Becoming a ‘disciple of experience’
any other Leonardo book MORE THAN
I’ve read, this one helps you see him as a complete human being and understand just how special he was. He came close to understanding almost all of what was known on the planet at the time. 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 studied, in meticulous detail, everything from the flow of water and the rise of smoke to the muscles you use when you smile.
Walter Isaacson has written great biographies of many great men. The subjects of his previous books – Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs, among others – were all outof-the-box thinkers, with a special ability to make connections across disciplines and points where others saw no relevance and to convert observation into acts of unparalleled imagination.
When you look across all of Leonardo’s many abilities and his few failings, the attribute that stands out above all else was his sense of wonder and curiosity. When he wanted to understand something—whether it was the flow of blood through the heart or the shape of a woodpecker’s tongue—he would observe it closely, scribble down his thoughts, and then try to figure it all out.
Amazingly, he did this with almost no formal schooling. His father was a notary, a profession that gave him some prominence and prosperity, so Leonardo never had to work in the fields. But because Leonardo was born out of wedlock (his mother was a poor, orphaned peasant girl), he was not sent off to school. That turned out to be a blessing. Leonardo had free time to wander, observe nature, and start creating notebooks full of observations and ideas. He became, in his own words, “a disciple of experience.”
Flamboyant, illegitimate and selftaught, he was unreliable and an unashamed self-publicist. He was also one of the most gifted and inventive men in history.
While some historians have bemoaned the time Leonardo spent on pursuits other than painting and sculpting (leaving many of his works unfinished) as something that ‘left the world poorer,’ Isaacson argues that they nevertheless enriched Da Vinci’s own life and made countless, almost imperceptible contributions to his art.