Book Talk with Walter Isaacson on “Leonardo Da Vinci”

one way to look fascinating is always write about and surround yourself with fascinating people and somehow people think you're fascinating I want to thank Eric as everybody I'm sure knows his book comes out in about four weeks Madison Park give a shout out to Larry Kirschbaum who agented it published it Gavin knows shepherded it and I saw Larry in New York a couple nights ago and he came here for this and will be here for some of Eric's events Thank You Larry for doing it and thank you Almond Joe gildenhorn and all our friends from Y like Phil we are going to find ways to keep y going don't worry we'll figure this out so having written about so many very very smart people and then hung around Aspen ideas festival with so many smart people it began to occur to me that there were a lot of smart people in this world it also began to occur to me that often they don't amount to much what really matters is being creative and imaginative and I look back at the books I had written starting with Benjamin Franklin and I realized that there was a common theme and it wasn't just being smart it was being creative it was trying to define creativity and explain how we can achieve it and the pattern that I saw took me a while to find it out was that these people saw patterns in other words Benjamin Franklin loved every topic there was he loved electricity he loved the Gulf Stream he loved how you put together governments he would ride up and down the coast when he was forming the u.s. postal system and jump a harvest horse go into whirlwind so he could measure how whirl winds worked and that helped him figure out the Gulf Stream and his sense of science helped him figure out the balances of the Enlightenment that came in shrine in our Constitution likewise Einstein when he was trying to figure out the harmonies of the spheres and was having trouble with his equations unreal Relativity would pull out his violin and play Mozart because it connected him with those harmonies and for Steve Jobs every time he ended a product presentation he would show an intersection of two street signs that of the Arts and that of engineering the Liberal Arts and Technology Arts and Sciences and in a day and age in which we think that everybody should specialize and we try to beat into our children that they have to have STEM education forgetting that the arts and the humanities are what make us creative it occurred to me that I should try to write about the ultimate icon not only of creativity because I do think he was the most creative genius in history but the ultimate icon the ultimate embodiment of somebody who combines the arts and the sciences combines the humanities and Technology when we wait for Garrett to govern late so by combining the arts and the humanities in that way in a way symbolized by vitruvian man I think he was able to see the cross currents and the patterns of nature and I wanted to help myself but also try to describe how that happens have somebody wills himself makes himself creative because the interesting thing about Leonardo is that he was not touched by lightning and have a superhuman processing power the way an Einstein did he was somebody who every day woke up and wrote in his notebook things like why is the sky blue how do the wings of a dragonfly work all the types of just pure curiosity that I think helped make him creative he had the great good fortune to be born out of wedlock had he been legitimate he would have had to been a notary like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather and he would not have been a good notary he really did not like to do things by rote also by being born illegitimately he did not get sent to one of the classical schools or universities that aspiring sons of the upper-middle class were sent to in the 1450s in Florence and this town of Vinci he was born in the village of Vinci just outside of Florence and as a kid because he was not going to school decided he had to teach himself and he found himself curious about every aspect of nature especially looking at the little rivers around Vinci that flow into the Arno looking at the swirls seeing how they form seeing that swirling pattern and things like leaves and plants and throughout throughout his life that spiral swirling flowing movement of emotions and motions become a theme of who Leonardo is as a young kid at about age 12 he goes to Florence nearby because his father brings him to Florence Florence was then a city we can learn from because it becomes the cradle of creativity in the Renaissance why because it was tolerant and it was diverse and it had trade it had banking it had immigration it had people from all all over Europe but also the Arab world because of Constantinople was falling the year Leonardo was born and they're bringing back algebra and other wonderful insights from the Arab world leonardo is a bit of a misfit he's gay he's left-handed he's heretical he's illegitimate and yet he's perfectly comfortable in Florence wearing his purple and his pink pad the clothing parading around town and you have a mix of different people who come in who live in Florence and a mix of different talents and even you have workshops like the one he gets apprentice to wear jewelry makers and gold beaters are working with cloth merchants and mathematicians architects and artists to do things like in Leonardo's case when he's a young kid there's the famous dome of the duomo the cathedral that copper ball when he's a teenager Verrocchio has the design ways to solder that ball use concave mirrors of concentrate the Rays of the Sun machinery to lift it up and art to make it beautiful that combination of art and engineering of different talents flourishes in Florence and it's a perfect place for Leonardo he's a good-looking kid when he's first becomes an apprentice at approximately age 12 or 13 Viraj al sculpts David a very young David we have a picture of another apprentices in the shop of Leonardo posing for David so we know exactly what he looks like and this is a little drawing in the bottom right hand corner of the adoration of the Magi were young artists where artists would put a self-portrait and this is Leonardo growing a portrait of himself and around that age when he was young so we know when Leonardo looked like and we know that one of the main things he did before he becomes a painter in the studio was he loves theater theater design pageants outdoor spectacles is what was keeping the manatees and power in Florence is in the days before TV and movies and everything else the entertainment at night was plays in pageants one point the Duke of Milan is coming for a visit they put on a lot of spectacles here's Verratti OHS design and here's one of the first drawings ever by Leonardo well he's people think it was a piece of art I realized by reading his notebooks then it was a design for the costumes of the people who were going to be marching in the parade for the Duke of Milan it's his craggy old warrior which Leonardo loved to draw with everything from the fantasies of dragon wings and Lions heads and all in these beautiful costumes when I realized what a great theatre designer he was and the importance of theater and pageant to his work certain things became clear this is a famous drawing people say it's Leonardo he invented the helicopter well no this was actually done for a play in Florence to bring the Angels down from the rafters it has that wonderful spiral design that Leonardo loves so much from rivers and waters and fluids and air and the swirls that even's made stabs at the Fibonacci's equations that underlie the math of that but he draws this for a theatre production it's supposed to transport the imagination not humans but the cool thing about Leonardo is as always blurred lines whether the motto of his paintings or the blurring between reality and fantasy once he's interested in designs like this he decides to make real flying machines he turns his art into engineering and his fantasies into inventions and new objects to see the type of movement he does in painting these are two paintings of Tobias and the angel done approximately the same time when Leonardo was very young a young kid working as an apprentice in the shop this is the one done by barrace Oh shop and let's remember when I say shop painting was a collaborative endeavor back then this is before great geniuses did their paintings and sign their work they'd all turn these things out and Leonardo would be assigned parts of the picture but he learned that innovation was involved teamwork and this is the competing studio on the street pelayo loves studio and if you look at the way leonardo who drew the dog who drew tobias the face and the turning neck here we know some of what was Leonardo's what were others in the studio draws the river that flows right into the movement of humans connecting us to our earth and our cosmos and a holistic thing if you even see the sprite leanness of the dog how different it is from the flat motionless and emotionless paintings of his competitors so we first start seeing that Leonardo connecting motion with emotion in his paintings likewise another painting done by borracho studio in this case leonardo has painted this angel so different from the one that Verratti I'm self painted this one is filled with emotion movement the only emotion on the angel of this face is how did I get stuck here next to a more amazing angel once again the curves of the river that curves and swirls of rivers from the eons of history coming down to today leonardo ever since he's a kid playing in the Little rivers of Vinci as a little boy that's what he loves and he loves it connecting to us it's called the macrocosm microcosm connection the microcosm of the human connected to the macrocosm of creation how are we all part of one thing to him the flow of rivers into our blood symbolizes it and especially in this case where the river flows and as Leonardo draws is poured over the head of Jesus into him and then ripples down into the River Jordan and scientifically accurately with unbelievable Beauty if you just look at the details of the water rippling passing ankles of Christ how the ripples and swirls are done precisely right some of us this evening you're going to go to the National Gallery this is the only painting public Beauty displayed in North America - never DaVinci is a work of a very young Leonardo it is a very good painting and with all due respect of the National Gallery is not the masterpiece that the Mona Lisa is but it's got the elements of the Mona Lisa it may not be the Mona Lisa but it's clearly drawn by the very young artist who would go on to paint the Mona Lisa without overt saying it I will say once again we see the rivers coming from the eons of history and connecting into the human we see curls of hair because the curls and swirls that he loved become a passion for the curls with the light making spots of luster on it somewhat emotionless he hasn't yet perfected how to do the mysterious smile or the eyes that exactly follow you that will take a lifetime of science math and Anatomy for him to get that right but it is a 3/4 profile of a wife of a middle-class cloth merchant and so too will be his culminating painting a 3/4 profile of the wife of a middle-class cloth merchant and we will see all the things he does between then and the Mona Lisa that will end up culminating in the Mona Lisa once again as he's trying to create things he does the swirl that's a narrative there's a little picture of him I showed you earlier that's him right there but it does a swirl that patterns and here is something he's trying to invent besides three-dimensionally islet Ian swirling that paintings are not still lives they are not a snapshot they are not just a moment in time he said moments of time don't exist like Einstein he realizes that every moment has what came right before it which came right after it there's no distinct lines between different moments so he's showing as all of his paintings tend to do a narrative drama a movement the second King offering the gift but the first King has already offered it bowing down because of that the shock on Joseph's head as all this is happening and even each one of these things you go as if you're looking at a narrative in fact a dramatic narrative as if it were on stage one problem with this painting is it's not finished and this is a very Leonardo thing he was a genius but he was not a regular old craftsman he did not churn it out and what he has is every single emotion on every face affects the motion of the next person in this one spiral but so does the light not only are there shadows that are he's trying to do but he has realized by this point with his studies of optics that reflected light off of objects color the shadows of the objects next to him he's getting himself all worked up in the drawings of this and as happens a lot of times he just puts it aside he just can't finish it because he can't crack it but I think he always intended to come back to it here's an example of how he comes back to things this is another unfinished painting from that period the early years in Florence and their Saint to Rome in the wilderness the interesting thing is that he started his Anatomy studies but he hasn't done many dissections but these things are truly shown an anatomical knowledge of the skeleton muscles and nerves interestingly the neck muscles are exactly right in other words it two of them that cross anatomically correct what's interesting is at the same time all of his drawings get it wrong there's a neck muscle that's singular right there and when preparatory drawings even a few years later for the Last Supper so how come he gets it right then because he didn't paint that way on that neck back when he was a young painter in Florence he does it and like many other paintings he's not quite sure it's right done Frenship put to the side and only recently with technical analysis from infrared and ultraviolet other multispectral ways of looking at it we see the under drawings and we realizes that when he originally painted he got it wrong 20 years later he does real Anatomy this is from his anatomy dissection sheets we do sex the human neck takes the skin off it finds a double ma muscles that way that's when he goes back 20 years later to perfect the neck the st. Jerome so one reason he doesn't give up his paintings one reason he doesn't finish them one reason he carries even the Mona Lisa for 16 years around with him to four cities in Italy and finally over the Alps to France is he believes there's always another brushstroke you can always make it more perfect with all due respect to some of you art collectors in the room he didn't dance to the music of his patrons when a painting wasn't ready he just wouldn't deliver it I based the book on his notebook pages because right as he's ending his youth in Florence before he moves away he starts keeping a notebook the notebooks are amazing the more than 7,000 pages of them and unlike the great Kenneth Clark who Eric mentioned who wrote a biography in the mid nineteen hundreds of Leonardo based on his art masterpieces I decided that the best way to show the holistic integrity of Leonardo's creativity was using the notebooks as a basis day by day week by week looking at the list of things he to do less he put in his notebook this is just one sample page papers a little expensive so fortunately he crammed things on it we see the craggy old man like the one he does and the pageant's but because he's trying to figure out the patterns of nature he draws a tree right there with branches and he comes up with what is now known as Leonardo's law of branching which is pretty simple which is that when the trunk of something branches into two branches each of the branches that's half the area of the original trunk or if it's three bran as one-third of the area and he discovers from his de sections that is like the anatomy of vein so we have the tree going into the anatomy of veins we also have the back going into a triangle in a circle because he's interested in the mathematical issue which you see here of transforming one shape and to occur a straight shape into a curved shape known as squaring the circle can you make a circle the same size as a square using only a protractor and ruler what he did not know is the answer is no you can't pi is a very irrational number but throughout his life he's always trying to square the circle we see it here it devolves into mountain ranges once again the geometric drawings of doing it but also the geometric drawings helping him show how light hits a curved surface and then there are those swirls swirls of air swirls of water becoming curls of hair which we see throughout his work but the coolest thing is he always has a to-do list things he's discovered here at the very bottom of this long list of things he had something that puzzled me at first which is how you boil in oil certain types of nuts and turn it into a tawny ie dark blonde hair dye and how you'd apply it then I realize here he is now starting in hitting his 30s somewhat vain we've seen how pretty he is we've seen what a good-looking guy is we've seen that he too has really long flowing curls he's worried about going gray he's starting to dye his hair blond makes me think yes he's human that is really cool he is a gay and quite comfortable with it unlike Michelangelo who had the same period is gay and has the agony and ecstasy that comes from the torment you could have fortunately Florence is a very tolerant city in fact the name for homosexuality in German at the time was Flor Ensor meaning a Florentine because Florence was known for its tolerance and you go through all sorts of his friends from Botticelli on Leonardo was arrested twice for sodomy it wasn't purely tolerant but both times the cases are dismissed by the Medici who one of their relatives as part of the crowd that had got no arrest did so you know they're pretty cool with it and Leonardo at this point has his first serious boyfriend Saul ie nickname meaning the little devil because he keeps stealing and nicking objects but throughout Leonardo's life they're about 40 drawings assaleh with as somebody a contemporary wrote the golden curls that leonardo so loved we see the craggy old warrior and in the notebook over and over again portraits of Sally but at age thirty having not totally hit it out of the ballpark as a painter in Florence having left those two paintings I showed you and some other things unfinished adoration of the Magi was a commission his father helped him get and had notarized the Commission those of you who have 20-something kids and you helped them get a job and they didn't finish it might know what the dynamics was like at that point and Florence is pretty cool it doesn't have an army it decides that its influence is going to be partly based on soft power cultural diplomacy and so at one point when at the Duke of Milan and come to visit they'd done the pageant's of one with the helmets the Medici decide that they have to you know have an alliance with Milan and they send a cultural delegation led by a poet an ambassador who was a writer and Leonardo as a musician of all things because he had designed and built a beautiful liar for the arm like a violin but in the shape of a lion's head and he and a companion Atalante go there to Milan to are as part of the cultural delegation to give the musical instrument but Leonardo who's not that eager for some reason to get back to his dad and fan the adoration of the Magi decides to write a job application letter to the Duke of Milan he wants to have New Horizons once it moved him a lot it is a such a cool letter the book begins with it because it's 11 paragraphs long each one numbered the first 10 paragraphs describe how good he is at engineering he wants to be an engineer he says I can divert rivers I can designed wonderful public buildings I can make weapons of war even draws the wonderful weapons of war with the size I mean cutting people is a he talked about diversion of rivers and water works at hydraulics engineering only in the 10th 11th paragraph does he say I can also paint and he certainly could he ends up being hired by the Duke of Milan does a lot of engineering but the Duke of Milan has him among other things not just do weapons of war but help build cathedrals and do paintings one of the things that Leonardo was asked to do when against the Milan with a group of friends because creativity is a team sport as I said he's doing with a group of people is to put a tie biryeo which is what this is a lantern tower at the crossing of the transept and nave because this Cathedral didn't have one and was hard to do because it wasn't well designed Leonardo believes that design and beauty stem from simplicity that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication you will notice the cathedral and Milan has never been described as simplicity it is a Gothic monstrosity Leonardo hates it because he likes symmetrical churches he and his friends design a tabria this is not it that is just an octagonal and it was beautiful but of course didn't fit in with the Gothic design so they end up just sticking with the Gothic design but Leonardo and his friends decide to go to nearby pavía and do a church a cathedral that is based on the principle not only of some lissa tea but pure symmetry a transept in the nave the same size like a Greek cross and reflecting simply the proportions of a human the way Vitruvius the ancient scholar had said churches should be so he goes with his friend Bramante who's an architect I mentioned an artist who becomes one of his closest friends Bramante we love him because not only is he one of Leonardo's best friends but he paints a painting of himself in Leonardo which he calls Heraclitus and Democritus but this is Bramante round face balding etc we know exactly that's him and of course with those wonderful curls and the chin like that there's Leonardo and we're absolutely sure to him not only because of the pink and purple ish clothing which he famously wore but there's his notebook in mirror script the way Leonardo wrote from right to left because he was a left-hander and so to make sure we know it's Leonardo there's a notebook with Leonardo's very unusual mirror script writings they go off and design churches together with their friends Francesco Giorgio and others and they these are all Leonardo drawings how to keep it simple how to keep it proportional how to do a church and when they they study Vitruvius and part of it is to have a church reflect the proportions of a human you know obviously this appeals to Leonardo we've already seen how Leonardo loves the connection of the earth to humans of spiritual things to the human body that he wants to see that holistic connection and so he does a work of extraordinary science about two hundred and thirty drawings doing all sorts of proportions the proportion of the chin to the lip the lip to the nose the whole way each of these hundreds of calculations exactly how a body in motion what the proportions are what the proportions are you know and the measurements are he also is still trying to square the circle trust me this is from his first output pages to the end he is obsessing and because he's obsessive he's OCD and a DD and depressive and manic and everything rolled into one and thank God we didn't have a diagnostic manual otherwise he would have put on some pharmaceutical regimen and he never would have painted the Mona Lisa but here's one of many many pages of the time we same thing alright if you might put the circle in this way and you do a loom this way you need to curve thing you can square the circle and she continues to try to do it and there's the church they decide to work on the pavia Cathedral which as you can see is about as different from the gothic monstrosity of Milan simple cross near proportions and the whole point is to make the proportions of a church as Vitruvius said reflect the proportions of the human in fact one reason they're in pavia is that you know Vitruvius his manuscript this ancient roman had been totally forgotten in loss but along with the other things in the renaissance Poggio who famously you know discovers Lucretius if you've read the swerve you know one of the manuscripts he discovers is with Truvia says ten books of architecture that say the proportions of a man church blah blah blah and it's in the library of the castle in pavía so they all go to look at this they all decide to draw the proportions of a man in the cosmos and in the universe francesco do giorgio there's stuff by boremont a Giacomo Don Andrea who we particularly like because there's a dinner this is in July 14 91 we know the date they have a dinner party at his house when they get back and saw ye who's very young I just joined the retinue of Leonardo the little devil boyfriend is there brakes a plate and spills red wine according to Leonardo and there's no books so we imagine them all trying to draw man in proportion with the church making sure that's all I didn't spill wine on it we have the drawings of them and then we get to why Leonardo is Leonardo this is the one he does people think he did this all on his own no I mean I love to show in this chapter that it was a collaborative collaboration it was you know with a group of people this was all part of some it wasn't just him sitting in the garret somewhere saying I'm a dog guy in a circle and a square it is perfectly proportioned every single thing has been measured by him to be exactly right secondly it does exactly what Vitruvius said the navel should be the center of the circle the genitals at the center of a square Leonardo who's been trying to figure out how to square a circle figures out one very clever way to do this which is that the circle goes higher than the square in order to square the circle and you know that face it's a self-portrait it is Leonardo standing naked in the earth and in the cosmos saying how do I fit in so it is an iconic work of unbelievable science breathtakingly unnecessary beauty and great spirituality so the next time you see it on a coffee mug or a t-shirt I hope you appreciate Vitruvian Man slightly more and know it's not a joke he does all sorts and I'll skip through some of these things but he does a lot of mechanics as I said he loves to try to attempt the impossible this is not a bad thing to try because even though you will fail you'll learn why you fail this happens to be a perpetual motion machine water flows down turns a screw the screw brings a water back up it's supposed to work he finally figures out that'll never happen because he figures out the concept of friction so we see in his mechanical stuff then we see to his Anatomy finally he's starting to do the two sections I told you about the human eye the skull mastering the idea of the visual display of information you cover up the left-hand side it doesn't give you as much information about the sinuses which Leonardo discovers but if you put it together with the peeled off side and the regular side you see exactly how it all works once again a combination of art and science a combination of utmost beauty connected to engineering and innovation he even does that when he works for Caesar Borgia the warlord he decides that he can't really build all these weapons that he's been talking about but he creates what may be the best military innovation perhaps you know one of the top 10 of all time which is the visual display of a map they didn't have maps back then they are all holed up in this tiny town of Imola and there are three really cool characters together in this tiny town all winter and this is in the late 1490s early 1500s right that winter it is Leonardo da Vinci Nicola Machiavelli and Caesar Borgia Nicola Machiavelli's in charge of the writing Borges in charge of the military and Leonardo's in charge of creating something like a map because Caesar Borgia decides and understands that his competitive advantage is surprise he's going to be able to know more than his enemies and know everything there is one reason I love it is I've been out to Maryland I mean up to Bethesda the defense mapping agency you see maps on the wall that are not all that different from this almost aerial view but a slight angle so you can see it three dimensionality color just a perfect visual display of information I'm gonna skip through some of the paintings because I want you to buy the book or but one of the things I did like this is among a Duke of Milan's mistresses that this is my favorite of the non famous paintings lady with a Norman a mistress besides the sort of somato meaning blurred lines that he does he is trying to figure out how light strikes curved objects as I told you with the adoration of the Magi he's trying to make the reflections of one object color the shadows of another we see it under her chin I mean there's a spot of light that wouldn't exist go to the light coming up but he's playing with it a little bit hand handedly because it's the light reflecting off of her breasts and the head of the ermine to color the shadow under her chin but also as I say it's a narrative painting an emotional narrative this is not just a three-quarter profile like we saw in jenever to Benjy this is a profile of a woman having emotional reaction and something happening we can imagine that Ludovico has just come in from this direction it startled both the ermine and the lady they have a mix of pleasure and slight apprehension you try to figure out what emotion is behind those eyes and smiles what protectiveness is be on behind the paw and the stare of the ermine suddenly we're getting paintings that are not just flat snapshots that are not even like jenever to Benjy but that are emotional narratives and then comes and is later after 10 or 12 years in Milan the Duke says okay I need a Last Supper I need it for the refractory and you see Leonardo's stage theatrics come alive this is an accelerated perspective the lines go back a little bit too fast where have you seen that you've seen that at every theater you've ever been to to make the stage look deeper to make this look like a deeper room lines going back he even has to hide the fact that would be weird by this the table does it this way and you see to that it is a dramatic narrative not a moment there's no such thing as a self-contained moment as I said everything connects to what happened before and afterwards so we see the monks come in they see the hand of Christ the narrative starts when you look up and Jesus says one of you shall betray me you watch it ripple out these are groups of three the Apostles it ripples out it's already hit this group and they're already saying is it I my Lord and all the way to the end the shock that happened and even the narrative moment that comes afterwards he that dip at this hand and there's Judas recoiling with the phrase he that dip of his hand and even I think the which comes a verse or two later in the Bible or in two of the Gospels the institution of the Eucharist where he's reaching for the wine and the bread not only is it you know scientifically and beautifully a drama but it shows the clever ways he even made it fit in this is a room so he has to trick the eye of perspective because if you're standing here the perspective is different that if you're standing up here if you're coming in the room so he has the size is different to be a trick perspective as if the vantage point is actually up here and here's something I love when I first saw it the restoration two years ago it struck me there's a window here in the real refractory and I don't think people had really taken heat of this you look and the light and the painting as if it all every shadow the light on this wall as if it's lunchtime and the light is coming in from that window this painting you'll hear a lot about you probably have last week what yeah all right I'm sorry this is a painting that is the only Leonardo in private hands it was only really dazzling dardo about 10-15 years ago I won't go through all of it it's in my book fortunately I have a lot of it in the book because suddenly I think and they even said so Christie's called me and told me they putting it on sale November 15th it goes on auction in New York it will be it is displayed starting this week in San Francisco November 3rd will be on 51st Street at Christie's I think it will go for one hundred and twenty five hundred and fifty million dollars it is Salvador Monday Christ the Savior of the world there are many reasons in the book that nowadays we can authenticate that there many copies of it we never knew which was actually Leonardo's and which was his students but different ways of looking at the brushstrokes also the pentimenti of the thumb how it's change from the underdrawing things leonardo would have done among the scientific things as he knows there are no sharp lines and nature as I've said before things are the somato unlike the Michelangelo technique but weirdly the hand is pretty sharp why is the hand sharp he's just written a treatise on optical perspective and what he said if something gets a certain point closer to you that's when the lines are sharpest he's trying to show that the hand is coming towards you it is much closer to you than Jesus it makes the three dimensionality I said of a two-dimensional plane work because the sharp hand makes it look like it's closer it's a little bit bigger than it should be its perspective but here's the weird science thing that's a crystal orb these are actually scientifically brilliantly accurate things called inclusions that are done the exact right way he's been studying optics studying orbs studying concave mirrors and studying Christopher Isabella d'Este day because Isabella d'Este day a rich patron who he wouldn't paint her portrait but he did say he would help her buy crystal he knows all about crystal but if you think of a crystal globe what's weird here what's weird is that it does not distort the robes of Jesus behind it go outside get a goblet of water go to amusement store buy one of those little globes look through it you'll see things are inverted and reversed the way they would be if you look through a crystal lens there's actually an article in The Guardian that misquotes me yesterday saying that makes me doubt whether was a Leo it says it raises doubt whether it's a Leonardo I never said that because we know this is a Leonardo the question is why did he not have the crystal or distort the three possible reasons I explore in the book one is that he didn't really know well that's ridiculous I show through his notebooks he's been doing crystal buying for the Isabella d'Este day he's been doing optics experiments he's been doing lenses everything else the second is he knew that if he had made the robe things reversed and small learned it was sort of the odd thing it would look like it'd be so distracting it would ruin the beauty of the painting so he's a just like in the Last Supper does something artificial for the sake of beauty I think that's probably right but the explanation I like best of all is he knew it would distort he knew very few people would know that but some would and he's indicating that Christ shepherding of this world is miraculous and there's a miraculous quality that's non distorting in Salvador Monday I let the reader be the judge of what's the proper explanation if you get it right four hundred and fifty million dollars we will talk to a lot of people maybe David Rubenstein whatever somebody should buy it it actually is not that expensive and people spend 150 million dollars on second-rate sailboats or something I would buy this I would put it on permanent loan at the National Gallery and that would be a national hero he has a rivalry as I said with Michelangelo Michelangelo paints like a sculptor and sculpts like a sculptor this is David and Leonardo's on the committee to decide where to put David Leonardo doesn't mind Michelangelo Michelangelo really hates Leonardo I mean they're just totally different it's a very reclusive person they get into a bitter side and Leonardo says we should put the David if you know the you feat see under the arches of the feet see where it won't be too intrusive ends up and this does not amuse Michelangelo when Leonardo all does rather oddly and this is a notebook drawing of Leonardo from that argument he says there should be a decent ornament or ant abandoned Asante which is like a fig leaf put over the genitals because it's too distracting to have the generals right there which is unusual because we've seen Leonardo quite happily does a lot of nude drawings but I think there was something about Michelangelo he didn't like oddly enough they agree with him and they for the first 40 years of the statue there is a decent ornament put on it they both this is Michelangelo they were both asked to paint battle scenes for the council hall playing off the rivalry this is a sketch that Michelangelo does and as you see sharp lines no blurring Leonardo you see once again this is Leonardo's somato technique on the right with the Virgin and st. Anne this is a typical Michelangelo with sharp lines which is why Leonardo thought he was unsophisticated let me go back they both are asked to paint battle paintings they both start they both do prefer Vettori drawings and they both I think kind of can't stand the competition and Michelangelo quits and goes to Rome to paint the Sistine Chapel and Leonardo quits to go back to Milan and finish the virgin second virgin of the rocks-- once again just the anatomy drawing which I love from the notebooks he does the heart he shows exactly how the swirl of water those swirls he loves explain the opening and shutting of the aortic valve of the heart people had thought it was because the pressure as the blood goes up goes down closes the valve but Leonardo no that would crumple the valve he knows that a spiral has a centrifugal force to take a membrane and spread it out and thus that spreading out is what closes the heart valve and he even builds different contraptions to test it including a glass thing where he puts grass feet he's showing how experiments and theories go hand in hand beginning of the Scientific Revolution but one of the things I love is you get to one of the heart drawings and another of the pages was doing it and his mind wanders and he draws the heart and he can't help himself he draws all ie around it so once again we know from his notebooks he's human and that he loves the connection a thing of anatomical scientific genius with the beauty of art and displaying it and all throughout his life interested in those ripples of water we always have seen water every morning we see water flowing into a basin a bowl we do not look to see exactly what spirals form dozens and dozens of pages in his notebook of showing how spirals form when they hit things and he ponders it his whole life because he loves that form and finally we culminate with the Mona Lisa now once again we know it's a thing of absolute beauty but I want to show why all of this science with Kenneth Clarke's that was a waste of Leonardo's time he should have been finishing the adoration of the Magi now had he not done the science I don't think he would have had such a feel for the patterns of nature there's multiple multiple pages where he died sex the human face skins this skin off cadavers of the face and drawers exactly how the lips work which muscles are there and these are just one of the pages some of them much more detailed every muscle every nerve whether the nerve connects to the brain of a spinal cord true understanding the lips how you can move your lower lip alone because it's a muscle that purses it but you can't move your top lip in the same way alone because it's controlled by the muscle that controls your lower lip things you and I could have figured out one morning while looking in the mirror but we're not Leonardo the cool thing is he's figuring out things that aren't like tensor calculus to describe the curvature of space and time like Einsteins doing he's doing things that we could have noticed and can notice if we just train ourselves to be more observant the cool thing the reason I take this page which is not as best Anatomy page of the is it's about the twelfth page and in light chalk we see him start to do something that's the beginnings of the Mona Lisa smile so we can see almost directly the connection of the art and science once again the dissection of the human eye how when light hits the exact center of our retina it sees detail he says when it hits the edges of our retina it sees shadow and so all of it comes together and the greatest painting in my mind ever done and I will just take the smile besides having every movement of the lip exactly right if you look really carefully at the smile the tiniest of details on the corners of the lips the tiniest details right at the edges turned down slightly there's just one or two almost imperceptible detailed points that show a downturn but the shadows and the colors turn up what does that mean it means he knows from a study of the human retina that if you're staring directly at her smile its elusive it's a little hard to see she may not actually be smiling what is she thinking as you're I just dressed to her chin or cheek bone or forehead the light is coming in to the edges of your retina a little bit more and she starts to smile it's augmented reality it's interactive it smiles and stop smiling depending on how you interact with it it is the mysterious elusive smile the closer you look the harder it is to see but there's something very spiritual about how as you look at her she looks at you because the eyes I could also go in the science of the eyes they are always looking at you she interacts with you you interact with her and once again just as in jenever da Vinci down the street there's a rivers from the eons of time connecting to the roads that humans build connecting to the veins in our body to make it absolutely clear that not only is this about us cosmos but it's also about how we fit in to creation he goes to France carrying that painting after 16 years it's still by his you know bad always putting small little perfections on it never by the way delivering it to that poor cloth merchant who had just married Lisa because he's painting it for himself as a universal painting there's this bedroom that the King of France gives near the Chateau of Amboise where Leonardo gets his own great manor house but in the end he still tormented doing the swirls and curls of the deluge and on his very last notebook page that we have we have Leonardo talking about various things things he's interested in but still doing the geometric thing of how do I make a shape in one size equal the area of a shape and another Euclid tried it with right triangles if you vary the length of the leg how you can do it and this would be the first step in squaring a circle we even have a chart that you know labeled each one of these and explains how it's done and at the very end the line dribbles off there's something lighter and he writes but the soup is getting cold we can imagine we can imagine there he is you know in his room downstairs is a big dining hall all of his students and acolytes and apprentices and associates and friends are there he has a cook named mattering in fact he gives her a cloak and as well we can imagine that even though he's old and even though he's dying he's still trying to square the circle just like on his deathbed Einstein was still trying to do equations of the unified theory but the soup is getting cold and thus he dies some say in the arms of the King of France like this painting as everything there's a bit of a mystery King of France had signed a proclamation from us town that was two days away on the other hand he hadn't actually signed it his Chan signed it maybe stayed back with Leonardo but as with everything with Leonardo there's just a wonderful mystery thank you all very much [Applause] now guys it into exactly an hour too but it meant you missed out on the virgin of the rocks-- yes how did it come together when I woke up one day and said I would do it well first of all slowly just as Leonardo discerns patterns although I don't want to compare myself to him I've discerned patterns and what I'm interested in which is this connection of art to science causing creativity from Ben Franklin the Steve Jobs and so it clearly begins to dawn on me that the ultimate culminating book of the series should be landowner Bill Gates bought the Codex Leicester he happened to be invited over so he could show it to me his curators were going through it he says is a years ago somebody's got to do Leonardo not as a painter but as a person of wide-ranging passions and curiosity Steve Jobs as hero is Leonardo and over that period I'd be wander around Kathy studied in Florence as a you know junior broad or at least went to Florence her junior year and I try and actually studied so we'd go back and then I run across the notebook at you know in Milan on the Codex of the flight of birds I'd be at the Morgan Library here and they'd be showing off a codex bill which Oh a notebook or thanks partly to Eric motley and Mercedes bass I met David Lindley nephew of the Queen who is a curator at Windsor of the drawings and he invited me to go see the Anatomy drawings that are at winter so I'm starting to see the notebooks and starts to dawn on me not only do I have to do Leonardo but I have to do it with the foundation being these notebooks they're seven thousand or so pages as I said they're never really been I mean as 1890 guy named JP Richter about half of them are brought together but nobody ever went through them chronologically and methodically now Marko chachi who's the first acknowledgement in the book some of you were they aspen this summer I invited him over he had been he's a wonderful old scholar art scholar in Florence had been the translator for Carlo pedretti who was one of the scholars who did the notebooks I found him you know through friends at Aspen Italia one of the guys there is a professor of intellectual history said you got to be mark he became my guide and translator visited us as summer in Aspen and there's a wonderful event we have which in that event thing we had we love which he loved which is in Venice talking our way into sing Vitruvian Man which is never displayed but it's on the fourth floor of the Academy and with the help of Giulio Tremonti was had been financed means all these people there saying show it and there's me and Kathy and Marco sitting there with vitruvian man yeah I read something in last several years about a movement that Mary Magdalene may have been associated yeah Mary Madeline being the in the Last Supper we would you read was probably book far more famous and mine will ever be which is The Da Vinci Code written by Dan Brown in the Tom Hanks movie in which I read it I saw trouble following it exactly but there's some basic conspiracy theory that there is discovered in the novel about Jesus having a child etcetera etcetera Mary Magdalene and it's The Da Vinci Code you and obviously the Last Supper is part of it and in the Dan Brown book and in the movie the character can we put this back uppers it's too hard to do the character to Christ the Jesus is right would you if you put it back on - yeah I don't know if we can anyway the last supper I don't quite know how to get it to full screen but they'll get it I'll get the last supper off while we're working on it you have to find out where the last supper was I think it's further along near the end that that's not John it's not she it is John so this character is Mary Magdalene according to The Da Vinci Code and it's a secret thing that Leonardo did to give the clue of this whole very complex conspiracy no that's John we have all the prep drawings we know all the things one of the things Dan Brown who I've met and like and I think it's a great novel but he keeps insisting well it's really true well no it's not but he says one of the things we know about Leonardo is he always made clear distinctions between male and females he you know never blurred the distinction no no I mean you can go back this is one of the Angels Leonardo's virgin of the rocks-- this is a male angel this is gabriel but you know it's very androgynous Leonardo I mean I'm sure I could find many other examples starting with the angel and Tobias with Tobias or this angel I mean this is not existing you know you know that androgynous this is a male angel but you know and well anyway so no I don't think that's right I do think it's a great novel I hope to sell a small percentage of what he sold but Leonardo DiCaprio's making the movie based on this book and we hope that Magdalen will not make an unnecessary appearance in one of the paintings no I I mean the film rights are complicated they don't usually always make films I'm not somebody who cares much about Hollywood I don't go around trying to get points or being consultant or whatever so you just sell it a bit yeah I'm not not a Hollywood person yeah thank you this is wonderful presentation Walter um last time last year my wife and I were in Vinci and it's gurgler vinci event a da Vinci Vinci and yeah and it's a wonderful little town and there's a museum there well I don't know were you there did you oh yeah I'm surprised then that you didn't make no because one of the things that really took our eyes was this armor that he created this weaponry it was like a tank yeah a new terrific model and I'm surprised that well I did I mean if you'll flash the screen back up I'm triage trying pretty hard to keep this give you a flash of backup I was trying pretty hard to keep this to an hour and so among the drawings I flash over are some of his now the tank interesting enough wouldn't have what the gears are actually one of them is reversed and once again is like the orb in the Salvador Monday did he do it because he wanted to make sure nobody would copy it and yeah or did he make a mistake I think the former not but I could give an hour presentation on his military machines and I think I even flashed up the crossbow the thing about his military machines that they bordered on fantasy and most of them were not actually executed on the battlefield that said you right we could do an hour on the military machines yes who's that yeah way back so I can't see during Isaacson I'm Todd Wiggins I'm very interested in his involvement in classical order of that architecture that applies to Washingtonian federal buildings the Doric tuscan composite and corinthian orders did he have any how much influence was he he likely the classical architecture as in Vitruvius but he did not most of his architecture is not what we would call the federal style and it was nah even though he at one point study some of the roman classical buildings most of what he designs in his notebook are not sort of colonnaded austere parthenon like classical but his taste in architecture was a little bit more renaissance i mean it helped define renaissance taste yeah yeah paper well the cool thing about is that it yes cool thing about Leonardo's notebooks when I was writing about Steve Jobs I tried to with him yet some of the emails he wrote in the 1990s some of them were written on the next computer which if you remember was the one he did while on hiatus from Apple and even with the techies he couldn't retrieve his email he couldn't retrieve some of the documents the operating system is out of you know doesn't exist anymore paper is an incredibly good technology for the storage of information and the retrieval and transmittal of information five hundred years from now from him doing it we can still flip through his notebook pages and I think it's really important one of the many lessons I have on Leonardo in the last chapter is take notes make a list on paper in a notebook because 50 years from now your grandchildren again you better be able to see your notes just like five hundred years from now we can see from then we can see Leonardo's and that's not going to be true of your tweets and your Facebook posts and certainly not your myspace posts if any remember at myspace was things will come a snapchat will come and go but paper will be here 50 and 500 years from now Walter thanks again yesterday President Trump was asked a rape on a scale of one to ten how he thought the puerto rican adventure had gone and i'm interested in you're doing something similar on the sort of degree of difficulty on the four major biographies that you've done i think that the most difficult was steve jobs because he was a brilliant sensitive spiritual but difficult character and he was dying and he was getting sometimes mean to people as he had been throughout his life when he casually get mean he'd tell me things that were slightly mean partly because he was probably upset partly because he was on painkillers and you had to figure out okay these are real people people i know and he's saying certain things about it and so it was always a bit of a discomfort there as much as i admired and even loved many aspects of them all right less less two questions because they both popped up do you think there's I think there's still some notebooks that have not been disconnects had not been discovered the notebooks we have we can estimate or approximately caught one quarter of the number he wrote which by the way is great I mean yeah we goes well but I mean how let us take all the notebooks you may have done and all the to do less you may have done and five hundred years from now what percentage of those you know will still be around melts Eve his second major boyfriend after saala II was a more aristocratic learning person kept the notebooks after Leonardo dies is very careful with them as some of you know the Brits especially minor members of the aristocracy like Lord Elgin goes to Greece and takes the marbles Lord Leicester among others you know takes some notebooks or whoever takes them they end up scattered some in windsor some and you know whatever so they do disappear after a while about 45 years ago I think maybe a little bit longer two of them a reappeared in the National Library of Madrid a really really old section of the National Library when they had been miss catalogued and miss shelved and somebody was looking for some book and pulls it down as the Leonardo notebook there now called the Codex Azure codices Madrid and they have all in fact I think I'm not absolutely sure I think this crossbow is in it a lot of the mechanical drawings are in it so things reappear Salvador Mundy reappeared a la Bella principessa chalk drawing that he did was discovered well it was discovered about 30 years ago and authenticated about 10 years ago when it was clear that it was taken out of a notebook of Lior a frontispiece of a book that Leonardo had drawn so I think we will discuss there's always something new to discover about Leonardo yeah last question thank you so much this was fascinating and I went to 12 years of Catholic school and I don't think I ever learned that Leonardo was gay and right and I'm just curious if you could comment on the fact that so many of his so much of his work is centered around his you know Christian themes and you talk in the book about at the end of his life he wanted to be informed of Catholic teaching and I wondered if he could just share her at that time first of all the Catholic Church was not exactly quite a strict or whatever as it has been at other times Pope Alexander whatever of the time had quite a few illegitimate children now certainly the Medici Pope's a Caesar Borgia was one of the illegitimate children of the Pope at the time and as I say it was complex the feelings towards male to male romance and attraction dante puts it in the circle of hell but you know then praises his teachers who were you know who were gay and openly so florence was particularly tolerant of it the church you know it didn't prosecute it now and this is somewhat relevant to our time there was a right-wing populist puritanical backlash that happens in 1494 i think Savonarola a very strict evangelical friar uh basically helped oust the medici and becomes a ruler of Florence famously there's a bonfire of the vanities there's also persecution of sodomy which as I say when Leonardo was arrested it was just nothing ever happened so you have and then he gets outed after four years because they decide boy this was a mistake so you have a period in which things go back and forth but Leonardo questioned a lot of biblical teaching because he questioned all received wisdom because he was a disciple of the experience he looks at the fossils when he's a young kid he discovers fossils near the Arno River and near Vinci and then over his life he's always doing studies of fossils in fact one of the cool things in Virgin of the rocks is the fossils or exactly right these are two versions he did of it and he writes in his notebooks that if you discover the first ever discovered trace fossils which means not fossils of a living organism but the traces that organ left like in the sand or whatever like when it crawled and that becomes fossil saying it proves they were alive when they made these fossil from that after a few pages he deduces at the Biblical Flood did not happen that that's not the way all these things happened that it was over the course of centuries and millennia that the strata have been laid down and he's perfectly comfortable saying you know no no our you know experience shows that the way the Bible teaches is not right when it comes to the flood even questions the fetus in the womb whether it has viability and a soul now he's still a member of the church when he dies he takes you know Vasari is our witness or he wasn't actually there but writes about it and I think he probably embellishes a bit but saying that Leonardo and really then that religious on his deathbed has to be given the final rites and the teachings of the search and commit of the church but he's not like Michelangelo who every day as I say and as the book title has it the other books the agony and the ecstasy of religion yeah Leonardo was a disciple of experience thank you all very much I'll go sign books everyone sorry

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Length: 72min 27sec (4347 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2017