#15 Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography

**David Senra** (0:00)
Let's go ahead and jump in to today's book, and we're going to start in his introduction. This is Isaacson talking directly to the reader. 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 science, humanities and technology, is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius. Benjamin Franklin, a previous subject of mine, was a Leonardo of his era. With no formal education, he taught himself to become an imaginative polymath, who was enlightenment America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist. He proved by flying a kite that lightening is electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses, enchanting musical instruments, clean burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream, and America's unique style of homespun humor.
Albert Einstein, when he was stymied in his pursuit of hysteria of relativity, would pull out his violin and play Mozart, which helped him reconnect with the harmonies of the cosmos. Ada Lovelace, whom I profiled in a book on innovators, combined the poetic sensibility of her father Lord Byron with her mother's love of the beauty of math to envision a general purpose computer. And Steve Jobs climaxed his product launches with an image of street signs showing the intersection of the liberal arts and technology. Leonardo was his hero, and it's a direct quote from Jobs now. He saw beauty in both art and engineering, Jobs said, and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius.
His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created. A wondrous guide to the person whom the art historian Kenneth Clark called the most relentlessly curious man in history. So Leonardo's notebooks is the foundation for Isaacson's book on da Vinci.
A few sentences from the introduction before we move on. Above all, Leonardo's relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge, but a willingness to question it, to be imaginative and like talented misfits and rebels in any era to think different.
And skipping ahead, I'm not going to cover too much of his childhood. I do want to talk about the fact that he was an autodidact and he lacked formal education. And in this section, it's called The Disciple of Experience. So let's go to Isaacson here to learn more. Another upside for Leonardo of being born out of wedlock was that he was not sent to one of the Latin schools that taught the classics and humanities to well-groomed aspiring professionals and merchants of the early Renaissance.
Leonardo was mainly self-taught.
He often seemed defensive about being an unlettered man, unlettered man means no formal education, as he dubbed himself with some irony. But he also took pride that his lack of formal schooling led him to be a disciple of experience and experiments.
This free-thinking attitude saved him from being an acolyte of traditional thinking. In his notebooks, he unleashed a blast at what he called the pompous fools who would disparage him for this. Now this is a direct quote from Leonardo. I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk, they strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned, not with their own labors, but by those of others. They will say that because I have no book learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to describe, but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others. His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. And before I move on, I just want a couple paragraphs down. There's this part that makes me think of the Internet. So it says, It was a good time for a child with such ambitions and talents to be born. In 1452, Johannes Gutenberg had just opened his publishing house, and soon others were using his movable type printing press to print books that would empower unschooled but brilliant people like Leonardo. So in the 1400s, they had the printing press. Today, we have the Internet, which I think is doing the exact same thing.