WALTER ISAACSON: CRACKING LEONARDO DA VINCI

good afternoon and welcome to the Commonwealth  Club of California the brand new Commonwealth   Club of California you you can find us online at  Commonwealth Club org on Facebook on Twitter and   on YouTube I'm Kishore Hari I'm the director  of the Bay Area Science Festival which starts   tomorrow you can find programs at Bay Area  Science at org our speaker today is Walter   Isaacson biographer of genius you probably know  Walter from his myriad of books his chronicling   of Steve Jobs Benjamin Franklin Henry Kissinger  but I think Walters impact far exceeds that in   a time when so many of us feel like we're living  in echo chambers Walter's work really resonates   beyond that bringing us closer together with his  work at the Aspen Institute and even being called   upon by the government to help coordinate response  to the the hurricanes tonight though Walter here   is is here to discuss Leonardo da Vinci I think  Renaissance man doesn't even begin to describe   da Vinci's contributions to the sciences to  the arts and to humanities he's certainly   unparalleled in all of history Before we jump into  a conversation and your questions Walter is going   to do a short presentation about 30 minutes long  about Leonardo da Vinci so please welcome to the   stage walter isaacson thank you thank you thank  you it's absolutely wonderful to be in my favorite   city San Francisco and back at the Commonwealth  Club although I had to pause as I came in and   the salt air was coming through and seeing the new  building and it's just great to be here I've been   on if not this stage at least previous stages  of the Commonwealth Club talking about all the   really smart people I've written about from Ben  Franklin to Einstein to jobs but one of the things   that occurred to me since Leonardo da Vinci is so  good at spotting patterns I finally spotted it is   that there are a lot of smart people in this  world there are dime-a-dozen actually and they   don't usually amount to much what really matters  is creative people innovative people and so in   this book I tried to explore what is creativity  how do we define it how do we achieve it and it   really comes I've discovered from something that  San Francisco and the Bay Area is so good at which   is people who mix and stand at the intersections  of the arts and the sciences who love both in fact   realize that art is a science and science is an  art and don't make that distinction I remember   being in the city so often when Steve Jobs  would do product presentations and what he   would end with the slide that showed a street sign  intersection a street sign of the intersection of   the Arts and Technology Street and he said it's  at that intersection that creativity occurs and   I realized that the ultimate symbol of that  is Vitruvian Man the guy standing there akimbo   naked in the circle in the square and the ultimate  exemplar of that type of creativity the greatest   creative genius of all times was Leonardo da  Vinci and having been fascinated with him my   whole life I wanted to do this book on him now  Leonardo was born in the tiny town of Vinci   Henson named and he had the great good fortune  to be born out-of-wedlock that meant he didn't   have to a notary like his father and grandfather  and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather   and let me tell you Leonardo would have been  a really bad notary he was always thinking out   of the box he was always leaving things slightly  unfinished not dotting every I and crossing every   T and secondly he had the good fortune cuz he  was not sent to school he was not sent to one   of the classic schools or universities that were  stuffing the heads of people in the 1450s with   the medieval scholasticism of the church and  instead Leonardo with a bit of a chip on his   shoulder called him a man without letters meaning  he hadn't been formally educated and he had to   be self-taught he had to become what he called a  disciple of experience meaning whenever he heard   anything he said how would we know that how would  we test it we see the beginnings of the scientific   method there somebody who says whenever given  received wisdom I have to look it in the eye I   have to test it and be a disciple of experience  and experiment so and all the little streams   around the town of Vinci he's sort of studying  flows of water the birds in flight and he asks   himself during his Wonder Years the questions  we all ask ourselves when were young like why   is the sky blue we see this in his notebooks I did  this book based on the 7000 or so pages a notebook   does a bird when it takes off raised its wings  faster or lower its wings faster how does the   dragon fly wings alternate or not all these things  that we were curious about when we were kids will   be outgrow when we outgrew our Wonder Years one  the first secret of Leonardo is stay curious stay   relentlessly curious curiosity for its own sake  because throughout his life he's making lists in   his notebooks of things he wants to discover and  learn and teach himself that week and to observe   and there are always those wonderful like why do  people yawn how do they walk on ice and Flanders   all throughout his notebooks he never outgrows the  curiosity of his wonder years his father who did   help raise him even though he's illegitimate takes  him to Florence in 1478 art is about age 12 when   he goes and I'll say this for this audience and we  may talk about it later there is a real connection   between the geographies of genius places where  suddenly from multiple reasons genius starts to   occur and Florence in 1478 like the Bay Area  in nineteen seventy five hundred years later   people with all sorts of diverse talents are  coming in with a huge amounts of tolerance and   whether it's people like Steve Jobs who are into  you know electric kool-aid acid tests and hippies   and free speech movement but also into processors  and microchips they're all full of coming together   likewise in Florence back then there's suddenly  an outbreak of tolerance under the Medici you have   people coming in from the fall of Constantinople  bringing the algebra from the our world with them   you have people who are like jewelry makers  suddenly becoming artists and artists becoming   architects and cloth Weaver's deciding to become  great silk designers and that mix of different   interests and then there's a tolerance because  the kid at age twelve who arrives in vengi is   illegitimate left-handed gay vegetarian heretical  as Steve Jobs would say here's to The Misfits the   rebels the round pegs in the square holes the  ones who think different and ones who question   authority we know what he looks like because  he works for ver ochio his father gets in a   man apprenticeship in that shop where there's  churning out Madonna's and statues and ornaments   for parades and things like that and one of the  things they turn out is a statue of david that   rocío on the far left and you see another young  apprentice in the shop is doing things like I   guess I can't point a pointer at that since it's  a backlit screen there's Leonardo posing for the   Statue of David so we know as everybody said  his contemporaries that he was well-built well   proportioned very strong young good-looking and  on the far right is something in the adoration   of the Magi one of Leonardo's first paintings  as a young artist in which the artist is sort   of puts himself a portrait of himself looking  out of the frame so we can see the curly hair   the jaw the build the beauty of Leonardo one of  the things for ochio studio did was they were in   charge of pageants and plays one of the things  I learned in the notebooks that surprised me   was that was his main job Leonardo not necessarily  being a painter at first but helping put on plays   pageants and public spectacles which is how they  amuse themselves in the days before movies and the   internet and television sets and so these are this  is a woman on this side of me is the first drawing   we really have of Leonardo that's considered a  piece of art but it wasn't done I realize it's a   piece of art I'm looking at Verrocchio and others  they are doing these as the costumes for the visit   of the Duke of Milan to Florence and they're in  charge of the pageant so you see the lion on the   breast the dragons wings a fantasy mixing with art  and good observation as Leonardo does pageants and   plays even the great helicopter which everybody  says Oh Leonardo invented the helicopter this   begins in a notebook page as sketches for a play  when the Angels have to come down from the rafters   it was originally intended not to transport  people but to transport their imaginations   and so the cool thing about Leonardo as you'll  see over and over again is that he blends and   blurs the distinction between the fantasy of  the stage and the reality soon after a while   he's not only doing helicopters for the stage but  saying why don't we invent real flying machines he   also is studying the patterns of nature and when  Verrocchio's does the baptism of Christ he gets   Leonardo to paint the angel on the far left in the  background River once again we see the rivers and   his absolute feel for the pattern of nature of  rippling waters and how it goes past the ankles   of Christ does it scientifically right but also  the angel that he does on the far left has inner   emotion to it something that you didn't see yet  in Renaissance paintings that angel is actually   has complex emotions on the face he's turning he  has just landed the angel next to him that Viroqua   does that the only emotion on the face is how did  I get next to this amazing angel the legend which   perhaps is true from a contemporary is that when  Verrocchio's sees the angel he throws down his   brush and says I'll never paint again and just  leaves it to Leonardo to do the painting in the   studio Leonardo starts doing portraits this is his  first portrait once again we see the connection of   humans to nature the river swirling down as it  did in the baptism of Christ coming almost into   the veins of the human jenever de Benjy this is  the first poet rrett it is like the Mona Lisa a   three-quarter profile of a cloth merchants middle  class cloth merchants wife it is clearly not the   Mona Lisa but it's also clearly the painting  of the young person who would eventually paint   the Mona Lisa it took years of being involved  in science and math and anatomy and all sorts   of geology and also spirituality of how we fit  into this universe for the painter of this to   become the painter of the Mona Lisa other people  have written about Leonardo say things like it's   a shame he wasted so much time on science and  Engineering and anatomy studies he could have   spent it more usefully finishing his paintings  for that I say look at you never DaVinci then   look at the Mona Lisa and the Mona Lisa answers  that criticism with her smile he does paintings   that are all swirls this is adoration the Magi I  mentioned it only as part of the biography because   now he's getting a little bit older he has his own  studio but he's not finishing his commissions if   you can't get it exactly right if he can't get  the narrative right the second King handing the   gift it's swirling around every emotion on the  face of one person effecting the next person very   complicated just puts it aside as he puts aside  st. jerome in the wilderness doesn't finish that   commission one of the things i discovered though  is sometimes he puts them aside not to give up but   saying I will get better I will make this perfect  someday for example here in st. jerome in the   wilderness he has the neck muscles exactly right  now this is unusual because at the time neither he   nor anybody knew that there were two neck muscles  like that in fact in a preparatory drawing we see   him doing it wrong with one neck muscle so why is  it right here in this early painting it's because   25 years later he starts doing his anatomy and he  realizes as you can see from that anatomy sketch   how the neck muscle works and he goes back to  the painting he left aside 25 years ago left in   Florence and if you look at with a multispectral  analysis you see he over painted what he   originally done to get the neck muscles right and  so in his notebooks we see the fascination of him   dancing all across nature the kragle warrior-like  but the tree that grows into the torso of the   crown of the warrior showing branching the  scientific Leonardo's theory of branching   which is that when branch has come off a trunk the  combined area of each of the branches equals the   combined area of the trunk he discovers that that  same with anatomy and so he shows just his mind   kind of doodling around the tree and the arteries  connecting the swirls and curls in the upper-left   of water and air becoming curls of hair the curls  he loves so much and then the scientific problem   of squaring the circle which he becomes obsessed  with making a square the exact same size as a   circle using only a ruler and a protractor which  is hard to do since pi is an irrational number but   my favorite thing on this particular notebook page  I'm just showing you that every page is crammed   with things this is down when he's reaching 30  and in the bottom there is a recipe for making   boiling nuts and oil and making blonde hair dye  he's gone he's worried about going gray he's an   awesomely good-looking dude with curly hair blonde  hair very vain about his appearance wearing pink   and purple robes all the time very buff exercises  a lot and now figuring out blonde hair dye as I   said he was gay and most people hadn't written  about this much I think it was just part of who   he was he was so perfectly comfortable with it his  boyfriend his first major boyfriend his name Sol   ie we see and all sorts of his drawings the curly  hair as one of the contemporary says sala e that   leonardo much adored but becomes a very long-term  companion of his and we'll see him throughout the   notebooks but at this point as I say when he  reaches 30 it's lots of paintings he didn't   finish some of which his father had notarized the  contracts for those of you have 20-something kids   where you've helped them get a commission and  they don't finish it we all know that feeling   and we can tell maybe Papa da Vinci was not all  that happy so leonardo de sisal leave Florence he   goes as part of a cultural delegation to Milan  the Medici got their influence not through an   army which they hardly had but through sending  musicians playwrights painters architects around   Italy he goes as a musician Leonardo because he's  invented two types of musical instruments and   armless and others but he writes the most amazing  job application letter when he gets there come he   wants to stay in Milan and he writes of the Duke  of Milan an 11 paragraph job application the first   10 paragraphs are all about his engineering  skills I can build great public buildings I   can make weapons of war I can divert the course  of rivers I know how to do great machinery it's   only in the 11th paragraph there's the ad I can  also paint and of course he could but he always   thought himself as a painter and as an engineer  one of the first things they have him do the Duke   of Milan is the Milan Cathedral didn't have a to  borio that's that little pointed tower there a   lantern tower and Leonardo and some of his friends  collaboratively we forget that they work together   collaboratively I've been asked to be a part of a  group that will put the lantern tower off leonardo   believed like Steve Jobs that simplicity was the  ultimate in beauty and sophistication those have   you seen this Cathedral or see it in my book or  see it here no it's not simple in fact it's an   absolute ugly gothic monstrosity of a building  just a type Leonardo would hate and he and his   friends design a sort of square lantern towel  with a circle and it that's absolutely simple   and beautiful and as you can tell they don't  build it the Milan authorities want a gothic   monstrosity but by doing so Leonardo becomes  friends with a group of people most notably   don''t Oh bro Monti the one sort of balding on the  right of that picture who's an architect an artist   and he does this painting and it's him with his  friend Leonardo once again we saw him as a youth   we can see him still with the golden curly hair  the they put well proportioned body strong jaw   and of course he's wearing his purple and pink  he always wore purple and pink tunics that were   short made him a bit of a dandy and in front of  them is one his notebooks is that were absolutely   sure that's Leonardo because it's done in mirror  script Leonardo being left-handed goes from the   left hand side of the I mean yeah goes from the  right hand side of the page to the left the other   way then we're usually right and that's a mirror  script notebook and what they decide to do is they   want to build churches right because spiritually  Leonardo believes that the proportions of a church   to be connected to the proportions of a human he's  always wondering how do humans connect with nature   and how do humans connect with nature and the  spirit and so they have simple churches these   are Leonardo's drawings but beurre monté and  francesco giorgio their friend they all do the   same with sort of a Greek cross design and the  square in the circle Leonardo still trying to do   the square in a circle and they know Vitruvius  the ancient Roman architect whose book has been   rediscovered and talks about how the proportions  of a man should reflect the proportions of a   church Leonardo does 230 measurements of the  proportions of a human to get everything from   the chin to the lips to all exactly right and  he's still trying to square the circle these   I mean there's he's a geeking out get me going  down rabbit holes page after page of different   ways to create crescents within circles to get  the area exactly right and they go to pavia for   a couple reasons one is they're gonna help build  the Church of the type that they like this is it   a simple church secondly the great manuscript of  Vitruvius the ancient Roman architect had just   been rediscovered and the best copy of it was in  the library of the castle and pavia so it's near   Milan they spend about two weeks there in July of  1492 working on this notebook and deciding they   have to illustrate the concept Vitruvius talks  about now we kind of know that illustration that a   man should fit in the proportions of a church you  see francesco de Georgio's drawings of it on the   left sort of stick figures Giacomo Andrea on the  right another friend an architect all on the trip   they're all doing this together wonderful dinner  party in July 1492 when they get back we know it   from the notebooks at Giacomo Andrea's house and  we know it because Sal ie the young boyfriend   breaks one of the plates spills some red wine and  apparently steals one of the pieces of silverware   thus getting the name the little devil and you can  imagine them all trying to get the proportions of   the human into the cosmos right while not getting  spilled upon by Sol ie until Leonardo does it and   you can tell the difference a work of absolute  anatomical exactitude mixed with unnecessary total   beauty there it is a work that symbolizes the  connection of art and science in the connection   of us to our world and how we fit in it and if  you look carefully and the absolutely beautiful   face and body and flashback a moment to this and  many other things we realize that here Leonardo is   doing a self-portrait of themselves naked in the  world and in the cosmos saying this is how we fit   in and so Leonardo becomes not just an artist  but somebody he uses a great visual displays   of information to convey both art and science it  culminates in some of his art pieces in the Last   Supper for example we see his theater work I mean  normally a tables are not quite tilted that way   but imagine and being on stage and a castle you  tilt it a bit so you can see what's on it the   lines of perspective go back a little bit too  fast they recede too fast well it's a trick of   perspective to make it look deeper imagine a stage  where the scenery that a Leonardo would paint   would be put at an angle just like those things  and thirdly it's not a scene of a moment Kenneth   Clark the great art critic criticizes their saying  it feels frozen in time to me it does not feel   frozen in time the monks walk in they see Jesus's  hand there's him saying one of you shall betray me   it becomes a Germanic narrative the apostles the  groups of three right next to him they're already   reacting saying is it me Lord the sound is just  getting out to the Apostles on the end trying to   figure out what he's talking about and the sound  even reverberates back if you look at it and Jesus   is reaching towards the bread and the wine for  the institution of the Eucharist which comes a few   passages later in the Gospels so here we see in  one picture both dramatic narrative the connection   of people's emotions to their gestures and motions  and we also see the tricks of perspective and even   the way he put it in this room you see that window  on the left when you go see it something struck me   there's the window and it faces so that right  around lunchtime when people becoming in the   light comes in from that window now look at the  painting you see the light on the wall there you   see all the shadows it's as if the light in the  painting is coming in from that window this saw   you may have seen it was here believe it or not  last week salvadore Monday the only painting by   Leonardo of the 15 finished paintings that he has  in private hands Christie's brought it here it was   just authenticated maybe 10-15 years ago as being  actually the original because there many copies   we didn't know which was the original but through  many methods that Christie's will explain to you   if you want to buy it it's been authenticated that  this is the Leonardo it's going to go for sale   at a 100 million dollar minimum on November 15th  and auction I assume it'll get about 150 million   I will say they're probably people you know who  spent that much on a sailboat or something they   should buy this painting it'll be and they should  give it to the San Francisco Museum of Art for   permanent display very interesting things though  you see the perspective moons Leonardo believes   we blur lines in reality that there aren't sharp  lines unlike Michelangelo and others he doesn't   do sharp line but the right-hand blessing is  actually much sharper than any other thing people   say that wasn't he didn't paint that way but he  was doing visual acuity perspective he called it   the perspective of when something looks distant  and at a certain point it's the sharpness when   it's about this far from your eye and he does  it that way because it makes a hand look like   it's actually moving to you it's coming out it's  three-dimensional it's coming out of the panel   to you and then there's a confusing thing I've  been in a lot of the newspaper articles about   this recently and I've tried not to stir up the  controversy but in my book I notice and write a   bit about and nobody had before the crystal orb  the thing about that crystal orb with the three   tiny dots it's perfectly scientifically right  except for one thing if you imagine I'll pick   it here a solid piece of art and you look at a  finger behind it or you look at clothing behind   it do this at home it distorts it makes it invert  sometimes you sort of see a reversal Christ robes   are not distorted in the least why is that could  be Leonardo just didn't know no no I've read his   notebooks he's doing the optics experiments he's  doing concave as he's doing how light refract he's   doing how mirrors he new second explanation is he  knew but it would be too distracting and he didn't   want the painting to look ugly so he kind of fakes  it even less he does with the Last Supper probably   the right explanation but an even more appealing  explanation is he knew he knew only a few viewers   would actually catch it but he's trying to show  the miraculous an undistorted nature of christ   shepherd ship of our world as salvador monday and  so he's trying to show it's a miracle i will skip   over this because it's about his feud with  michelangelo because i do want to get to the   discussion period but among the things he does is  in the flow of fluids he realizes that that's how   our blood flows and that's how our heart valves  open and shot it's not because of the pressure   as people thought is because the swirl brings  a membrane out and he has many meaning pages   describing it including the experiments he does  to prove it it was actually just fully proven   about 20 years ago with MRI type of imaging but  what I love about it is on the last pages of his   heart thing his mind is starting to wander so  there he draws the heart one more time and he's   doing something but he pauses and he draws a lie  around the heart a very human bit of distraction   always caring about how water flows into the bowl  and it culminates with this and I'll sort of make   this the last of the pictures he does optics  experiments to figure out that at the center   of the eye in the retina is exactly the cones  that see detail near the edges of the retinas   we see shadows and shapes so he understands the  science of how we look at an object he also do   sex the human mouth and smile to show in 14 pages  every muscle and nerve that controls the smile and   here on the final page if you look closely at the  very top he takes up a different not a pen but a   little piece of chalk and starts in 1503 to draw  what will become the most famous smile ever if   you look at that smile if you look at the picture  you see once again from the eons of past time to   the rivers winding connecting to the civilization  of the roads and then into our bodies it is the   connection of humans to our nature you also look  at that smile and you see the culmination of all   of science exact right of how the muscles of the  lips work and how they move but at the very edge   of the smile if you look directly at it there are  a couple of little details that make it point down   slightly as if not smiling and that's because if  you look at it he knew directly it wouldn't look   like she's smiling that much but then if your  eyes go to her forehead or cheek or her chin   the part of the retina catching her lips is sort  of on the corners of your retina and the shadows   make the smile and the colors make the smile  pop on so it's an interactive virtual reality   smile started in 1503 and it is deathbed in 1519  he still got it by a side still perfecting that   smile not giving it to the cloth merchants who  commissioned it but making it so that all of   his science and all of his Anatomy and all of  his feelings about mathematics and everything   else a combined in this painting to give it an  illusive smile that is mysterious that flickers   on and off the less you look for it and that is  why I think that those who say that his Anatomy   and science and everything else was time wasted  I think that smile answers us he dies in France   his very last notebook page as he's dying he's  old he's still trying the square of the circle   still trying ok Euclid said if we have a right  triangle and we vary the size of the leg and we   do does a chart in the very last line it says you  know here's how I've been trying then he says but   the soup is getting cold and we can imagine my  terrine his cook downstairs with melty and Saul   ie and all of his students are thereby waiting  for him even though he knows he's never going to   do it he's still trying to square the circle but  the soup is getting cold thank you all very much I I love how da Vinci would fit in perfectly in  San Francisco today oh man I couldn't see him you   know it's not quite the or no but I can see him  in the purple tunics the entourage flamboyant glam   boy he's probably into a lot of his comfortable  yeah yeah he was he was a vegetarian but there's   always a wonderful aura of mystery because  we have a shopping list and he loves buying   eel which I if you look at the Last Supper they  finally restored it it was eel with citrus now   I don't know which of the restaurants around here  do that but I hope they do i I want to start with   a little bit more about about him given that  he seemed a man ahead of his time how was he   viewed by his contemporaries well he was totally  beloved I mean he was one of the friendliest   most collegial people unlike Michelangelo whose  reclusive and kind of nasty and dressed only in   black and slept in his own boots you know where's  Leonardo everybody loves him he's known for being   both the most amazing artists and for screwing up  and not finishing some of his paintings the people   commissioned him try to write into the contracts  you know if you don't finish it you're gonna have   to pay us for all the paint she you know that  sort of thing but he was when he's doing the   Last Supper this is a good example people would  come and sit there in the refectory the public   would because they knew Leonardo would be there to  paint and they were just watching blow in and he'd   do a few strokes and look at it and then leave  somewhat dramatically so he was known at the time   as a great engineer and painter how would he see  himself though I missed all of this because he had   so many deep dives into science and engineering  but still the real passion it was I mean he was   called the agitator an artist to the Duke and then  engineering artists the French King and people say   did would he consider himself an engineer or an  artist and the highfalutin answer is he would not   have made a distinction between the two both are  beautiful brushstrokes that conveyed the glories   of creation and he wanted to be known as both  so you paint this picture of kind of a quirky   fellow when you go through the book and one that's  imperfect which kind of goes against some of your   other stories of some of the individuals you  you've documented how does that fit into this   larger narrative of a genius that kind of doesn't  always follow through on his bread is such a good   question cuz halfway through I mean I worked  on this book for years and gathering string and   halfway through I'm like wait a minute the guy  was a screw off half the time he procrastinate   he didn't finish some things he failed you know  the machines that never you know rolled in the   flying machines that never flew in the river  that's never diverted though and I'm thinking   okay that diminishes him and then I realized a  he was pushing for perfection and that there were   times he just wouldn't just let the poor you let  the perfect be the enemy of the good he wouldn't   just churn it out if it wasn't perfect but more  importantly I realized how human he was that he   was somebody we can really learn from because  unlike say Einstein who had this prize you know   you and I never even you are never gonna figure  out the tense of calculus of general relativity   and improve on it bunnies don't ask meetings  about tensor calculus right but Leonardo was   somebody we can relate to because it came from  a childlike curiosity a sense of observation   fantasizing half the time but then blurring the  line between reality and fantasy and so I think   his flaws actually make him more human what also  struck me as amazing is this is the 15th century   but you have so many primary source material all  these notebooks I think people will know more   about da Vinci than me from a writer how is all of  this material you said 7,000 pages well you know   when I was doing Steve Jobs I wanted to get some  of the things he had done in the 1990s when he was   working for next computer or something you and I  are the only two people remember what that was but   between this tensed apple and he's there in his  house near you know in Cupertino and I mean in   Palo Alto and he's got a next machine he's got two  technicians and they're trying to get the memos   and the emails but the operating system they can't  you know it just they cannot retrieve it paper is   an absolutely wonderful technology for the storage  of information the retrieval of information you   don't have to worry about Leonardo's operating  system in his notebooks not being compatible   with you know Windows XP or something and so  we have all of this and there's many lessons in   the book the last chapter is sort of some lessons  I've drawn but one of them is pretty simple which   is take notes on paper everyday and put them in  notebooks because 500 years after he did it we   can still play with those notebooks and be amazed  at least 50 years from now your grandchildren will   be able to look at your writings on paper unlike  your tweets and Facebook posts in MySpace and all   that stuff I hope no one without my chats and all  they'll be gone but wasn't paper at the time also   kind of a somewhat precious research I was it  was somewhat prejudiced they just invent I mean   sometimes you have to have multiple inventions  that happen all at once to have a San Francisco   in the 1970s or Florence in the 14 seventies  at that time you have the printing press the   year he was born Gutenberg starts printing books  so in his notebook we have from Leonardo get the   copy the translation of Euclid that's at the store  by the bridge all these he's just collecting four   hundred four hundred and fifty books by the end of  his notebooks he also they've invented something   called rag paper they've been able to take rags  because they're cloth merchants in Venice and   you know they're in that business and they have  a lot of leftover cloth and suddenly they're   making better paper they invent debit and credit  bookkeeping so the meta cheese become rich all   these things have to happen at once is like on in  in the valley inventing venture capital the same   time you're inventing the microchip the internet  and dropping acid it all kind of comes together at   least for Steve Jobs it did so paper was somewhat  valuable and that's why it's really cool that each   page he's cramming as much as possible on it I  showed you one of the notebook pages and so it's   not like this page will just be on water flow  he'll do water flow but he'll do his craggy man   will do people sitting at a table as a study for  a painting and so you see his mind how his mind   leaps around simply because he's trying to cram it  all on one page of the paper and it happened with   rhyme if not with the reason if you know what I  mean you can sort of see okay here's a mental leap   and it's not exactly like he was drawing these  triangles and then drew mountains but they kind   of rhyme before I'd read the book I had this  impression that he was prolific which you you   definitely indicate he's incredibly prolific but  I had this notion that all of those drawings that   we saw became reality which you quickly disabuse  me of in going through the book a lot of this was   just conception and then the reality I mean you  know this Steve Jobs once said vision without   execution and SaLuSa nation but that the yeah but  for Leonardo maybe because he was rejecting being   a notary I don't know but executing everything  perfectly once he got the conception right he   was cool and it was like all right I don't need to  execute all of these things so there are weapons   that took centuries before people could actually  build them but that's another lesson from Leonardo   which is sometimes just like you're a kid let your  imagination take hold fantasize about things that   may or may not work at least it'll make you ahead  of your time that's hard parenting advice yeah   when I think about my six learn to procrastinate  learned of imagine learned to daydream learned   of indulge fantasy and mystery and take notes on  paper and big I want to talk about the masterpiece   I want to talk about the smile in particular you  make no equivocations that the Mona Lisa is one   of the greatest pieces of art ever conceived  but then you go new I think you might say the   greatest the greatest yeah and it took a long  time for it to be for it to be painted and I I   think you gave us a hint earlier but I'd love to  dive even deeper onto how much detail he went into   particularly about the cadavers which is yeah as  I said that smile in the whole painting he starts   in 1503 and as with jenever to Benjy the one I  showed you at the beginning when he's a young   painter it's for cloth merchants middle-class  cloth merchants wife and you richest people in   Italy Isabella d'Este is saying do my portrait  I'll pay you ain't no he doesn't dance to the   music of patrons he does what he wants to do  another lesson and he never delivers it to cloth   marching at his deathbed there you know by his bed  and still got four paintings one of which is the   Mona Lisa he's carried it by pack-mule across  the Alps and all over Italy because he knows   there's always brushstrokes that can perfect it  and he's using oil glaze with the tiniest amounts   of pigment so that it's hundreds of layers of  very thin brush strokes so thin and tiny that   even without greatest scientific instruments we  can't see each brush strokes separately I mean   he's just so blended and so perfect together and  the science of it is particularly interesting I   told you about the anatomy of the smile but he saw  it's with the white primer coat on I think poplar   is the wood he uses and he knows that by adding  layer after layer of paint that the light will   go through each layer and hit the small amounts  of pigment in each layer and so some of the light   will be reflected right from the surface back to  your eye and some will be reflected from 30 layers   down back to your eye and he's using slightly  different iron oxide to get the shadow Browns   right and some will go all the way to the primer  coat and bounce back so it looks like the light   is coming from inside of her trust me this is a  huge leap in art and then he dissection I say 30   cadavers to make sure he knows every muscle and  every nerve that touches every muscle in the face   and whether the nerve comes from the brain or  the spinal cord is he drawing upon Anatomy from   that time was there medical school you know now  he's doing his own cadavers in the basement of   both the hospital in Florence and then in Milan  and I mean I wish I had more of the pages but   among the things he's able to do because there  are anatomist of the time but des sections were   frowned upon it was just becoming tolerate that  then too he does beautiful anatomy drawings you   know like this one for example this is not of the  face but it's obviously the fetus in the womb this   is something that did not happen until Leonardo  decided I'm gonna do a lot of anatomy drawings and   was that sort of just beyond the fact that it was  it was groundbreaking at a time did people receive   it well because this seems to cross certain lines  well it does and at one point in Rome he's turned   in to the authorities and he has to stop doing  just dissections the church had so many different   men like the church often does mixed emotions  about various things and in Rome it was worse   than it was in Milan and so he gets in trouble  when he's doing it there but he does it I mean   he's Leonardo he's not gonna stop being curious  how much of how we have so much information   about him through these notebooks are there many  mysteries that remain about DaVinci oh the great   thing is you have to embrace mystery which is the  last lesson I have in my final chapter because so   much about him is mysterious and even as he blurs  the lines like right there or if you look at the   difference between a Michelangelo painting in a  Leonardo painting Michelangelo on the left sharp   delineated lines which is unlike the way we see  the world Leonardo having the blurred distinction   but from the exact place of his birth which  I discussed in the first pages of the book to   whether or not he truly died in the arms of  the king of France which I discussed in the   last pages of the book there's always a little  mystery on the edges with Leonardo mm-hmm uh so   much of your biographies that you've written when  you've talked about them you're a sort of a part   of the story about how these people their stories  have impacted you so how has spending seven years   doing all this research on da Vinci how is it  impacted you beyond the fact that you're clearly   have a second career as an art critic I'll give  you one example as we go through our day you may   be a little bit like me you're walking towards the  front door the Commonwealth Club and you pull out   your iPhone and you check this and that and the  other I have now done like Leonardo instructs us   to do and does by example I try to pause for maybe  5 seconds 10 seconds sometimes a whole minute to   observe things that we just take for granted I  got out of the cab at the corner walked around   had never seen the new building the salt air  suddenly hits me that go wow so I look and I   look at the water and I looked at the tiniest of  the Whitecaps and I tried to figure out how do   the ripples come across and why do the ripples not  go in the exact direction of the wind why because   Leonardo and Ben Franklin both in their notebooks  wonder how do ripples form on the surface of water   because Leonardo when he did though River Jordan  going past the ankles of Jesus in that painting   gets the ripples right pausing for just a moment  to think why does water why did light glint on the   leaf a curved leaf and I see a sparkle what was  it the sunlight hit something shiny how did it get   to my eye these are the things that kids notice  and that we don't and were sometimes to distract   it too busy to whatever to just pause and notice  something so it's not that it comes naturally to   me it may not even come naturally to Leonardo but  I push myself to say wait a minute look at that   water look at the ripples so you believe that's  a learned element totally Leonardo's yeah look I   did it just now I looked when I came in I looked  at that water and I said look at the ripples how   would I depict them how are they like sound waves  leonardo asked that question - do they bounce back   when they hit an object you know there's Leonardo  drawings near the end of they're right there water   flowing into a pond how does it cause a swirl  what's it like when water flows past an object   why does it look curly the way it does this is  not as I said tension calculus you and I can do   this I remember in in college one of my physics  professors as he had pour half-and-half into his   coffee would remark about how that was the best  tangible example of chaos theory that he's ever   seen it is actually entropy if you ever want to  know why the arrow of time actually goes forward   it's because you're half and half will never  under from the coffee because basically the arrow   of entropy and of chaos I asked about whether and  Leonardo knew that - he knew the flow of water was   like the flow of time and that every incident was  not a single incident but connected to the moment   before in the moment afterwards and so I think  even noting the passage of time the way Einstein   Leonardo did it's sort of amazing because you he's  clearly this larger-than-life flamboyant very vain   character and at the same time you ascribe to him  the fairly incredibly philosophical moments as   well I asked about whether that can be learned  is because there's this notion at least when I   was growing up that genius is innate that there's  something really special about these people that   you've chronicled and while certainly you you  emphasize that that there is something special   about Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs and and davinci  you don't make them larger-than-life characters   there yeah because you know I'm not true there are  certain things that are innate most things are a   mixture of being an eight and you know heritage  and breathing and interacting with our environment   but as I said what might be an eight might be a  certain type of intelligence but those intelligent   people don't often amount to much what really  causes it is as I said imagination creativity that   is not innate that is something we may have as a  kid and we either have it beaten out of us by our   teachers and parents or we nurture it but Leonardo  and Ben Franklin Ben friend them when the smartest   of the founders I mean Jefferson Madison he wasn't  the most passionate I mean John Adams his cousin   Samuel but he was the one who tied things together  and was open to as I ride up and down doing the   Postal Service why do these whirlwinds happen  and does that help explain the Gulf Stream and   even tying that to his statecraft so those are  things that are not people born with a superhuman   processing power that we can't ever try to emulate  Ben Franklin and Leah the reason I wrote Leonardo   was to refute that thing you keep being told which  is don't worry you can't ever be like that you had   to be born that way no Leonardo made himself that  way starting as a little kid the rivers going into   the Arno so I want to go back to something you  said at the beginning smart people are a dime   a dozen it's the creative people that matter if  it's the creative people that matter how do we as   a society nurture that I mean first of all we quit  siloing things telling you here's the different   discipline you've got to study engineering or math  and that's different from art or music or whatever   we have to say get out of those disciplines  at universities and school kids and even us   and you know people working and outside that  window I can probably see them they get siloed   and their knowledge and say no love the beauty of  everything and this is always gets applause I mean   not applause but you know people say yeah I agree  with you when I talk about how we can't just be   only engineers and mathematicians it's those who  connect art and creativity that'll do it but what   I also say is if you're somebody who loves art and  music and plays you'd be appalled if somebody said   I don't know the difference between Shakespeare  and you know stop it or between Macbeth and   Hamlet or I don't like music or whatever and yet  people like that people like my friends they would   happily merrily admit even joke or brag that they  don't know the difference between say a transistor   and a resistor they don't know how logic is  done through on-off switches on a circuit they   don't know that there's between an integral and  differential equation and they feel I just don't   do math well I don't do engineering well you know  humanists and people love the Arts they've got to   also go to the intersection not just claim that  the engineer should come to their part of the   intersection the intersection has always felt  like an empty intersection at times it's it's   occupied by by few people do you like there's  room to crowd that intersection with so many   more now oh yeah I thank you Steve Jobs is one  of the great examples but the ultimate creative   people those who in college or before they drop  out study calligraphy and dance and music is also   electronics and I can find within these zip codes  people from EV Williams to Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk   to who love storytelling love music love space  travel love you know business models and the   more wide-ranging their curiosity the more likely  they are to be creative you end the book with many   lessons that you feel like you walked away with  personally they're not prescriptive there's just   sort of there's their items are there anything you  want to share that really most impacted you yeah   I mean I've talked about some which is retain your  childlike sense of curiosity you mentioned we were   target once can I do the woodpecker oh yeah one of  my favorite points in other blogs a favor is you   mentioned and you highlight in the notebook there  is a in one of his notes there is just a random   question about how describe the tongue without  any context I know it's like - the context is   like 15 other questions like why do people yawn  explain whether the muscles that do the eyebrow   the same that wrinkles the nose you know why is  the sky blue describe the tongue of a woodpecker   so that's what I do a double-take right I say wait  a minute this guy's really going on I mean there's   no use use for that not you know whatever sound  like you need it to do a flight of birds whatever   how would you wake up one morning and decide you  need to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks   like and people kind of you know I make fun of it  and I'd say how would you even know I mean woody   did grab a woodpecker and open his mouth and so  I skipped by not being like Leonardo not having   learned from Leonardo I just sort of jokingly  yeah it's in the introduction in the book I   write it and sort of joke about just what I just  said run into it a few more times and later in the   book I'm trying to figure out friction and stuff  and muscles and how they move and finally I say   to myself wait I'm not being like Leonardo I ought  to go figure out what the tongue of the woodpecker   looks like now the tongue of the woodpecker is  three times as long as the beak it wraps around   the brain when it retracts so then when the Packer  hits the bark at ten times what would kill a human   it cushions the brain there is no reason you need  to know that it is useless information but the   last two paragraphs of my book I describe it to  you on the theory that like Leonardo who put that   in his notebook you just might want to know out  of curiosity pure curiosity I loved it because I   actually when I first got to it I looked it up  myself yeah because because I was I don't know   how a woodpecker tongue works take us into the  process of doing this we're talking about 600   years of history that you had to delve through and  7,000 pages of notebooks what was it like to delve   into this this well you know it was tough you know  a dirty job somebody had to do it to go see the   notebooks I mean it means you have to go to Venice  and Florence and Paris and London and Windsor   Castle and Madrid and Seattle so it was a journey  of joy to just go from place to place nobodies   have a fully compiled these notebooks which  is kind of cool it means you have to go to the   bibliothèque ambrosia Anna and you know see the  Codex on the flight of birth here grab my book let   me borrow it for half a second we get the book my  little author picture if you look at it carefully   it's in the Academy in Venice we're on the fourth  floor in a closet not on display is Vitruvian Man   they just keep it in a gray folder because it  can't be exposed to light too much and I go with   my wife and I know somebody in Italy is helping me  my translator and we talk our way into saying open   up the closet show it to me and there I get to sit  there looking noticing how in sight if he does the   line right there how right there in the navel he  puts a protractor point and you get a tingle up   your spine you're actually in the presence of  the hand of the master so that's how difficult   it was to do all this research very difficult and  overwhelming but you weren't the first to write it   biography of da Vinci you won't be the last either  but you must have seen something that was missing   from some of those well the great they're great  biographies of Leonardo more importantly great   books about them there aren't really biographies  in the center they're not chronological life   stories but they're about his art or whatever  Martin Kemp who helped me quite a bit add on   at Oxford there's a couple of books analyzing  Leonardo da Vinci and I think they're great   he has a new book out analyzing the background of  the painting of the Mona Lisa meaning the families   involved that sort of thing so you get to meet  all sorts of people and I hope like a good you   know person I try to be collaborative and even  when we talked about Leonardo's mother you know   Martin Kemp is in there by name is the person who  had discovered exactly this about his mother so   it's fun working with people who have worked on  Leonardo but you look at the greatest books about   Leonardo such as Kenneth Clark I can't remember  when it was but it was like 50 60 70 years ago   Kenneth Clark is an art connoisseur he's the  one I told you it's just brilliant in this kind   of source shape of the paintings but he's the  one who said he wasted all this time doing math   and geology and Anatomy what a shame he could have  painted more pictures so I come of it come at this   book unlike others who've written about Leonardo  they usually base their books on the twelve or so   great masterpieces of painting I base my book on  the notebooks and what he was doing every day and   the connections he made between art and science  and engineering and spirituality that you can only   get as you look at those pages crammed with many  things on it and so I think unlike other books   about Leonardo this is a narrative biography that  starts with them being born ends on that deathbed   but does it being as its foundation the notes  that Leonardo took so everyone wants to know   I have a stack of questions here saying what's  next what's your next book they're already ready   for what's next but but rather than ask that  I want I want to know how has this or series   of biographies impacted what you're looking for  in terms of telling the next story because yeah   I think it's it's easy to look on the surface and  see that you're telling a story of genius but it   seems much more than that one right it's a story  of how we can all be more like the great geniuses   it's a study about creativity what it is how  you achieve it and I didn't Leonardo's great at   noticing patterns I wasn't I had done Ben Franklin  and then oh they let me dine sign and Steve Jobs   said do me next said yeah sure easiest yes and it  was only then I started noticing the pattern which   is people who are interested in the widest variety  of things tend to see the patterns of nature in   ways that make them more creative than most other  people and so that is the theme and I must say for   better or worse this is a culmination I mean you  don't get greater I mean I decided to do Leonardo   da Vinci because he was the most creative he was  a person most curious about everything you could   possibly know about everything that could be known  about the universe including how we fit in so it's   not like then you go on to the even greater  person I knew that at the end of all these   biographies would come the greatest of them all  Leonardo da Vinci so I don't plan to do another   creative genius biography book I plan to move  back to my hometown of New Orleans I probably   will write a book about race and sex and jazz  in the 1890s and storyville in New Orleans and   before we do the color line but it won't be it'll  be a smaller book with us audience of people who   love jazz New Orleans and worry about race I  will put in my vote I think it'd be fascinating   for you to tell a story about the geography of  a place informing and the geography of genius   and creativity is like Florence and 1470 the Bay  Area in 1970 or til today in which when you get a   diverse group of people I mean just take jazz for  example you have to have people coming back from   the spanish-american war Hocking their cornets and  you have to have the drummer's for freed slaves   in Congo Square doing their rhythms from Africa  you have to have the Creole John de couleur you   know octoroon de quadroons with a Creole Foxtrot  orchestras and you have to have the spirituals   of the people from the plantations coming down  and the blues and the sanctified church and you   have to have a place that's enormous ly tolerant  of all of that and then jazz is born I believe   strongly in the geography of creativity Wow  I didn't understand half the terms you just   threw out there but I can tell you it's the best  advertisement for visiting New Orleans ever yeah   it also works on the food if you're not into the  jazz the cuisine comes the same way unfortunately   we've we've reached our last question and and it's  quite simply it's been 500 plus years since da   Vinci passed away and he's had numerous impacts  on our society do you think his legacy going   forward is going to be the same as it's been is  he going to still be relevant yeah I think we're   seeing actually an increase in the relevance  of Leonardo da Vinci because for a very long   time starting with Einstein in a way and CP snow  or whatever you had the Great Divide of the two   cultures meaning those who love science and those  who love humanities and art and I say Einstein   because he loved both Mozart and music and math  and everything else but Einstein made it difficult   the average Ben Franklin could understand Newton  you know action reaction force mass you know the   laws of Newton were things normal Einstein made  it seem like you had to be a total genius to   understand science and people either love science  because of him or they were intimidated because of   him so you have the two cultures split and that  lasts for most of the 20th century my father was   an engineer a scientist my grandfather and stuff  but I was more of a humanist and so I realized how   that split had occurred it is because of this area  in this period that now the merger of engineering   and beauty the notion that beauty matters but  also circuit and software matters and that those   have to be done jointly the people who worry  about artificial intelligence putting us out of   jobs there's a long tradition mainly in this area  starting with Doug Engelbart Alan Kay Steve Jobs   which is that the combination of human creativity  and process microchip processing power combined   will always increase faster than the productivity  of humans alone or machines alone so if you want   to not worry about artificial intelligence and  robots replacing us you have to say yes if we   have the partnership of creativity of humans  as well as the processing power of microchips   that will increase faster that is making I'm sorry  about the long answer here but that makes Leonardo   all the more relevant the people who can find the  beauty in engineering in the patterns of nature   but also understand the simplest thing that is  true of Einstein Steve Jobs and mainly Leonardo   the simplest lesson Beauty matters hmm please  join me in thanking Walter Isaacson and thank you I'd I'd like to remind everyone that copies of  Walter's books are available for sale outside and   he'll be happy to sign yours we do appreciate  you letting letting him make his way to the   signing table first and I'm cushaw Hari thank  you for joining us here at the grand new club

Channel: Commonwealth Club of California

Views: 12,642

Keywords: Walter Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, Classical Italian Art, Art, Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco

Id: b1Gs_9xLv04

Length: 68min 42sec (4122 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2017