Time magazine editor-turned-Aspen Institute leader manages to bring historical giants into vivid, 3D life that makes it worth extending the man’s lifespan by a century.
Isaacson has tackled Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, and now he’s cast his considerable storytelling skills on an Italian Renaissance giant with Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, 624 pp., eeeg out of four). And don’t laugh, but the movie rights have already been bought by Leonardo DiCaprio, whose namesake he’ll honor by taking the leading role.
Isaacson’s biographical choice is a shrewd one. Leonardo might have been born in the 15th century, but he’s never far from pop culture. Beyond the ubiquitous references to paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, a da Vinci painting of Christ is on the auction block for more than $100 million. Fabled techies-turned-collectors such as Bill Gates own his prize codexes.
While scholars have been writing about Leonardo for the better part of 500 years, Isaacson’s bravura lies — like a sculptor freeing a figure from a block of marble — in taking countless volumes of academic tomes and molding them into a 21st-century page-turner.
So here are some of the things we learn about Leonardo the man, as opposed to Leonardo the cliché. He was gay, enjoying the company of two younger men who eventually split his estate. He was left-handed and wrote backwards, less for effect and more simply because it seemed easier. He was an inquisitive jack of all trades — painter, set designer, engineer — because that’s what helped pay the bills.
But most of all, he was an observer. Of everything.
The way a bird gained loft or the way wind flowed over its wings led to his own sketches showing how man could one day fly. His passion for the human form and how muscles rippled and tensed as the body moved created a groundbreaking portrait artist. His obsession with apocalyptic images brought about blueprints for military designs that were centuries before their time.
Aside from the prodigious content Isaacson has assembled, a shout-out is due to whomever had the simple if brilliant idea to position a good deal of the book’s images alongside relevant passages. If Isaacson’s telling you about Leonardo’s skull drawings, well, there they are.
Here’s the bottom line on da Vinci. It’s as long as the man’s beard. But this is a journey worth taking for three reasons: Leonardo was a genius; Isaacson explains the simple roots of that genius; and you’ll maybe stop every now and then to look up from your phone and at the sky and have a curious thought about the world.
So, Isaacson, get writing. I nominate Leonardo rival Michelangelo, while you’re in the Italian neighborhood. As for you current geniuses, get cracking. You’ve got another few decades to get Walter to 200.