ps180529 What I learned from Leonardo da Vinci 

At the end of his biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson gave a list of twenty things to learn from Leonardo. I added one at the end. If I add to this list an abridged version of Isaacson’s details, it would be to create Ingenuity Cards, a deck of 21 cards based on Isaacson’s lessons. It would then be possible to make these into the card game, Rembrandt’s Ghost, where these represent Rembrandt’s secrets, the notes he hid under the tiles of his printing room.

Isaacson prefaced this section: “The fact that Leonardo was not only a genius but also very human – quirky and obsessive and playful and easily distracted – makes him more accessible. He was not graced with the type of brilliance that is completely unfathomable to us. Instead, he was self – taught and willed his way to his genius. So even though we may never be able to match his talents, we can learn from him and try to be more like him. His life offers a wealth of lessons.

1.   Be curious, relentlessly curious.

“I have no special talents,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. “I am just passionately curious.” Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring the circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a woodpecker, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon, and the edges of shadows. Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did.

2.   Seek knowledge for its own sake.

Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.

3.   Retain a childlike sense of wonder.

At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over every day phenomena. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.

4.   Observe.

Leonardo’s greatest skill was his acute ability to observe things. It was the talent that empowered his curiosity, and vice versa. It was not some magical gift but a product of his own effort. When he visited the moats surroundings Svorza Castle, he looked at the four-wing dragonflies and noticed how the wing pairs alternate in motion. When he walked around town, he observed how the facial expressions of people relate to their emotions, and he discerned how light bounces off differing surfaces. He saw which birds move their wings faster on the upswing than on the downswing, and which do the opposite. This, too, we can emulate. Water flowing into a bowl? Look, as he did, at exactly how the eddies swirl. Then wonder why.

5.   Start with the details.

In his notebook, Leonardo shared a trick for observing something carefully: Do it in steps, starting with each detail. A page of the book, he noted, cannot be absorbed in one stare; you need to go word-by-word. “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”

6.   See things unseen.

Leonardo’s primary activity in many of his formative years was conjuring up pageants, performances, and plays. He mixed theatrical ingenuity with fantasy. This gave him a combinatory creativity. He could see birds in flight and also angels, lions roaring and also dragons.

7.   Go down rabbit holes.

He filled the opening pages of one of his notebooks with 169 attempts to square the circle. In eight pages of his Codex Leicester, he recorded 730 findings about the flow of water; in another notebook, he listed 67 words that describe different types of moving water. He measured every segment of the human body, calculated their proportional relationships, and then did the same for a horse. He drilled down for the pure joy of geeking out.

8.   Get distracted.

The greatest rap on Leonardo was that these passionate pursuits cause him to wander off on tangents, literally in the case of his math inquiries. It “has left posterity the poorer,” Kenneth Clark lamented. But in fact, Leonardo’s willingness to pursue whatever shiny object caught his eye made his mind richer and filled with more connections.

9.   Respect facts.

Leonardo was a forerunner of the age of observational experiments and critical thinking. When he came up with an idea, he devised an experiment to test it. And when his experience showed that a theory was flawed – such as his belief that the springs within the earth were replenished the same way as blood vessels in humans – he abandoned his theory and sought a new one. This practice became common a century later, during the age of Galileo and Bacon. It has, however, become a bit less prevalent these days. If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information.

10.               Procrastinate.

While painting the last supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave. He told Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he explained, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Most of us don’t need advice to procrastinate; we do it naturally. But procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer.

11.               Let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

When Leonardo could not make the perspective in The Battle of Anghiari or the interaction in the Adoration of the Magi work perfectly, he abandoned them rather than producing work that was merely good enough. He carried around masterpieces like his Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa to the end, knowing there would always be a new stroke he could add. Likewise, Steve Jobs was such a perfectionist that he held up shipping the original Macintosh until his team could make the circuit boards inside look beautiful, even though no one would ever see them. Both he and Leonardo new that real artists care about the beauty even of the parts unseen. Eventually, Jobs embraced a countermaxim, “Real artists ship,” which means that sometimes you ought to deliver a product even when there are still improvements that could be made. That is a good rule for daily life. But there are times when it’s nice to be like Leonardo and not let go of something until it’s perfect.

12.               Think visually.

Leonardo was not blessed with the ability to formulate math equations or abstractions. So he had to visualize them, which he did with his studies of proportions, his rules of perspective, his method for calculating reflections from concave mirrors, and his ways of changing one shape into another of the same size. Too often, when we learn a formula or a rule – even one so simple as the method for multiplying numbers or mixing a paint color – we no longer visualize how it works. As a result, we lose our appreciation for the underlying beauty of nature’s laws.

13.               Avoid silos.

At the end of many of his product presentations, Steve Jobs displayed a slide of a sign that showed the intersection of “Liberal arts” and “Technology” streets. He knew that at such crossroads lay creativity. Leonardo had a free–range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities. His knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in The Last Supper, and on a page of anatomical drawings depicting the dissection of lips he drew the smile that would appear in the Mona Lisa. He knew that art was a science and that science was an art. Whether he was drawing a fetus in the womb or the swirls of a deluge, he blurred the distinction between the two.

14.               Let your reach exceed your grasp.

Imagine, as he did, how you would build a human–powered flying machine or divert a river. Even try to devise a perpetual–motion machine or square a circle using only a ruler and a compass. There are some problems we will never solve. Learn why.

15.               Indulge fantasy.

His giant crossbow? The turtle–like tanks? His plan for an ideal city? The man–powered mechanisms to flap a flying machine? Just as Leonardo blurred the lines between science and art, he did so between reality and fantasy. It may not have produced flying machines, but it allowed his imagination to soar.

16.               Create for yourself, not just your patrons.

No matter how hard the rich and powerful marchesa Isabella d’Este begged, Leonardo would not paint her portrait. But he did begin one of a silk–merchants wife named Lisa. He did it because he wanted to, and he kept working on it for the rest of his life, never delivering it to the silk merchant.

17.               Collaborate.

Genius is often considered the purview of loners who retreat to their garrets and are struck by creative lightning. Like many myths, that of the loan genius has some truth in it. But there is usually more to the story. The Madonnas and drapery studies produced in Verrocchio’s studio, and the versions of Virgin of the Rocks and Madonna of the Yarnwinder and other paintings from Leonardo’s studio, were created in such a collaborative manner that it is hard to tell whose handmade which strokes. Vitruvian Man was produced after sharing ideas and sketches with friends. Leonardo’s best anatomy studies came when he was working in partnership with Marcantonio della Torre. And his most fun work came from collaborations on theatrical productions and evening entertainments at the Sforza Court. Genius starts with individual brilliance. It requires singular vision. But executing it often entails working with others. Innovation is a team sport. Creativity is a collaborative endeavor.

18.               Make lists.

And be sure to put odd things on them. Leonardo’s to-do lists may have been the greatest testaments to pure curiosity the world has ever seen.

19.               Take notes on paper.

Five-hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start writing them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our Tweets and Facebook posts.

20.               Be open to mystery.

Not everyone needs sharp lines.

One for the road – the Rule of 21

Years ago I made an axiom for myself called the Rule of 21: It takes twenty-one days to make or lose a habit. Partly because of the Rule of 21 and partly because I think I prefer odd numbers when I make a list, I added one more to the list of things Walter Isaacson said we can learn from Leonard da Vinci:

21.               Live life like a game.

This translates in at least two ways. One is: Live every day as if it were your last, because one day it will be true. The other is accredited to Confucius: Better to play games than do nothing at all. Maybe these 21 things are represented in my original idea for the International Print Center and Inkubators. I wonder: Are the nineteen components of the IPCI the way to realize and activate a list of twenty-one things Isaacson learned, and then to live your life like a game based on printmaking?

“Printmaking game-based learning for STREAM-based education.”