desertcart.com: Leonardo da Vinci: 0001501139169: Isaacson, Walter: Books Review: An excellent biography that will also help you think more like Leonardo - I didn’t buy this book because I was fascinated by Leonardo. I bought it because several people whose opinions I value said it was a great book and because the other books I’ve read by Walter Isaacson were excellent. I’m glad I bought it and read it. Before I started reading, I thought I knew the basics. Leonardo was the painter of perhaps the two most famous paintings in history: The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. I had that right. But most of the rest of what I thought I knew turned out to be either wrong or incomplete. The man certainly was a creative genius, but a lot of the things that I’d read about him, like that bit about the “first helicopter,” turned out to be wrong. I didn’t know how much he did beyond painting and how deep he went on so many topics. Leonardo was certainly the prototype of the Renaissance Man, and looking back, we can see that he was born at the right time for someone with broad interests and many talents. Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. That gave him a long, productive life of 67 years. He was a bastard, which wasn’t a problem in Florence when he was born and may even have given him some advantages. He didn’t get a lot of formal schooling, which meant that he started to learn on his own and developed methods that worked for him. He started out in Florence, where he was apprenticed to an excellent master, and learned the craft of painting. But early in his life, he moved to Milan. That turned out to be a good thing, too. Florence was more artistic, but Milan had a much more diverse culture of people interested in the sciences. And it was in the sciences and engineering that Leonardo would do a lot of work I knew nothing about and now shake my head at, in wonder. Leonardo’s work in science included the development of thinking on perspective. I always thought perspective was a kind of geometric thing about painting. But it turns out that he developed three views of perspective. One was the standard vanishing point thing, but the others were the way color changes as distance increases, and the way that we lose detail on things the further they are away. He made contributions to anatomy by doing dissections of cadavers of both humans and animals. He certainly learned from his dissections, and he also captured what he observed in drawings and notes. He may have made even more contributions to engineering. He did a lot of military engineering, and a lot that revolves around water flows, including water systems for cities and diverting rivers. By the time I got to the end of the book, it seemed like Leonardo had done some work in almost any area of human knowledge. Not all of that work was great, or groundbreaking, but an awful lot of it was. So, the question is, how did he do it? That’s where I got my biggest takeaways from the book. Leonardo was very smart. Okay, we got that out of the way. Most of the people we call geniuses are very smart. But there are an awful lot of very smart people who aren’t geniuses. What really separates geniuses from the rest of the pack is what they do, not raw brainpower. The good news is that we have a pretty good idea of what Leonardo did. Isaacson developed his book primarily from the 7,000+ pages we have from Leonardo’s notebooks. That’s a lot, but it’s probably only about a quarter of the total he created. Here’s what Leonardo did to produce the quantity of quality insight and production that characterized his life. Leonardo captured his ideas. Early in his life, he developed a habit of walking around with a notebook that he used to jot down observations and make quick sketches. He even developed a shorthand that would help him recreate things he’d seen when he got back to his studio and wanted to draw them in detail. Leonardo was an acute observer who trained himself to be better. It helped that he was also a facile drawer. But the main driver of his close observations was curiosity. He developed his own process for observing things. It began with what Isaacson calls “marching orders.” Leonardo described what he needed to do to learn or properly observe something. Then he would go and observe. Leonardo learned by experimenting. Besides observing, Leonardo was an avid experimenter and he recorded both the experiments and what he learned from them. Leonardo got ideas and sharpened ideas through his reading. The printing press was invented the year Leonardo was born. By the time he was 40, books were increasingly common, and an autodidact like Leonardo could learn and get ideas from books. Leonardo had many friendships and collaborators over the years. This was not the lone genius retiring to his studio and producing bursts of insight. This is a man who went out into the world to observe, made careful observations, and then hone his understanding with reading, discussion, and experiment. Isaacson includes a final chapter in the book about things you can learn from Leonardo, and it’s a chapter worth reading. But there’s a statement of Isaacson’s near the beginning of the book that sums up the takeaway for me. “His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.” And, I would add, experiment and collaboration. Before you read the book straight through, read that final chapter about what you can learn from Leonardo. It will give you a frame for learning as you go. In A Nutshell This is a thorough and well-written biography of one of history’s most fascinating individuals. You’ll enjoy the read. You’ll learn a lot. With a little effort, you can improve the way you see the world and develop some discipline so that you can be more like Leonardo than you are today. Review: The Quest to Understand what Makes Some People Geniuses - Walter Isaacson is on a quest. To understand his Leonardo Da Vinci you have to understand something of why he choose to write a biography about him at all, after writing biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Thankfully, Isaacson is explicit about what interests him in these personages and so there is no need for reading between the lines. What Isaacson wants to understand is what makes some men and women people of genius. Not the silly way genius is portrayed in the movie Amadeus, in which it is simply some innate talent, but the character traits which enable rare individuals with the capacity to permanently change the world with the mere power of their mind. With that goal in mind, one is ready to appreciate Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci. The book begins discussing his early achievements in art and the investigation of nature within the first forty pages, fairly quickly for a 525 page tome. And the book is dominated by appreciations of his work, both artistic and scientific (to use a modern distinction unrecognized by Leonardo). Along the way there is a wonderful resonance between Isaacson describing the characteristics of Leonardo that led to his peculiar type of genius and then seeing that genus instantiated in a particular unpublished treatise on anatomy or in a work of art such as the Mona Lisa. If you are interested in this quest, in both seeing what led to Leonardo being a genius, and then seeing that genius expressed in his creative work, you will love Isaacson’s Da Vinci. Many biographers prefer to dwell on a lengthy account of the culture and history of the time and focus on the personal life of their subject. Others choose to try to psychoanalyze their subject and allow the reader to understand the subconscious drives which led to their accomplishments. None of that is to be found in Isaacson’s work. Though a summary doesn’t do the book justice, Isaacson sees Leonardo as unusually perceptive of the world around him, with an insatiable curiosity, a proper understanding of how to balance theory and experiment and a disdain for doctrines handed on by the past. These traits, and others, led him to understand the effect of light in creating the illusion of three dimensions in painting, which muscles are used to smile, how men and women might one day be able to fly and all the many other prescient things expressed in his art and notebooks. If there is anything to criticize, it is that Isaacson is almost universally positive, almost effusively, about Leonardo. But this is because the book focuses mostly on the factors that led to this genius and the actual fruits of his intellect. Admittedly, it is hard to be critical of those aspects of Leonardo’s life. One final point to make to potential readers: Isaacson writes in clear and simple English. Though the book is 525 pages long I read it in less than a day. If he had chosen to adopt the tone of many academics this would have been a far less pleasurable, and longer, read. Isaacson set out to determine both what made Leonardo a genius and why he is considered one. While every reader can form their own opinion as to whether he was successful, I think both the importance of the quest and its achievement in the case of Leonardo will be doubted by few readers of this book.
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| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 11,073 Reviews |
W**K
An excellent biography that will also help you think more like Leonardo
I didn’t buy this book because I was fascinated by Leonardo. I bought it because several people whose opinions I value said it was a great book and because the other books I’ve read by Walter Isaacson were excellent. I’m glad I bought it and read it. Before I started reading, I thought I knew the basics. Leonardo was the painter of perhaps the two most famous paintings in history: The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. I had that right. But most of the rest of what I thought I knew turned out to be either wrong or incomplete. The man certainly was a creative genius, but a lot of the things that I’d read about him, like that bit about the “first helicopter,” turned out to be wrong. I didn’t know how much he did beyond painting and how deep he went on so many topics. Leonardo was certainly the prototype of the Renaissance Man, and looking back, we can see that he was born at the right time for someone with broad interests and many talents. Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. That gave him a long, productive life of 67 years. He was a bastard, which wasn’t a problem in Florence when he was born and may even have given him some advantages. He didn’t get a lot of formal schooling, which meant that he started to learn on his own and developed methods that worked for him. He started out in Florence, where he was apprenticed to an excellent master, and learned the craft of painting. But early in his life, he moved to Milan. That turned out to be a good thing, too. Florence was more artistic, but Milan had a much more diverse culture of people interested in the sciences. And it was in the sciences and engineering that Leonardo would do a lot of work I knew nothing about and now shake my head at, in wonder. Leonardo’s work in science included the development of thinking on perspective. I always thought perspective was a kind of geometric thing about painting. But it turns out that he developed three views of perspective. One was the standard vanishing point thing, but the others were the way color changes as distance increases, and the way that we lose detail on things the further they are away. He made contributions to anatomy by doing dissections of cadavers of both humans and animals. He certainly learned from his dissections, and he also captured what he observed in drawings and notes. He may have made even more contributions to engineering. He did a lot of military engineering, and a lot that revolves around water flows, including water systems for cities and diverting rivers. By the time I got to the end of the book, it seemed like Leonardo had done some work in almost any area of human knowledge. Not all of that work was great, or groundbreaking, but an awful lot of it was. So, the question is, how did he do it? That’s where I got my biggest takeaways from the book. Leonardo was very smart. Okay, we got that out of the way. Most of the people we call geniuses are very smart. But there are an awful lot of very smart people who aren’t geniuses. What really separates geniuses from the rest of the pack is what they do, not raw brainpower. The good news is that we have a pretty good idea of what Leonardo did. Isaacson developed his book primarily from the 7,000+ pages we have from Leonardo’s notebooks. That’s a lot, but it’s probably only about a quarter of the total he created. Here’s what Leonardo did to produce the quantity of quality insight and production that characterized his life. Leonardo captured his ideas. Early in his life, he developed a habit of walking around with a notebook that he used to jot down observations and make quick sketches. He even developed a shorthand that would help him recreate things he’d seen when he got back to his studio and wanted to draw them in detail. Leonardo was an acute observer who trained himself to be better. It helped that he was also a facile drawer. But the main driver of his close observations was curiosity. He developed his own process for observing things. It began with what Isaacson calls “marching orders.” Leonardo described what he needed to do to learn or properly observe something. Then he would go and observe. Leonardo learned by experimenting. Besides observing, Leonardo was an avid experimenter and he recorded both the experiments and what he learned from them. Leonardo got ideas and sharpened ideas through his reading. The printing press was invented the year Leonardo was born. By the time he was 40, books were increasingly common, and an autodidact like Leonardo could learn and get ideas from books. Leonardo had many friendships and collaborators over the years. This was not the lone genius retiring to his studio and producing bursts of insight. This is a man who went out into the world to observe, made careful observations, and then hone his understanding with reading, discussion, and experiment. Isaacson includes a final chapter in the book about things you can learn from Leonardo, and it’s a chapter worth reading. But there’s a statement of Isaacson’s near the beginning of the book that sums up the takeaway for me. “His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.” And, I would add, experiment and collaboration. Before you read the book straight through, read that final chapter about what you can learn from Leonardo. It will give you a frame for learning as you go. In A Nutshell This is a thorough and well-written biography of one of history’s most fascinating individuals. You’ll enjoy the read. You’ll learn a lot. With a little effort, you can improve the way you see the world and develop some discipline so that you can be more like Leonardo than you are today.
A**S
The Quest to Understand what Makes Some People Geniuses
Walter Isaacson is on a quest. To understand his Leonardo Da Vinci you have to understand something of why he choose to write a biography about him at all, after writing biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Thankfully, Isaacson is explicit about what interests him in these personages and so there is no need for reading between the lines. What Isaacson wants to understand is what makes some men and women people of genius. Not the silly way genius is portrayed in the movie Amadeus, in which it is simply some innate talent, but the character traits which enable rare individuals with the capacity to permanently change the world with the mere power of their mind. With that goal in mind, one is ready to appreciate Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci. The book begins discussing his early achievements in art and the investigation of nature within the first forty pages, fairly quickly for a 525 page tome. And the book is dominated by appreciations of his work, both artistic and scientific (to use a modern distinction unrecognized by Leonardo). Along the way there is a wonderful resonance between Isaacson describing the characteristics of Leonardo that led to his peculiar type of genius and then seeing that genus instantiated in a particular unpublished treatise on anatomy or in a work of art such as the Mona Lisa. If you are interested in this quest, in both seeing what led to Leonardo being a genius, and then seeing that genius expressed in his creative work, you will love Isaacson’s Da Vinci. Many biographers prefer to dwell on a lengthy account of the culture and history of the time and focus on the personal life of their subject. Others choose to try to psychoanalyze their subject and allow the reader to understand the subconscious drives which led to their accomplishments. None of that is to be found in Isaacson’s work. Though a summary doesn’t do the book justice, Isaacson sees Leonardo as unusually perceptive of the world around him, with an insatiable curiosity, a proper understanding of how to balance theory and experiment and a disdain for doctrines handed on by the past. These traits, and others, led him to understand the effect of light in creating the illusion of three dimensions in painting, which muscles are used to smile, how men and women might one day be able to fly and all the many other prescient things expressed in his art and notebooks. If there is anything to criticize, it is that Isaacson is almost universally positive, almost effusively, about Leonardo. But this is because the book focuses mostly on the factors that led to this genius and the actual fruits of his intellect. Admittedly, it is hard to be critical of those aspects of Leonardo’s life. One final point to make to potential readers: Isaacson writes in clear and simple English. Though the book is 525 pages long I read it in less than a day. If he had chosen to adopt the tone of many academics this would have been a far less pleasurable, and longer, read. Isaacson set out to determine both what made Leonardo a genius and why he is considered one. While every reader can form their own opinion as to whether he was successful, I think both the importance of the quest and its achievement in the case of Leonardo will be doubted by few readers of this book.
D**D
Well researched and written
A well researched and fascinating look at what may be one of the top minds in history. Well worth reading.
A**R
A Rich detail of Da Vinci, Deepening the Mystery.
Issacson managed to journey into a feverish domain of curiosity bringing perspective to the man behind the veil. It turns out he gets bigger, when you fall back, more complex as you dial in, more brilliant, more varied, more troubled, more sensitive and extraordinary than anyone could have imagined. The story congeals in the perfectly curated quotes selected by the author , peeled from the obscure margins of Da Vinci's notebooks to highlight greater truths. For instance, a comment presenting a theory on the craft of painting, becomes a way to perceive the workd. I've devoured everything I could find on Leonardo since I was a child, and it gets more intriguing. There are people who spend their lives studying the man, and I'll wager the best of Da Vinci historians we're knocked sideways by his scope when Issacson offered this take. Vasari's accounts somehow still need to be used as a disclaimer for poor academic practice, but further examination comfirms that his hyperbole may be understated. Issacson just made it clear that he's as deep as the deepest ocean, and as lovely too. Issacson is such a gifted biographer and storyteller, yet this brings him into new territory as an author. It's by a long mile his finest writing, and such a fitting portrait for Leonardo in the 21st century. To do this subject justice, and inspire us with Da Vinci's story was a Herculean effort. He managed to do it! It's not as if there's was a new trove of material unearthed to cast more light on the world's most beloved genius. Issacson found a way. He clearly worked his ass off. He tells this story with tenderness and deft clarity. The writing is elegant and suspenseful. He draws you in with a brief quaint scene in Italy. A young precocious Leonardo enjoying the company of his lazy uncle in their modest country home; WHAM... he's growing up, absorbing everything around him, faster and faster, he's muddling but growing, and ravenous for knowledge, accelerating in skills and synthesizing them into new one's, seeing into worlds beyond his time, and further still, into our present, and again beyond in insights. You think there's relief but Da Vinci is still going, his ideas still skating and sketching the fabric of the unknown. Leonardo has a spark that never went out. Hundrerds of years later he is inspiring innovations in art and science and all the while breaking down the illusion that they are separate. Thank you Walter Issacson for breathing life into the man. Thank you Leonardo Da Vinci for still filling me with such wonder.
J**R
A brilliant portrayal of the process (and not the product); an inspiring invitation to invest in curiosity and observation
While decidedly an affectionate biography, Isaacson is able to piece together the thought process of a genius. As he states at the outset, the previous subjects of his biographies have all one common element - the multidisciplinary approach of their thinking. Perhaps what comes through in this epic biography, is the profound power of observation. Whether it is in the description of 67 different words to describe flow of water, or the to-do lists of da Vinci. the various attempts to "square a triangle or circle", Isaacson is able to (poetically) describe the power of observation, meticulous planning, and a genuine sense of curiosity. Of course, Mona Lisa and the Last Supper gets its own well-deserved chapters, but the descriptions on how Leonardo explore the human anatomy and distilled principles from Physics for his paintings is fascinating, entertaining and inspiring. Using an example from Freud, Isaacson humbly channels the difficulty of trying to psychoanalyze a genius who lived generations ago; but the reliance of the sketches and work-in-progress, citations, and a powerful narration able to 'connect-the-dots' makes for a sensitive portrayal. The reliance on the sketches as the primary references to build the narrative of Leonardo's thought process is not only unique but also challenges a reader to think beyond finished product and enjoy and respect the process. The final chapter on potential lessons for a reader - sort of life lessons from Leonardo - is in itself well worth the book. The book (physical) is a joy to hold; one wishes that the publisher had created a pull out of the wonderful timeline that the book starts off with.. some of the photos could have made into landscape for readers to better appreciate the detail; a reader is likely to significantly benefit from investing in Leonardo da Vinci: Complete Paintings and Drawings . One will be able to better appreciate the process and the product with these two wonderful books in hand.
S**E
A REMARKABLE BIOGRAPHER CHRONICLES A GENIUS
Walter Isaacson, a scholar and well-regarded biographer, has written a definitive study of the world’s most iconic figure, “Leonardo da Vinci.” It has been widely hailed as “a study in creativity,” “vigorous, insightful,” “a masterpiece,” and “luminous.” Great complements but, of course, they’re about the writer and his product, not Leonardo. I believe that Isaacson has tackled a huge topic and assert he has nailed it, considering the information, scant and effusive, available to him. Leonardo did not leave behind much about his personal life although he wasn’t a mysterious man. His life was fairly open, he was gregarious and generated many friends, and he wasn’t secretive about personal details of his romantic inclinations. But the notebooks, maps, paintings, drawings, and never-ending doodles, and everything else that remains, present a maddening array of stuff to delve through to quantify and catalog his being. I doubt that any other human has been so expansive with the products of his mind. He was quite simply a fountain of knowledge, ideas, thoughts, and interests. He was only intent on having his work involving machines, weapons, city designs, anatomy, geometric patterns, eddies, swirls, curls, scientific notions, botany, painting and art, music, and other esoteric musings be noted and, where possible, produced. The fact is, however, that because his mind was divided into so many deep and heavily absorbing sectors, much was delineated but very little was actually produced. Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary painter, made this early tribute to Leonardo. ”Occasionally…a single person is marvelously … endowed with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind… Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci…who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.” And so we are left with a tremendous amount of material from the mind of a genius but few physical manifestations of an end product. Even his paintings, magnificent and highly valued, are very few in number. He seldom finished anything he started. So it is not surprising that personal revelations stay mostly uncovered because they were simply not important enough for him to consider bringing them to light. Isaacson does his best to give us some personal insight and what he does reveal is interesting. But the real story of the remarkable man is the depth of his mind and talent, elements caught in extraordinary intricacy by the author. Read everything you can find from Isaacson. His biographies of important people are illuminating. You won’t become a Leonardo with the insight you gain, but you probably will be a more intelligent person. Schuyler Wallace Author of TIN LIZARD TALES
A**E
More of an art critique than a biography
Isaacson does not consider Leonardo as a genius in the same sense as Isaac Newton and Einstein who had brains beyond the realm of we mere mortals, rather he looks at Leonardo as more human, though a man of intense curiosity -- about everything -- who could assimilate imagination and technology, in essence one of the first renaissance men. Isaacson has focused on Leonardo's notebooks and he has traveled to all the archives where the originals are maintained – a definitive work on the life of Leonardo da Vinci. This book is written as though one is talking a leisurely stroll with an art expert who is pointing out all the subtle details in each work. Early on Leonardo was an apprentice to Verrocchio. They worked together [collaborated] on “Tobia and the Angel” and on the “Baptism of Christ”. What is so astounding is that the use of modern X-ray analysis enables one to discern which part of the work was done by Leonardo and which part was done by Verrocchio. By the time of the “Baptism of Christ,” Leonardo was clearly surpassing his master. Via this book, I feel as though I am taking a leisurely stroll through the works of the masters and obtaining a priceless art education. However I realize, that in order to best appreciate this book, one must have an adequate exposure to art, art history, history in general, the Bible, the classics, the Greeks, etc. One cannot just pick up this book and fully appreciate Leonardo without a fair understanding of what came before. Wonderful. A great book for leisurely reading in a quiet reflective mood, one cannot race through it.
J**E
Helpful Info on Isaacson's "Leonardo"
STRENGTHS: ~Physically, this is a beautiful book. The high quality paper make the book impressively heavy, but the printed images do great justice to Leonardo's art--as just as you can get in a book. ~Biographically, this book is well-researched and well-written. This is the goal of the book, to give you, the reader, an insight into Leonardo's life and genius. WEAKNESSES: ~For as big as a book as this is, I thought there would be more about the politics of the Italian city-states. The Medici, Sforza and Borgia are all included in this story, but they're peripheral rather than contextual. The historical background of 15C Europe I felt could have been enhanced. But maybe that's been done enough and Isaacson simply wanted to give his treatment of Leonardo a different focus. WEAKNESS AND/OR STRENGTH?! ~Lots of art history! Why is this book so gosh darned long? Well, every work of art that Leonardo made is given a comprehensive evaluation. Quite simply, you may love that, or hate it. Personally, I enjoyed it. But, it's a bit like being in the Louvre: when you have all this incredible art, how can you possibly appreciate it all? However, this quality can make the book a good research tool if you just want to read about one of Leonardo's works. THE AUDIOBOOK: ~A PDF of all the images in the physical book are likewise included with the Audible book. So, don't worry those of you who prefer to listen to the book! I both listened and read, and it was fun for me to listen to the book, as the narrator read Isaacson's descriptions of Leonardo's works, while I could look and study each in real-time with the book. That was quite an enjoyable experience!
