Chairman’s Letter
Imagine you’re walking through the rolling hills of Tuscany, an area blanketed with lush green slopes and groves of olive trees whose leaves rustle as the breeze from the valley rises and the day’s heat builds.
As the sound of the chimney swifts from the lower village chatter overhead, you come up on a handsome young boy who is completely engaged in studying the clouds above. Greetings pass between us, as you look up to find what is holding his intense gaze, you ask, “What’s up there?” “Exactly, what is up there,” he paused in thought then continued, “Haven’t you ever wondered why the sky is blue in the day but black at night or how do clouds form, or what makes the wind?” You stand there with a blank look on your face as he stands up and points toward a nearby brook, “And there, in the water, what makes those repeating patterns on the water’s surface as it goes along?” He then points toward an old town wall and towers on a distant hill and said, “and recently I noticed that when you are looking at those round towers over there, if you close one eye, the towers seem to lose their roundness, why is that? Haven’t you ever wondered about those things?”
Well, stunned by the rush of questions thrown your way you do the only sensible thing and sit down, while at the same time thinking it must be tiring for this young boy to have a mind that is so voraciously inquisitive. Then it dawns on you that this local village boy will grow to become one of the most respected and revered thinkers of all times, a man whose search for answers lifted him above all others during the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci. If time travel was a reality, then this is the man I would wish to spend time with.
Today, 500 years after Leonardo’s passing in 1519, it seems our fascination has only grown as we marvel at the contents of his priceless notebooks. How did this man, born out of wedlock and thus entitled to only a fundamental education of writing and mathematics, become the great intellect that our term “Renaissance Man” was fashioned upon? Leonardo had a voracious desire to fully understand the how and why of everything that surrounded him. When Leonardo found that the common answers, as found in classical texts, did not satisfactorily answer his questions, he chose to search for new answers.
Leonardo himself describes his education as self-acquired, driven by a constant curiosity and his acute powers of observation.
It has been suggested by present-day psychologists that when you consider contemporary descriptions of Leonardo’s work habits, his failure to complete many of his projects and his attraction to innumerable disciplines, it is easy to believe that he may have suffered from Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). Having a restless mind full of ideas and questions, which makes it difficult to settle upon one project at a time, is a problem that I and many of my artist friends must deal with daily. And, it often shows up in people considered to be highly creative. It is hard to imagine that Da Vinci considered the Mona Lisa an unfinished work and because of that he carried it with him until his death in his 68th year.
I am in no way suggesting that Leonardo and I stand on the same level—oh if that could only be true—but this does bring up an important realization, no matter whom we are or whom we will become, everyone has shortcomings and problems that vex us perhaps on a daily basis. Ignoring them doesn’t work very well, and using them as an excuse as to why we can’t succeed will in the end only make us bitter with ourselves.
Leonardo could not change who he was nor the way his mind worked, instead, he decided to do what we might call a “workaround.” He made lists of things he wanted to do, as they occurred to him, which helped him to organize his thoughts. When observing something, whether action or object, he would first see the whole and then look more closely to see all the parts, the finer details, after which he would move back out to observe the wholeness of it all.
Da Vinci’s notes indicate how this intense study could yield discoveries, such as when he wrote, “The dragonfly flies with four wings and when those in front are raised those behind are lowered,” indicating a motion that cannot be easily followed by a causal look. In his notes on how birds fly, Leonardo wrote, “A bird makes the same use of his wings and tail in the air as a swimmer does of his arms and legs in water.” But should you think this was all that he wrote of the subject, I have a book of Leonardo’s written notes and the section on “Flight” fills 90 pages with an average of 430 words per page—that’s a total of 38,700 words!
Leonardo began compiling his notes at the age of 26, which he would then bring together to be bound as codices, which simply means ancient manuscripts bound into a book. He continued this practice until his death just three weeks after turning 67 years old.
There are today 50 known such notebooks in collections spread around the world but the only one in private hands was purchased 25 years ago by Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The Codex Leicester was purchased at auction for $30.8 million dollars and now travels to various museums around the country.
A remarkable life for a lowly born bastard son, with little formal education but given the freedom to roam the hills and indulge a restless but brilliant mind.