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Everyone knows about Leonardo da Vinci, but most of us can't claim to have any deep knowledge of his creations and his impact. Journalist turned to biographer Walter Isaacson, shed some light on this in his 600-page book. It tracks Da Vinci's astonishing advances in art and technology and how they helped power Europe's cultural rebirth. It also brings Da Vinci the man to life, revealing the ways he was both ahead of his time and of his time.
What's astonishing is that today, 500 years after painting his last panel. Leonardo is still reshaping the contours of the art world. Even as the Louvre was preparing a season of festivities to mark the fifth centenary of his death, a rediscovered painting now attributed to Leonardo became the most valuable art work in history. At a global Christie's auction in 2017, it sold for 450 million. The intercontinental battle for the painting, Salvador Mundé, or Savior of the World became a worldwide media sensation and resulted in a sale to a Saudi prince.
Isaacson's book was launched almost simultaneously with the auction. In researching it, Isaacson interviewed scholars worldwide, delved into academic journals, and immersed himself in Leonardo's notebooks, all 7200 surviving pages. Leonardo crammed the darts and leaps of his imagination into small leather-bound notebooks with drawings and jottings. They contain everything from portraits of craggy, heroic figures, to anatomical drawings, studies of clouds, geometrical diagrams, and details of his personal accounts.
In their all-encompassing subject matter, the Leonardo notebooks demonstrate his insatiable curiosity about the world and his understanding of the interconnectedness of nature. His many doodles of flying machines and weapons anticipate many future groundbreaking inventions. Isaacson also reveals something of Leonardo the man, who in many ways now seems ahead of his time. We now know that Da Vinci was gay, he was a committed vegetarian, he enjoyed many deep friendships, and was generally well-loved.
In this book in sight, we'll focus more on his achievements than his personal life. We'll trace some of the key stages in his work at the frontiers of art and science. First, we'll get acquainted with Leonardo as he rises through a Florentine Art Studio, just as the Renaissance ignites change across Europe. Second, we'll follow Leonardo as he migrates to militaristic Milan, offering his expertise as a designer of futuristic weapons, but it's his paintings of divine dramas that project him into the pantheon of Europe's leading artists. Third, we'll consider Leonardo's experiments with prototypical aircraft alongside his celestial and earthly portraits. We'll look at his rivalry with Michelangelo. Fourth, we'll discuss Da Vinci's appointment as King Francis I's first painter, and the last portion of his life spent in the French court. We'll end by circling back to the story of Da Vinci's painting Salvador Monday, and what it says about his enduring power and popularity.
Leonardo Da Vinci had the good fortune to be born out of wedlock. That meant he faced a lifetime ban on entering elite academies and even entire professions. So instead of studying law like five previous familial generations, Leonardo found sanctuary as an apprentice in one of Florence's avant-garde art studios. With the help of his father, Pierre Odovinci, he joined a workshop headed by Andréa Del Virocchio, a combined training and drawing with access to classical and contemporary books, which were expensive commodities at the time.
All around him, Florence was being transformed into Europe's leading cultural cosmopolos. The movement to create a new Athens, a golden age of advances in technology and art, was spearheaded by the powerful Mieticci clan. These hyper-rich bankers were funneling their profits into resurrecting the classical pillars of the Greek city state, including a Plato academy and inventive paintings and sculptures across the city. Here's Isaacson on the late show talking about Florence.
Leonardo was this misfit, but Misfits fit in to Florence. Like Steve Jobs would say, you know, the Misfits are rebels around pegs in the square hole. Florence was very tolerant and the diversity of the people when the Medici ran it is what makes it the cradle of the Renaissance.
Virtually from the moment he joined the Virocchio studio, Leonardo was recruited into the movement to re-sculpt Florence into a soaring acropolis of art. The Mieticci sponsored not just art and architecture, but also an endless sequence of plays, pageants, and carnivals to entertain the city's population. While he'd later co-create iconic paintings with Virocchio, Leonardo started out by designing stage sets and evolved into a producer of Fantasia's, tantalizing elements of which are sketched across his notebooks.
An early adopter of new oil paints, Leonardo applied myriad layers of brushstrokes to create luminous angels and messengers of God. Thanks to the spread of books in his time following the invention of the printing press, he immersed himself in treatsies on geometry and optics and would conduct experiments on light and vision.
In Virocchio's studio, Leonardo developed some of the key features of his artistic genius. From Virocchio himself, a master sculptor, he gleaned the importance of conveying movement and motion. Working on drapery studies, he honed his ability to depict light and shade so as to convey volume. The mastery of Kiero Skurro from the Italian for light dark was central to many of Leonardo's masterpieces.
But he also forged a different distinctive technique, Sumato. Rather than depicting his subjects as static objects, he blurred contours and outlines to mimic the shifting perspective of the viewer. Blurred edges and shadows merging with matter produced a more realistic version of human perception, but also left room for mystery and enigma and for our imagination to take hold. The speculation and intrigue about the smile of the Mona Lisa is just one example of this effect.
After opening his own workshop in 1477, Leonardo's first breakthrough artwork was sparked by a commission to create an adoration of the Maggi for a nearby monastery. With mathematical precision, he mapped out the intricate lines of perspective of an ancient Roman palace in Piazza, with the Madonna marking the vanishing point of a preparatory drawing. The three Maggi are sketched like whirlwinds of movement across the scene.
When Leonardo began transmuting this full-scale sketch into an oil panel, he created figures so lifelike they seemed poised to jump out of the painting. He began etching in the colors of the sky, and then suddenly, put his brush down, never again to work on the painting. According to Isaacson, it became the most influential unfinished painting in the history of art.
And, in the words of art historian Kenneth Clark, the most revolutionary and anti-classical picture of the 15th century. Leonardo's abrupt abandonment of the piece would become a recurring theme across a lifetime of painting. Da Vinci would rather abandon a work than produce something substandard. Other works such as the Mona Lisa or Virgin and Child with St. Anne remained in progress for years, as he carried on adapting, adding and improving.
Georgio Vassari was a fellow artist who interviewed many of the central figures of Leonardo's time for his lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and architects, published in 1550. Vassari wrote that Da Vinci sometimes deserted his drawings because he feared his painting techniques could not reach the perfection of art in carrying out the things which he imagined.
Let's take a quick break before we continue with our look into Walter Isaacson's biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. But first, let's go over everything we've covered. We looked at how Da Vinci, born out of wedlock, would be barred from many benefits of his father's class. He apprenticed in Florence under Virochio. There, he developed his technique of blurred edges and contours that his work is known for.
We'll continue next time by exploring some of his designs. We'll look at his weapons of war, flying machines and the last supper. We'll also look into his rivalry with Michelangelo.
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We're continuing our look into Walter Isaacson's bestselling biography on Leonardo Da Vinci. Here's Isaacson speaking at the Aspen Institute. At certain points in our life, we quit puzzling over every day phenomenon. We might save her the beauty of the blue sky, but we no longer wonder why is it blue? Leonardo did. He wrote it in his notebook.
Last time we went over Da Vinci's early years, focusing on his apprenticeship in Florence. Now, we'll look at some of his designs from the last supper to an untested early schematic of tanks. We'll also glimpse at his notorious rivalry with Michelangelo.
Leonardo abandoned not just the adoration of the Magi, but the entire Republic of Florence. He set off for Milan, a much larger city-state which was ruled by a series of self-crowned dukes backed by military might.
Because Milan's duke, Ludovico Savozza, was at the time better known for his love of armed power than art, Leonardo wrote a carefully scripted letter of application for a position in his grand court. He underscored his mostly imagined expertise in the art of war and engineering, hardly mentioning his artistic skills.
One of the points of his letter states, if a place under siege cannot be reduced by bombardment, I have methods for destroying any fortress even if it is founded on solid rock. He also claimed he could sculpt lightweight mobile cannons, along with unassailable armored chariots that can penetrate the ranks of the enemy.
After promising to demonstrate these military breakthroughs, in his notebooks, Leonardo began adding to an arsenal of futuristic weapons he found in a book by an arms inventor. He sketched out his fantastical designs, including a tight and sized crossbow and the world's first armored tank, a circular craft featuring a ring of cannons that could shoot in any direction.
But, mercifully perhaps, Milan's ruler never attempted to bring these imaginative weapons to life on the battlefield. Instead, he hired Leonardo to design the theatrical productions that served to mesmerize the city's residence as long as he remained in power.
It was the Duke of Milan who later commissioned Leonardo to paint the last supper inside a monastery in the heart of Milan. Leonardo would devote years to perfecting the wall painting, and interspersed manic painting sprees with entire days just observing the mural from different angles.
When the impatient Duke urged him to speed up, Leonardo told him, men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.
Across the painting, the diagonal lines of perspective all converge on Christ's temple, like the inverted rays of a halo. Around him, Leonardo sketched the complex reactions that flashed across the faces of the apostles in the instant after Jesus says, one of you will betray me. Judas is seen clutching the bag of silver he'd been given in exchange for betraying Jesus. Peter moves in agitation, perhaps preparing to take up arms against this traitor. Positioned behind Judas, he holds a sharp knife, which he later uses in defense of Jesus when the mob comes to seize him.
Although a freeze frame in time, the painting evokes in many viewers the powerful drama that would be played out by these 13 characters over the next hours and days. The mural would help make Leonardo one of the first star artists of the Renaissance, and legends of the painting and its creator, begin spreading across Europe.
The last supper would also act as a talisman-like shield for Leonardo when French troops invaded Milan shortly after it was unveiled. The French king, Louis XII, was so impressed by the mural that he ordered that Leonardo be safeguarded during the city's takeover and would even begin collecting some of his artworks.
Sadly, Leonardo's innovative techniques, using a combination of oil and temper on dry plaster rather than traditional fresco painting on wet plaster, meant that within only 20 years, the painting had started to deteriorate. It's been subject to many restoration attempts over the centuries, some more haphazardly than others.
Even as his status as an artistic star grew, from around 1490, Leonardo devoted himself to the study of birds and flight. His interest in flying machines stemmed from his work on theatrical spectacles in Baroqueo studio. Evidently, these spectacles included all manner of breathtaking contraptions to elevate and suspend actors as if they were flying.
Leonardo's investigations into flying machines represent the meeting point of his interest in the natural world and his flair for engineering. After studying the flight patterns of birds, he began designing an array of supersized bat-shaped wings that he hoped would one day propel human aeronauts.
Although he sketched out plans and potential sites for flight tests, from a palace roof or above a lake, Leonardo didn't record the results of any of these experiments. He would ultimately jettison the pivoting wings for a simple glider that could allow its navigator to coast along air currents and gently touch down to earth.
These gliders took their place alongside designs for diving suits to outfit an underwater army and preparatory drawings for new paintings in the polymaths ever present notebooks. It would take nearly half a millennium to prove that Leonardo's flying machines were flight-worthy. When engineers tested his design for a hang glider for a British film crew, it successfully flew, as did his pyramid-shaped parachute, which provided a safe landing for skydivers. Leonardo later decided to gather his extensive notes and sketches about flight into a treatise, now known as the Codex on the flight of birds. Aside from his perseverance with the subject, there are hundreds of drawings, intends of thousands of words, and the inventiveness of his designs. What's extraordinary in his compilation is his presaging of Newton's theory of gravity and Galileo's principle of relativity.
Leonardo returned to Florence and created a new studio to handle a wave of commissions sparked by the last supper. His golden age in painting, launched with the Milan mural, would include the Mona Lisa and the Virgin in Child with St. Anne. Salvador Mondays also from this time, but the world would not become aware of it until centuries later. At times, Da Vinci Studio resembled an art factory, with his team collaborating on many pictures at once. As Leonardo composed oil panels, an array of apprentices would simultaneously create their own copies. The master painter would add his distinct brushstrokes to many of these simulations, which would complicate the search for Leonardo's true autograph painting centuries later.
The city of Florence had been suffering a period of turmoil while Da Vinci had been away. During his time in Milan, the religious cellot, Girolamo Savan Narola, and his army of rebel youths had launched a cultural revolution marked by the burning of books and paintings. It destroyed Florence's position as Europe's cutting-edge art center. When the Pope and public turned on him, Savan Narola was burned at the stake. The city's leader is aiming to restore Florence's role as the epicenter of the Renaissance, commissioned Leonardo to paint a massive mural inside their council hall. Although he was offered a princely payment for the artwork, there was a catch. Oppositely, Leonardo's wall painting, a rival work had been commissioned. The artist was Michelangelo.
During Leonardo's Sojourn in Milan, Michelangelo had become Florence's rising art star. His marble sculpture of David, armed with a slingshot and preparing to do battle against Goliath, had just been positioned in Florence's central piazza. It instantly became a symbol of the city's state's resurging fortunes. With these dueling commissions, the rulers of Florence pitted the era's greatest artists against each other. Each was slated to create a gigantic painting of a Florentine victory on the battlefield. Both would produce wall-spanning sketches, with soldiers the size of Titans charging across the tableau.
Leonardo and Michelangelo began shooting arrows of criticism at each other, and ultimately, each would abandon his unfinished mural. Michelangelo was summoned to Rome on the orders of the Pope and would later begin painting the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo, after an escalating train of disasters with experimental painting techniques that destroyed his mural, would escape the project by returning to Milan. Yet young artists, including Raphael, flocked to Florence to view each artist's sketches. The sculptor Ben the Nuto-Cilini wrote that this served as the school of the world. The dramatic showdown between Michelangelo and Leonardo, and their respective abandonment of Florence, catapulted the status of both men. They had now ascended into the realm of super artists.
Let's take one final break before we complete our discussion on Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci biography. This time, we've gone over some of Da Vinci's designs. Despite his lack of expertise, Da Vinci submitted designs for an armored car and a massive crossbow. The Duke of Milan rejected these ideas, but hired him as a designer. The Duke eventually commissioned him to paint the last supper. Da Vinci designed bat-like gliding devices for human flight, which wouldn't be tested until 500 years later. Finally, we touched on the pinnacle of the Leonardo Michelangelo feud when they painted across the hall from one another, although both abandoned their murals.
We're concluding our look into Leonardo da Vinci, written by best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson. Last time, we went over some of Da Vinci's little-known schematics for flying machines and weaponry, and one of his most famous, the last supper. We also covered his rivalry with Michelangelo.
We'll end this time by exploring Da Vinci's appointment as King Francis I's first painter, and the last portion of his life spent at the French court. Then, we'll end by taking another look at the Salvador Monday, and what it means to the lasting legacy of Da Vinci.
Just as Leonardo's last supper protected him during Louis XII's invasion of Milan, so a new painting would provide a passport back into the French-ruled city and its seat of power. Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder, delivered to the King's aid, gained him a royal appointment in Milan's court, and with spurred string of commissions from Louis XII. The work portrays a captivating Venus-like Madonna holding a curly-haired Jesus in a scene that could have been drawn from life in Florence. The young child plays with a yarnwinder or spindle, which resembles a cross.
Jesus looks innocent in at first playful, Isaacson says, but if you look at his mouth and eyes, you can sense a resigned and even loving comfort with what will be his destiny. Mary, whose right hand is frozen in motion, seems torn by an urge to intervene and seize the cross away from Jesus, and counter impulse to yield to divine destiny. The wildly popular painting triggered the production of dozens of copies. It marked the Renaissance break with centuries of traditional paintings, when Catholic icons were depicted as remote and stylized. Now the major figures of Christianity were transformed into living beings who might walk the streets of Milan or Rome.
The French King's successor, the 21-year-old Francis I, began bombardingly in order with invitations to join his court at the French-Summer Palace. A charismatic leader on the battlefield, Francis was also a passionate admirer of how the Renaissance had transformed Italian art and aspired to extend the movement across France. Recruiting Leonardo to his court would help him achieve that goal.
After Leonardo crossed the Alps into France, the King provided him with a royal chateau, an aristocratic stipend that was not dependent on his rate of production, an unbound freedom to immerse himself in his scientific experiments, technological designs, and artistic passions. Appointing Leonardo's first painter, engineer, and architect to the King, Francis was a dream patron, admiring and encouraging, but never troubling him with reminders about unfinished paintings. Leonardo crafted designs for a utopian royal city to be intersected with a chess board of gleaming canals and newly sculpted lakes.
Jousting tournaments in his fantasy-like master plan would be staged across battling boats and assuring new palace complex would rule over this amphibious city. When Leonardo arrived in France, he brought with him a cluster of paintings that he had been continuously changing for more than a decade, including the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and Saint John the Baptist.
The portrait of Mona Lisa had been started in 1503, and the contracted date of delivery had long since passed, but Leonardo had fallen in love with the painting and would spend the rest of his life adding brushstrokes to further animate the image. Vassari wrote that if one gazed upon it most intensely, even the beating of the pulse could be glimpsed flickering across the portrait.
Leonardo had these paintings, the chosen ones he could never bear to relinquish positioned across his royal chambers and would continue perfecting the panels, adding sparks of life and color until his final days. In his closing passages on Leonardo, Vassari recounted that the artist, sensing imminent death, asked for a priest to administer the Holy Sacrament. He repented that he had offended God and mankind in not having labored at his art, as he ought to have done.
As King Francis moved to prop up the artist Vassari, the spirit of Leonardo, which was most divine, breathed its last in the arms of the king. That scene would be immortalized by the French painter Jean Auguste Domanique Ingris, but Leonardo's drama in art would continue to play out over the following centuries. The French king acquired the paintings that Leonardo had kept by his side and made them the core of his royal collection. While helping launch the French Renaissance, Francis expanded the Louvre Palace and laid the foundations for it to become the globe's premiere stage to exhibit Leonardo's masterworks.
Da Vinci's visionary notebooks would be collected by artists and admirers, kings and conquerors. Over the course of centuries, they'd be taken apart and assembled into new compilations. Although they're now scattered across Europe and the US, expanding access to these codices has helped modern scholars reconstruct the notebooks as Leonardo created them. Their contents have also aided in the incredibly complex process of differentiating Leonardo's autograph paintings from myriad copies crafted by his disciples.
We're wrapping up in a moment, but before we go, let's recap what we've gone over. In this book insight, we've touched on key moments in Leonardo's life. From his early years of apprenticeship and Florence, to his move to Milan and work for the militaristic ruling family there, including painting the last supper, and onwards to his pioneering experiments with flying machines and competition with another Renaissance man, Michelangelo. Finally, we've discussed Leonardo's later years when he came under the patronage of the French king Francis I and his enduring artistic legacy.
At the start, we mentioned the rediscovery of one of Leonardo's paintings, Salvador Mundé. It's worth retelling the story of the discovery before we wrap up this book insight. We'll do that next. The Salvador Mundé, a spellbinding panel depicting Christ holding a crystalline sphere representing the universe, had been found in an obscure sale and was marred by amateur efforts to restore it. It had been sold in 1958 for less than $100 and was acquired half a century later by a group of art dealers who suspected it might be Leonardo's lost masterwork, despite damage in layers of over-painting and varnish.
The art dealers who had found the panel brought it to one of the world's leading restoration experts to clean and conserve and then began quietly showing it to Leonardo scholars around the world. Advanced imaging technology now revealed something extremely exciting, the sketched outlines of an under-painting. When the under-painting was revealed with its glorious details of intricate brushstrokes, at that point, Isaacson says, most of the experts agreed that it was an authentically anardo.
As a result, the price of the painting begins skyrocketing. First, it was acquired by a Swiss-based art dealer for nearly 80 million. He quickly flipped the work by selling it to a Russian collector for 127 million. At the end of 2017, as we learned earlier, Salvador Mundé fetched a record-breaking 450 million at auction. It was sold to an anonymous bidder who turned out to be Prince Bader, the Saudi minister for culture. The painting was due to be unveiled in September 2018, but the exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi was canceled without explanation. It was no longer even clear where the painting was.
Perhaps in a vault in Geneva, its mysterious disappearing act reignited debates about the painting's attribution, and there are some experts who still cast doubt onto its authenticity. But after interviewing some of the world's leading Leonardo scholars, Isaacson himself is convinced it's the real thing. He notes the beautiful scientific precision with which Leonardo renders the crystal orb that Jesus is holding. He also pointed out a telling error in its rendering. The fabric and part of Christ's palms seen through the orb show no signs of distortion.
Was Leonardo a keen student of optics missing a trick? Did he choose not to depict these potentially distracting visual effects? Or was this a mission entirely intentional? Suggestive of Christ's miraculous nature, whose purity prevents distortion and further proof of Leonardo's own genius? Here's Isaacson again speaking at the Aspen Institute. Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do each day. Provoking questions like this, the Salvador, like the Mona Lisa, has an uncanny power to interact with every viewer in an individual way. Along with its technical mastery, every Leonardo painting has a certain something that draws us in.
It's hard to put our finger on what this is. But Isaacson's biography is a brilliant starting point to begin our own appreciation of the master. Thank you for listening to Book Insights. Check out the rest of our content at memo.com. Please keep in mind that the information provided in or through our Book Insights episodes is for educational and informational purposes only. It's not intended to be a substitute for advice given by qualified professionals and should not be relied upon to disregard or delay seeking professional advice.