Leonardo da Vinci

I embarked on this book because Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate example of the main theme of my previous biographies: how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

“He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar.”

Leonardo’s dedication to connecting movements of the body with movements of the soul was manifest in the other great painting he probably began around that time,36 Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (fig. 17). The unfinished work shows Saint Jerome, a fourth-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, during his retreat as a hermit in the dese

The fact that Leonardo was not only a genius but also very human—quirky and obsessive and playful and easily distracted—makes him more accessible. He was not graced with the type of brilliance that is completely unfathomable to us. Instead, he was self-taught and willed his way to his genius. So even though we may never be able to match his talents

Brunelleschi’s successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi’s experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate

“The first intention of the painter,” Leonardo later wrote, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane, and he who surpasses others in this skill deserves most praise. This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say chiaroscuro.”30 That stateme

“Leonardo was handsome, urbane, eloquent and dandyishly well dressed,” wrote Michelangelo’s biographer Martin Gayford. “In contrast, Michelangelo was neurotically secretive.” He was also “intense, disheveled, and irascible,” according to another biographer, Miles Unger. He had powerful feelings of love and hate toward those around him but few close

Unlike Michelangelo, a man consumed at times with religious fervor, Leonardo made a point of not expounding much on religion during his lifetime. He said that he would not endeavor “to write or give information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by an instance of nature,” and he left such matters “to the

At the time when he was perfecting Lisa’s smile, Leonardo was spending his nights in the depths of the morgue under the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, peeling the flesh off cadavers and exposing the muscles and nerves underneath. He became fascinated about how a smile begins to form and instructed himself to analyze every possible movement of each