Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.
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Vision without execution is hallucination. But I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.
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The work done for these pageants was ephemeral, but it was lucrative and stimulated the creative imagination of many of the artists involved.
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The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain.
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“As you go about town,” he wrote in one of them, “constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows.”
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Among men of worth there is scarcely greater cause for pride.
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“In narrative paintings you should closely intermingle direct opposites, because they offer a great contrast to each other, especially when they are adjacent. Thus, have the ugly one next to the beautiful, the large next to the small, the old next to the young.”
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“It is here that much precious time is wasted and many vain pleasures are enjoyed,” he wrote of a bed, “both by the mind in imagining impossible things and by the body in partaking of those pleasures that are often the cause of the failing of life.”
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“It’s an idealized self-portrait in which Leonardo, stripped down to his essence, takes his own measure, and in doing so embodies a timeless human hope: that we just might have the power of mind to figure out how we fit into the grand scheme of things. Think of the picture as an act of speculation, a kind of metaphysical self-portrait in which Leonardo—as an artist, a natural philosopher, and a stand-in for all of humanity—peers at himself with furrowed brow and tries to grasp the secrets of his own nature.”
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My intention is to consult experience first, and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way.
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[H]is uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding.
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“The point has no dimensions; the line is the transit of a point.” Using his method of theorizing by analogy, he wrote, “The instant does not have time; and time is made from the movement of the instant.”
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In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed, and the first of that which comes.
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[T]here are some problems that we will never be able to solve, and it’s useful to understand why.
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By exalting the interplay between art and science, Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy.
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We are always discovering new felicities of movement and harmony, growing more and more intricate, yet subordinate to the whole
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This inability to ground his fantasies in reality has generally been regarded as one of Leonardo’s major failings. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field.
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[I]f posterity is poorer because of the time Leonardo spent immersed in passions from pageantry to architecture, it is also true that his life was richer.
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[H]e had acquired enough textbooks and expert tutors that he failed to think differently.
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He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history.
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“He had no real understanding of the way in which the growth of knowledge was a cumulative and collaborative process.”
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One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it.
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He came to appreciate not only nature’s similarities but also its infinite variety.
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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.
