Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

An extraordinary talent connected to growing up with a love of Nature

Hi, I’m Sue and I write about the beauty and ingenuity of Nature, and how we can deepen our connection for our optimum health and wellbeing. Discover more Nature-inspired content on Spiral Leaf, Twitter and my video Nature Channel.

Leonardo Da Vinci is the archetype of the Renaissance Man otherwise known as a polymath with a wide range of interests and expertise in various fields of science, humanities and the arts. Most importantly, Leonardo’s inspiration came from the infinite works of Nature, woven together into a unity filled with marvellous patterns.

Leonardo Da Vinci - The Biography by Walter Isaacson is one of those books that you buy on a whim but don’t actually come to read until the time is right. This 525 page wonder has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite some time and it wasn’t until I watched a fascinating interview with Robert Edward Grant on Next Level Soul Podcast that I decided to dive in.

My interest in Leonardo Da Vinci is not in his paintings, although learning about his technique turned out to be fascinating and deserving of an article all by itself. For me, it was more about his life’s journey, his character, his interests, his imagination, his methods and, of course, his fascination with Nature which inspired his work and the contents of his famous and most beautifully crafted notebooks.

This post revolves around a great many notations taken on the topics of Character, Genius, Influence, Knowledge, Learning, Nature, Notebooks, Observation and Science which I found most interesting, particularly in terms of how they might apply to us today and what we can learn from them.

Notable observations

Leonardo Da Vinci had a joyful instinct to fathom the beauties of creation through his relentless observation of Nature, experimental scientific method and blue-sky thinking. This amounted to nothing less than wanting to know everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. His hard-earned genius came from a reverence for the wholeness of Nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns.

Leonardo’s observations, lists, ideas and sketches were recorded in a series of notebooks that took the form of loose sheets the size of tabloid newspaper, smaller volumes bound in leather and the pocket-sized notebooks he kept hanging from his belt in order to constantly observe, note and consider the circumstances and behaviour of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows.

The beauty of Leonardo’s notebooks is that they record his observations and thought process in real time across a myriad of disciplines including topics such as flight, water, anatomy, astrology, art, horses, mechanics, geometry and geology. Remarkably, the 7,200 pages preserved represent about one-quarter of what he actually wrote through his lifetime.

Cross-topic connections

Good paper was costly which is why Leonardo tried to use every edge and corner of most pages, cramming as much as possible on each sheet and jumbling together seemingly random items from diverse fields.

Rarely dated, these notes have lost much of their order which means the juxtapositions can seem haphazard. It means they provide a lens through which we can marvel at the beauty of a universal mind as it wanders exuberantly in free-range fashion over the arts and science. It means we can extract from his pages, as Leonardo did from Nature, the patterns that underlie things that at first appear disconnected.

Most fascinating are Leonardo’s lists which included things like: calculate the measurement of Milan and suburbs; draw Milan; get the master of arithmetic to show me how to square a triangle; describe the tongue of a Woodpecker and ask about the measurement of the Sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese. Ongoing themes included studying the phenomenon of light scattering as he groped for a theory of why the sky appears blue.

Self-made genius

One of the most encouraging revelations we can glean from Leonardo’s life story is that his genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. He was not super-human as the word genius might suggest. It did not come from being the divine recipient, like Newton or Einstein, of a mind with so much processing power that we mere morals cannot fathom it.

Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His passion for learning and the ability to combine art, science, technology, humanities and his imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. His skills are therefore something we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.

Leonardo’s genius also involved teamwork, not being afraid to ask questions and his appetite for soaking up information from books which was voracious and wide-ranging. Thus Leonardo became a disciple of both experience and known fundamental truths with the intention to consult experience first, and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way.

Pioneering insights

Most interstingly, Leonardo’s work was never published. Even though he occasionally declared an intent to organise and refine his notebook jottings into published works, his failure to do so became a companion to his failure to complete artworks. The fact that most published books rarely contain the unrefined working-out process of revelations contained therein makes Leonardo’s notebooks even more precious.

This intense focus on gaining knowledge marks the character of an incredible human being who was more interested in nailing concepts than he was in polishing them for publication. I counted no less that 37 ground-breaking ideas and concepts that were later claimed as discoveries by others often centuries later. These include being the first person in history to describe fully the human dental elements; the first to fully appreciate that the heart, not the liver, was the centre of the blood system; and the first to see the Earth as a living organism.

My favourite is his design for an ideal city where he applied his classic analogy between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of the Earth to realise that cities are organisms that breathe and have fluids that circulate and waste that needs to move. Leonardo was the first to understand that the plague was spread by unsanitary conditions and that the health of the citizens was related to the health of their city.

It goes without saying that had his revolutionary design for the city of Milan been implemented, it might have transformed the nature of cities, reduced the onslaught of plagues and changed history.

The unity of Nature

Since childhood, Leonardo had an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of Nature with a curiosity that would always impel him to explore more. It was because of his intuitive feel for the unity of Nature that his mind and eye and pen darted across disciplines, sensing connections.

The patterns he discerned were more than just useful study guides, he regarded them as revelations of essential truths, manifestations of the beautiful unity of Nature. His Vitruvian Man, for example, embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the Universe. It also symbolises an ideal of humanism that celebrates the dignity, value and rational agency of humans as individuals.

Leonardo believed that such analogies were a way to appreciate the unity of Nature. Among the analogous forms he explored were the branching pattern that could be found in trees, in the arteries of the human body, and in rivers and their tributaries.

Leonardo came to realise that all movements in the Universe operate according to the same laws. The laws are analogous: the motions in one realm can be compared to those in another realm, and patterns emerge. He also realised that mathematics was the key to turning observations into theories. It was the language that Nature used to write her laws.

To understand birds and flight, for example, Leonardo drew more than 500 sketches and wrote 35,000 words on this topic alone. This enabled him to weave together his curiosity about Nature, his observational skills and his engineering instincts.

These studies became the bedrock for many of his inventions including his flying machines that were clearly aimed at real human flight. It was a pursuit that stretched across two decades with an unusual degree of diligence and therefore a great example of his method of using analogy to discover Nature’s patterns.

On one of his lists he writes: Study the anatomy of the wings of a bird together with the breast muscles that move those wings. This is followed by a note that says: Do the same for man to show the possibility that man could sustain himself in the air by the flapping of wings.

As such, Leonardo envisioned what innovators would invent centuries later and many such ideas can be traced back to his original observations and investigations.

The beauty of continuous learning

We can learn so much from Leonardo’s approach to acquiring knowledge as a process of continuous discovery and development. His ability to meld curiosity, intense observation, blue-sky thinking and an appreciation for well-substantiated theory provided the foundation for his genius.

The fact that he was not formally educated was a key factor and he was fully aware that his approach saved him from being an acolyte of traditional thinking. Leonardo wrote: 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.

This is perhaps one of the most important lessons we can take on board today as we are bombarded with the nonsensical narrative of scientific consensus and the closing down of anyone who dares question the status quo which is fuelled by those who desist from learning anything new or practicing the art of critical or blue-sky thinking.

Leonardo was a disciple of experience and experiment with an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of Nature. 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.

Leonardo realised that knowledge came from a related dialogue between experiment and theory and was therefore quite dismissive of men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.

Learning from Leonardo

In conclusion, Walter provides us with a fantastic list of things we can learn from Leonardo where his 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.

• Be curious, relentlessly curious

• Seek knowledge for its own sake

• Retain a childlike sense of wonder

• Observe

• Start with the details

• See things unseen

• Go down rabbit holes

• Get distracted

• Respect facts

• Procrastinate

• Let the perfect be the enemy of the good

• Think visually

• Avoid silos

• Let your reach exceed your grasp

• Indulge in fantasty

• Create for yourself, not just for patrons

• Collaborate

• Make lists

• Take notes on paper

• Be open to mystery

I can’t think of a better to-do list to help conscientious and creative souls navigate the mire of falsehoods surrounding us today. Take a leaf from this remarkable book to reignite your curiosity and find the inspiration and courage to develop your own genius as we work together to build the world we most want to see.

Thank you for reading and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

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