Tags: literature-notes

A few things worth noting. To be continued.

Brief Summary

A Biography by Isaacson (Isaacson, 2017)

Key Takeaways

• Go deeper than what is on surface. To paint a person, you must see the skeleton in your mind and construct the painting from there.

Miscellaneous Notes

• p.1: At 30 yo, Leonardo da Vinci (LdV) wrote a letter to ask for a job, listing what he can do in the first 10 paragraphs, e.g. engineering skills, design, building waterways, cannons, armoured vehicles and public buildings. And in the eleventh paragraph, he wrote he can also paint.
• p.3: Newton and Einstein had much processing power. LdV was curious and practiced intense observation.
• p.4: Vision without execution is hallucination. Ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy is a key to creativity. LdV knew how to marry observation and imagination.
• p.4: LdV left notebooks more than 7200 pages. Paper turns out to be a superb information storage technology, still readable after 500 years.
• p.8: LdV was dark and troubled at times, but he managed his demons while conjuring up his dragons.
• p.17: First-hand experience vs. learning from books, and others. He’s praising personal and deep learning through personal explorations.
• p.19: Freud’s thoughts of LdV reveals more about Freud than LdV himself.
• p.26: Florence was a beautiful place in all senses: Shops became studios, merchants financiers, and artisans artists.
• p.28: Note how angles of height produce shadows and the perception of depth.
• pp. 29-30: Check out Lean Battista Alberti. He said “one must apply the greatest artistry in three things: walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking. In each of these one must try to please everyone.
• p.40: No sharp lines … shadows. Light should be blended like smoke disappearing in air rendering contour-less image so smooth and images are still displayed.
• p.47: The glory of being an artist → reality informs artist but not constraint him.
• p.56: Translucent → Transcendent. Transform → Transit.
• p.70: Homosexuality was not uncommon. Verrocchio was never married nor did Botticelli. Other gay artists: Donatello, Michelangelo and Benvenito Cellini (convicted of sodomy twice).
• p.72: LdV as a gay, illegitimate and accused of sodomy twice, he regarded himself as “different” so that turned out to be more an asset than a hindrance.
• p.88: A good painter has to paint two principal things: the man and the intention of his mind. First is easy, second is represented by the movement of limbs and gestures. (movement is linked to mental state of the figure).

Movements should announce the motions of the mind.

• p.89: From Dante, “foam in the water, smoke upon the wind”.
• pp. 112-128: Court entertainers: LDV built instrument, played music, painted “credit card size” grotesques and also wrote pieces. Some interpreted these as he was suffering from madness. Some think that these pieces were written for performance (theater) “experience of deluge”. His writing is as lively as his paintings, make you feel that you’re in the scene. His writing reflected his dark side.
• p.149: The ten books on architecture by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (80 BC).
• p.149: Vitruvius work was appealing to LDV and Francesco. They use an analogy Francesco wrote: “All the arts and all the world’s rules are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body”.
• p.150: The proportions of man are analogous to well-conceived temple and to the macrocosm of the world became central to LDV’s world view.

Reference