Leonardo da Vinci

This is far more pleasant that reading our daily toilet paper supplier, the Minnesota Strib.  My latest bio was on Leonardo da Vinci.  Walter Isaacson, who has written a number of impressive biographies is the author.  Most people likely associate da Vinci first with the Mona Lisa, one of the relatively few art works he actually completed.  And that is a most fascinating fact regarding his life, he was far more interested in the conception of art and other works than in actually executing or completing them.  He was also likely a perfectionist who had difficulty letting go of a painting, for example.  He was still working on the Mona Lisa at the end of his life, making occasional tweaks.  His attention to detail and ability to capture what he visualized in drawings is tremendous.

Leonardo was an incredible observer of nature and of humans.  He experimented across a variety of disciplines to expand his knowledge and apply it to art and to practical improvements for humanity.  He dissected a number of humans and animals, all in the interest of understanding how muscles, nerves and other components worked.  He applied that understanding to his art, for example, how to indicate emotion, like a little smile, or is it a smile?  He was an early practitioner of what would today be called hydrologic engineering, although his knowledge and ideas were unfortunately rarely adopted by rulers or officials.  He had a number of innovative ideas in other areas, also rarely put into practice or action.

We know most of what Leonardo had learned through an extensive set of notebooks, most of which, but not all, have survived, but were lost for an extended time.  So innovations and discoveries that he made and were identified in the notebooks had to be rediscovered, often centuries later.  It is a shame that his knowledge was not more widely shared and acted upon during his life.  While the biography gives us some sense of his personal life, the focus is on his work, which is entirely appropriate because learning and work were the entire driving force for da Vinci.