Reviews of Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
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Walter Isaacson's 'Leonardo da Vinci' Is the Portrait of a Real Renaissance Man
Because Walter Isaacson has made a cottage industry of writing most Renaissance men, it's no surprise, actually, that he's finally landed on a subject from the actual Renaissance. Similar the other idols in Isaacson's gallery of polymaths and visionaries — Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs — Leonardo da Vinci was built-in with extra bundles of receptors, attuned to frequencies his peers could not hear and capable of making connections no ane else could see, especially between the sciences and the humanities.
There is a pregnant difference, though, between "Leonardo da Vinci" and Isaacson'southward previous biographies. His other geniuses left behind bountiful source material virtually the lives they led. Leonardo did not. There are, famously, 7,200 pages of his glorious notebooks to piece of work from, and yeah, they are rich in maps, doodles, anatomical drawings, schema for new machines, models for new weapons, proposals for urban center redesigns, geometric patterns, portraits, eddies, swirls, curls, pensées, scientific observations of uncanny prescience. (Amidst the near staggering: He intuited the first and third laws of motion, 200 years ahead of Newton.)
But what Leonardo's notebooks lack — which Isaacson readily concedes — are "intimate personal revelations." Some biographers are perfectly comfortable composing a full-body portrait based solely on a few faint footprints. (Consider the legions who take tackled Shakespeare.) Isaacson does not seem to be that kind of writer. Absent the documentary material he'southward accepted to, he overcompensates with copious analyses of Leonardo'southward works.
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I'm not sure the function of art critic suits him. Isaacson's enthusiasm is admirable, just he hails many of Leonardo's creations in the aforementioned breathless tone with which a teenager might greet a new Apple production. The words "brilliant," "wondrous" and "ingenious" come up a lot. Information technology is not atypical to observe a sentence like this one, describing Leonardo's notebooks: "They allow usa to marvel at the beauty of a universal mind as it wanders exuberantly in free-range fashion over the arts and sciences and, by doing so, senses the connections in our cosmos."
As an art historian, Isaacson falls casualty to the excesses of the profession, adopting the oracular tone of a museum docent — "the landscape of her soul and of nature'due south soul are intertwined," he writes of the Mona Lisa — and spending pages on questions of involvement to a select few, similar whether the original cartoon of "Virgin and Child With Saint Anne" did or did not include the lamb.
In these places, he's not just missing the forest for the copse. He'southward seeing only bark.
Isaacson is stronger when he'due south on familiar turf, showing u.s. Leonardo the scientist and innovator, the engineer and underground doctor . Between 1508 and 1513, Leonardo skinned at least 20 cadavers, some equally they were decomposing in his hands, in order to study and draw muscle groups, organs, skeins of veins. His analysis of the human torso was and then thorough that he determined how the aortic valve worked 450 years earlier the medical establishment did. ("Of all the amazements that Leonardo left for the ages," the surgeon Sherwin Nuland said, "this one would seem to be the almost extraordinary.")
I should mention here that Isaacson'due south book includes dozens of colour illustrations, all ravishing.
Isaacson is at his finest when he analyzes what made Leonardo human. He was an inveterate borderline misser, more beguiled by starting projects than finishing them. He abased a 23-foot equestrian statue intended for a prince; he gave upwards on paintings and murals intended for wealthy patrons; he sketched "flying machines that never flew, tanks that never rolled, a river that was never diverted."
Epitome
One of his near underrated achievements may have been his eloquent defense of procrastination. "Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they piece of work to the lowest degree," he told 1 of his employers, "for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form."
Leonardo was an implacable perfectionist. ("He saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles," wrote an early on biographer.) He worked on the Mona Lisa for 16 years, and information technology was in his bedroom when he died.
Like many artists, Leonardo'southward weaknesses were inseparable from his strengths. If he hadn't been an easily distracted perfectionist, he would have left backside a larger official oeuvre but a less impressive 1. Instead, he abandoned what he could not work out, which allowed him to "become down in history as an obsessed genius rather than merely a reliable master painter," Isaacson writes.
One often assembly perfectionism with a toxic variety of neurosis. Yet Leonardo seemed quite well-adjusted, particularly for an artist. Unlike Michelangelo, who was dour and cocky-denying, Leonardo was generous and convivial, partial to robes of majestic and pink. He wasn't particularly competitive. He didn't spend his days spoiling for a fight. (He was no Caravaggio.) He was comfortably open up about being gay (Michelangelo was not), merrily indulging his longtime companion with plenty shoes and jeweled stockings to keep even Imelda Marcos in clover.
Epitome
And he was strikingly devoid of ego, "more interested in pursuing cognition than in publishing it," Isaacson writes. "He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to exist part of the progress of history."
In recent years, in that location'south been a glut of books about the so-called science of inventiveness, which in truth are TED lectures in waiting, motivational business organisation books that instruct us on how to unleash our own inner Leonardos. The pleasure of an Isaacson biography is that information technology doesn't traffic in such cynical stuff; the writer tells stories of people who, by definition, are inimitable.
Notwithstanding in the determination of "Leonardo da Vinci," Isaacson capitulates to the easy seductions of TED-ism, and male child is it disappointing. Under the subheading of "Learning From Leonardo," he offers 20 italicized platitudes, including Retain a childlike sense of wonder and Let your attain exceed your grasp. Each gets its own elaboration. None is particularly helpful. It's all about as cloying as canned peaches. Though perhaps I'm just too old to Be open to mystery.
What endures after reading "Leonardo da Vinci" is just how indifferent to glory the man was. He lived in a world of his individual obsessions. He often despaired over his failure to become anything done. ("Tell me if ever I did a thing," he wrote in his notebooks.) What a souvenir that he did; what a gift that we know him at all.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/books/review-leonardo-da-vinci-biography-walter-isaacson.html
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