Think Like Da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius

4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3. The Great Pyramid Builders

2. William Shakespeare

And the greatest genius of all time, according to Buzan and Keene’s exhaustive research? Leonardo da Vinci.

As Giorgio Vasari wrote of Leonardo in the original version of his The Lives of the Artists, “Heaven sometimes sends us beings who represent not humanity alone but divinity itself, so that taking them as our models and imitating them, our minds and the best of our intelligence may approach the highest celestial spheres. Experience shows that those who are led to study and follow the traces of these marvelous geniuses, even if nature gives them little or no help, may at least approach the supernatural works that participate in his divinity.”

Our evolving understanding of the multiplicity of intelligence and the capacities of the brain suggests that nature gives us more help than we might have imagined. In Think Like Da Vinci we will “study and follow the traces” of this most marvelous of all geniuses, bringing his wisdom and inspiration to your life, every day.

A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO GENIUS (#ulink_efcc2bbf-0455-5a6b-8591-4d79e232d289)

In the pages that follow you will learn a practical approach, tested in experience, for applying the essential elements of Leonardo’s genius to enrich your life. You will discover an exhilarating, original way of seeing and enjoying your world as you develop powerful strategies for creative thinking and new approaches to self-expression. You’ll learn proven techniques for sharpening your senses, liberating your unique intelligence, and harmonizing body and mind. With Leonardo as your inspiration, you will make your life a work of art.

Although you may already be familiar with Da Vinci’s life and work, you’ll finish this book with a fresh perspective and a deeper appreciation for this most enigmatic figure. Looking at the world from his point of view, you may also get a taste of the loneliness genius brings. But I guarantee that you’ll be uplifted by his spirit, inspired by his quest, and exalted by your association with him.

The book begins with a capsule review of the Renaissance and its parallels with our time, followed by a biographical sketch of Leonardo and a summary of his major accomplishments. The heart of the book is the discussion of the Seven Da Vincian Principles. These principles are drawn from an intensive study of the man and his methods. I’ve named them in Leonardo’s native Italian. The good news is that Leonardo’s principles will probably be intuitively obvious to you. You do not have to try to invent them in your life. Rather, like much of common sense, they need to be remembered, developed, and applied.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), architect of Florence’s Uffizi and a pupil of Michelangelo’s, originally published his The Lives of the Artists in 1549. He was credited by scholars with effectively inventing the discipline of art history with that book. Lives remains the most important source on Italian Renaissance art. With uncanny flair Vasari profiles the lives and work of almost two hundred painters, sculptors, and architects, including Giotto, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and, of course, Leonardo.

The Seven Da Vincian Principles are:

Curiosità – An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.

Dimostrazione – A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

Sensazione – The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

Sfumato (literally “Going up in Smoke”) – A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.

Arte/Scienza – The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. “Whole-brain” thinking.

Corporalita – The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.

Connessione – A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

Having read this far, you are already applying the first Da Vincian principle. Curiosità – the quest for continuous learning – comes first because the desire to know, to learn, and to grow is the powerhouse of knowledge, wisdom, and discovery.

If you are interested in thinking for yourself and freeing your mind from limiting habits and preconceptions, then you are on track for the second principle: Dimostrazione. In his search for truth, Da Vinci insisted on questioning conventional wisdom. He used the word dimostrazione to express the importance of learning for oneself, through practical experience.

Pause for a few moments, and recall the times in the past year when you felt most vividly alive. Chances are, your senses were heightened. Our third principle – Sensazione – focuses on sharpening the senses, consciously. Leonardo believed that refining sensory awareness was the key to enriching experience.

Portrait of the Maestro.

As you sharpen your senses, probe the depths of experience, and awaken your childlike powers of questioning, you will encounter increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. “Confusion endurance” is the most distinctive trait of highly creative people, and Leonardo probably possessed more of that trait than anyone who has ever lived. Principle number four – Sfumato – guides you to be more at home with the unknown, to make friends with paradox.

For balance and creativity to emerge from uncertainty requires principle number five – Arte/Scienza – or what we now call whole-brain thinking. But Da Vinci believed that balance was more than just mental. He exemplified and affirmed the importance of principle number six – Corporalita – the balance of body and mind. And if you appreciate patterns, relationships, connections, and systems – if you seek to understand how your dreams, goals, values, and highest aspirations can be integrated into your daily life – then you are already applying principle number seven: Connessione. Connessione ties everything together.

“We respect him by learning from him.”

– FREUD ON DA VINCI

Each principle is highlighted by excerpts from the maestro’s notebooks and illustrated with his sketches or paintings. This illumination is followed by some questions for reflection and self-assessment. These questions are designed to stimulate your thinking and inspire your application of the principles. The questions are followed by a program of practical exercises for cultivating a personal and professional Renaissance. To get the most benefit from Think Like Da Vinci, read the whole book first, without doing the exercises. Just contemplate the questions for reflection and self-assessment. After this preview, review the explanation of each principle and then do the exercises. Some of the exercises are easy and fun, while others require challenging inner work. All are designed to bring the spirit of the maestro to your daily life. In addition to the exercises, you will find an annotated reading and resource list to guide you in exploring and applying each principle. The reading list includes recommendations on the Renaissance, the history of ideas, the nature of genius, and, of course, the life and work of Leonardo.

In the final section of the book you will discover “The Beginner’s Da Vinci Drawing Course,” and you’ll also learn how you can participate in a history-making project that embodies the essence of the Da Vincian spirit.

The Renaissance, Then and Now (#ulink_b0b0a784-1da4-58fb-a8e1-6677a66e281d)

Just across the Arno River, a bit off the well-trodden Florentine tourist track, you’ll find the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Enter, make a left and then another quick left, and you are in the Brancacci Chapel, surrounded by the frescoes of Masolino and Masaccio. The first fresco on the left is Masaccio’s evocation of Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden. And it is here that the Renaissance begins: Instead of having the two-dimensional otherworldliness of medieval paintings, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve look like real human beings. Their slumping postures and downcast faces express real emotion. Portrayed in three dimensions, with their feet solidly on the ground, Masaccio’s figures herald a new era of human promise and potentiality.

To appreciate this new era, and to get the most from our study of Leonardo da Vinci, we must first gain some insight into the preceding period. In A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, William Manchester claims that pre-Renaissance Europe was characterized by “a mélange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.” Describing the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the dawn of the Renaissance, Manchester writes, “In all that time nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined. Except for the introduction of water wheels in the 800s and windmills in the 1100s, there had been no inventions of significance. No startling new ideas had appeared, no new territories outside Europe had been explored. Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could remember. The center of the Ptolemaic universe was the known world – Europe with the Holy Land and North Africa on its fringes. The sun moved round it every day. Heaven was above the immovable Earth, somewhere in the overarching sky; hell seethed far beneath their feet. Kings ruled at the pleasure of the Almighty; all others did what they were told to do … The church was indivisible, the afterlife a certainty; all knowledge was already known. And nothing would ever change.”

The word Renaissance comes from the combination of the French verb renaître, meaning “to revive,” and the noun naissance, meaning birth. The Italians call it Rinascimento. After centuries of serfdom and superstition, the ideal of human power and potentiality was reborn. The revival of this classical ideal was presaged by Giotto, initiated by Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Masaccio, and reached full expression through Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. This dramatic transformation of worldview from the medieval era went hand in hand with a number of discoveries, innovations, and inventions, including:

The printing press – Made knowledge available to vast numbers of people beyond the clergy and ruling elites. In 1456 there were fewer than sixty extant copies of Gutenberg’s bible, the first book printed in Europe. By the turn of the century there were over fifteen million printed books in circulation.

The pencil and inexpensive paper – Made writing, note-taking, and therefore the recording of learning accessible to the common citizen.

The astrolabe, the magnetic compass, and the large sailing ship – Resulted in a tremendous expansion of ocean traffic, international trade, and exchange of information. As Columbus and Magellan proved that the world is not flat, much of traditional wisdom was rendered flat.

The long-range cannon – Although catapults, mangonels, and small cannons were in use for many years, they were not able to breach fortress walls. The powerful long-range cannon was pioneered by a Hungarian engineer named Urban in the mid-1400s. As the new technology spread, the feudal fortress, and therefore feudalism, soon lost its impregnability. The stage was set for the birth of the modern nation-state.

The mechanical clock – Stimulated commerce by allowing people to experience time as a controllable commodity. In the Middle Ages people had no concept of time as we understand it. The vast majority of people didn’t know what year it was or even what century they lived in.

Many of these innovations and most of the great art masterpieces of the period were fueled by the entrepreneurial spirit, the spreading desire for consumer goods, and a rush to capital. In Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine shows, with magnificent illustrations and incisive, detailed text, how the cultural and intellectual transformations of the Renaissance were driven by expanding capitalism. She suggests that “those impulses which today we disparage as ‘consumerism’ ” were present in the Renaissance mind-set that produced the works and advances we treasure today. Even commercialism played a role: “A painter’s reputation rested on his ability to arouse commercial interest in his works of art, not on some intrinsic criteria of intellectual worth.”

This extraordinary burgeoning awareness of human capability was delightfully reflected by changes in the rules of chess. Prior to the Renaissance, the queen moved only one square at a time; but as the perception of human horizons and potential expanded, she was granted the wide-ranging powers she maintains to this day.

Still, the question remains why the Renaissance took place when it did. For one thousand years prior, European accomplishments in the realms of science and exploration were negligible. Throughout the Middle Ages, the vast majority of human intellectual energy and effort was diverted to questions of doctrinal minutiae and “holy” war. Instead of exploring new lands, innovations, and ideas, the best minds engaged in debates on how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, and the church rarely hesitated to torture anyone who questioned its dogma. This, of course, put something of a damper on independent thinking.

The seminal event that led to the Renaissance, my colleague Raymond Keene and I believe, occurred in the fourteenth century when the Black Plague swept through Europe. Almost one half of the population was destroyed in a rapid and hideous fashion. Priests, bishops, nobles, and knights died in the same proportion as peasants, serfs, harlots, and tradesmen. Devotion, piety, and loyalty to the church provided no protection, shaking the faith of people from all walks of life. Moreover, wealthy families had their ranks thinned almost overnight, concentrating wealth in the hands of the lucky survivors. While they would previously have spent this wealth on the church, the wealthy began to hedge their bets after the plague and began to invest in independent scholarship. In what was at first an almost imperceptibly subtle shift of consciousness, answers were sought outside of prayer and dogma. Surging intellectual energy, dammed for a millennium in ecclesiastical reservoirs, began to flow through the pestilence-inspired breach.

Five hundred years after the Renaissance, at a time when nations and corporations rival the church in their claims to people’s loyalties, the world is experiencing an even more dramatic expansion of knowledge, capitalism, and interconnection. Air travel – the fulfillment of one of Da Vinci’s dreams and prophecies – telephones, radio, television, motion pictures, facsimile machines, personal computers, and now the Internet combine to weave an increasingly complex web of global information exchange. Revolutionary advances in agriculture, automation, and medicine are taken for granted. We’ve landed men on the moon and machines on Mars, unleashed the power of the atom, deciphered the genetic code, and unlocked many of the secrets of the human brain. These dramatic developments in communication and technology stimulate the energies of capitalism and free society and the erosion of totalitarianism.

You can’t help but notice that change is accelerating. How these changes will affect you personally and professionally, nobody knows. But, like the thinkers at the end of the cataclysmic change caused by the Black Death, we owe it to ourselves to ask if we can afford to let the authorities of our time – whether church, government, or corporation – think for us.

It is safe to say, however, that accelerating change and increasing complexity multiply the value of intellectual capital. The individual’s ability to learn, adapt, and think, independently and creatively, is at a premium. During the Renaissance, individuals with a medieval mind-set were left behind. Now, in the Information Age, medieval-and industrial-era thinkers are threatened with extinction.

The Renaissance was inspired by the ideals of classical antiquity – awareness of human power and potentiality, and a passion for discovery – but it also transformed them to meet the challenges of the time. Now we can draw inspiration from Renaissance ideals, transforming them to meet our own challenges.

Perhaps, like many of my friends, you feel that your greatest challenge is living a balanced, fulfilling life in the face of increasing stress from every direction. As we noted, our medieval ancestors had no concept of time; we, on the other hand, are in danger of being controlled by the clock. In the Middle Ages, information was unavailable to the average person, and the few books that existed were in Latin, which was taught only to the elite. Now we are awash in an unprecedented, unrelenting overflow of data. In five hundred years we’ve moved from a world where everything was certain and nothing changed to a world where nothing seems certain and everything changes.

Accelerating change has inspired a never-before-seen burgeoning of interest in personal growth, soul awakening, and spiritual experience. The sheer availability of information about the world’s esoteric traditions has launched a tsunami of seeking. (A hundred years ago you would have had to have climbed a mountain in India to learn how to meditate; today you can take a course at the Y, download information from the Internet, or choose from hundreds of volumes at your local bookstore.) At the same time, the information glut contributes to pervasive cynicism, fragmentation, and a sense of helplessness. We have more possibilities, more freedom, more options than any people who have ever lived. Yet there is more junk, more mediocrity, more garbage to sort through than ever too.

THE MODERN RENAISSANCE MAN OR WOMAN

The ideal of the Renaissance man or woman, or uomo universale, has always suggested a well-rounded, balanced person, comfortable with both art and science. The liberal arts curriculum of universities around the world originated as a reflection of this ideal. In an age of increasing specialization, attaining balance requires going against the grain. In addition to possessing a good knowledge of the classical liberal arts, the modern uomo universale is also: