Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Leonardo da Vinci has fascinated me for a very long time, so when I learned of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the quintessential Renaissance Man, I snapped it up. The hardcover edition is a hefty tome, not merely by virtue of its 624 pages, but also because of the heavy coated paper, employed to better display the many color plates and illustrations that are scattered throughout the book.

Isaacson’s analysis of Leonardo’s life, personality, virtues, and faults, is engagingly warm and human, bringing the deified icon of the Italian Renaissance back down to earth. That Leonardo was a genius is not in dispute—his wide-ranging expertise on everything from anatomy to optics to engineering to painting to architecture provide ample proof of his genius—but he was a flawed one, given to bouts of vanity, arrogance, self-doubt, and impatience. His reputation as a master of science and art was matched by his reputation for failure: commissions repeatedly went unfinished, and projects dragged on and on until patrons found someone else to fulfill their needs.

Leonardo’s fascination with the why of things was both his greatest asset and his most profound impediment. Easily distracted, he would often skive off from one job to investigate a point of tangential interest, like setting a painting aside to experiment on how the optics of the eye affect the way we perceive color and perspective. Every activity led to another activity, and Leonardo’s insatiable curiosity and innate perfectionism drove him to understand everything. 

There is no question that Leonardo changed the worlds of both art and science, but in reading this book, I wondered quite often how the master would fare in our modern era. The world of the Renaissance was a time of intense investigation and study, a time where knowledge long lost was rediscovered, and new discoveries still lay about, waiting to divulge their secrets. Leonardo’s broad spectrum of interests, his keenly observing eye, and his fearless questioning of even the most mundane phenomenon, made him the perfect intellect for the time. His work in anatomy alone, built from dozens of dissections (both human and animal) and documented in gorgeous detail in his notebooks, were remarkably advanced and in some instances centuries ahead of his time.

But how would his genius have expressed itself today?

Our world does not encourage the generalist. From medicine to science to engineering, the modern age is ruled by the specialist. Could Leonardo have stuck to one field long enough to reach a level of expertise needed to revolutionize it? And, while we often think of Leonardo as one of the greatest painters of all time, he usually listed that talent low on his CV. In a letter to the Ludovico Sforza promoting himself for a position in the Milanese court, he spent ten paragraphs stressing his skills in engineering (civil and military), and only at the end of it all did he toss in a rather off-handed, “Oh, yeah, and I can paint.”

With Leonardo’s quicksilver mind and his curiously contradictory capacity for both distraction and monomaniacal focus, I do not believe that today he would be the master of influence that he was in the 15th century. Moreover, without a society where wealthy and powerful patrons keep artists on their payrolls, even Leonardo’s prodigious talent as a painter might well go unnoticed in today’s world.

It’s easy to think of Leonardo as a pinnacle of human intellect, alongside such other polymaths as Newton and Aristotle, but if tomorrow he were plunked down in some suburban backwater, would we ever know of his existence?

Naturally, Isaacson’s biography cannot and doesn’t even try to answer these questions, but the fact that it gives rise to such pondering means that it provides new and deep insight into the mind of a man revered the world over. Perhaps modern Leonardos exist, observing and studying the world from every angle, quietly moving from job to job to subsidize their gargantuan curiosity, achieving excellence in ways that will only be tossed aside by their uninterested heirs. It’s possible. But regardless of how Leonardo might get along today, we can still marvel at what he accomplished in his day, where he was the perfect mind at the perfect time.

k

PS. To those pedants who complain that “da Vinci wasn’t his last name; it was just the town he was from!” please note that both Leonardo and his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, used their hometown as a surrogate surname, as did others who knew them.