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

Computer literate: Although even Leonardo may have had trouble programming a VCR, the modern Renaissance man or woman is attuned to developments in information technology and is increasingly at home on the World Wide Web.

Mentally literate: As discussed earlier, 95 percent of what we know about the human brain has been learned in the last twenty years. Mental literacy is a term, coined by Tony Buzan, to express a practical familiarity with this evolving understanding of the workings of the human mind. It begins with an appreciation of the vast potential of the brain and the multiplicity of intelligences, and includes the development of the accelerated learning and creative thinking skills that will be introduced in the following pages.

Globally aware: In addition to appreciating the global links in communication, economies, and ecosystems, the modern uomo universale is comfortable with different cultures. Racism, sexism, religious persecution, homophobia, and nationalism are viewed as vestiges of a primitive stage of evolution. Modern Renaissance people in the West cultivate a particular appreciation for Eastern culture and vice versa.

For seekers who wish to cut through the dross, to find deeper levels of meaning, beauty, and quality of life, Leonardo da Vinci – the patron saint of independent thinkers – beckons you onward.

Masaccio’s “expulsion” is an ironic theme for what may be the first true Renaissance painting. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo spent many hours studying it. Leonardo commented, “Masaccio showed by the perfection of his work how those who are inspired by a model other than nature, a mistress above all masters, are laboring in vain.”

The Life of Leonardo da Vinci (#ulink_0c2d1182-a32f-5b21-b092-0ed6253b6b7e)

If you have ever filled out a job application or written your résumé, then you can particularly appreciate the letter that Leonardo wrote in 1482 to Ludovico Sforza, regent of Milan. Da Vinci composed what is perhaps the most outstanding employment application letter of all time:

“I wish to work miracles …”

– LEONARDO DA VINCI

Most illustrious Lord, having now sufficiently seen and considered the proofs of all those who count themselves master and inventors of instruments of war, and finding that their invention and use of the said instruments does not differ in any respect from those in common practice, I am emboldened without prejudice to anyone else to put myself in communication with your Excellency, in order to acquaint you with my secrets, thereafter offering myself at your pleasure effectually to demonstrate at any convenient time all those matters which are in part briefly recorded below.

1. I have plans for bridges, very light and strong and suitable for carrying very easily …

2. When a place is besieged I know how to cut off water from the trenches, and how to construct an infinite number of … scaling ladders and other instruments …

3. If because of the height of the embankment, and the strength of the place or its site, it should be impossible to reduce it by bombardment, I know methods of destroying any citadel or fortress, even if it is built on rock.

4. I have plans for making cannon, very convenient and easy of transport, with which to hurl small stones in the manner almost of hail …

5. And if it should happen that the engagement is at sea, I have plans for constructing many engines most suitable for attack or defense, and ships which can resist the fire of all the heaviest cannon, and powder and smoke.

6. Also I have ways of arriving at a certain fixed spot by caverns and secret winding passages made without any noise even though it may be necessary to pass underneath … a river.

7. Also I can make covered cars, safe and unassailable, which will enter the serried ranks of the enemy with artillery, and there is no company of men at arms so great as not to be broken by it. And behind these the infantry will be able to follow quite unharmed and without any opposition.

8. Also, if need shall arise, I can make cannon, mortars, and light ordnance, of very beautiful and useful shapes, quite different from those in common use.

9. Where it is not possible to employ cannon, I can supply catapults, mangonels, traps, and other engines of wonderful efficacy not in general issue. In short, as the variety of circumstances shall necessitate, I can supply an infinite number of different engines of attack and defense.

10. In time of peace I believe that I can give you as complete satisfaction as anyone else in architecture, in the construction of buildings both public and private, and in conducting water from one place to another.

11. Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also painting, in which my work will stand comparison with that of anyone else whoever he may be.

12. Moreover, I would undertake the work of the bronze horse, which shall endure with immortal glory and eternal honor the auspicious memory of the Prince your father and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the aforesaid things should seem impossible or impracticable to anyone, I offer myself as ready to make trial of them in your park or in whatever place shall please your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.

He got the job. Although, according to Giorgio Vasari, it was probably his courtly charms along with his talents as a musician and party planner that were mostly responsible for his positive reception. It’s amazing to imagine a genius of Da Vinci’s stature devoting his time to the design of pageants, balls, costumes, and other ephemerae, yet as Kenneth Clark points out, “This was expected of Renaissance artists between Madonnas.”

Thirty years earlier, according to a document prepared by his grandfather, Leonardo was born at 10:30 P.M. on Saturday, April 15, 1452. His mother, Caterina, was a peasant from Anchiano, a tiny village near the small town of Vinci, about forty miles away from Florence. His father, Ser Piero da Vinci, who was not married to his mother, was a prosperous accountant and notary for the city of Florence. Young Leonardo was taken from Caterina at age five and raised in the home of his grandfather, also a notary. Because children born out of wedlock were disqualified from membership in the Guild of Notaries, Leonardo was not eligible to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. But for this quirk of fate he could have been the greatest accountant of all time!

In quattrocento Florence, it was a common practice for a master to allow one of his more gifted students to complete some of the details of a painting. Domenico Ghirlandajo, Pietro Perugino, and Lorenzo di Credi were some of Leonardo’s fellow apprentices in Verrocchio’s workshop.

Fortunately, he was sent instead to be an apprentice in the studio of the master sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488). Verrocchio’s name translates from the Italian as “true eye,” a name he was given to recognize the penetrating perceptiveness of his work and a perfect title for the teacher of Leonardo (Verrocchio’s masterpiece is the equestrian monument of General Colleoni in Venice, although he is most popularly known for his Putto with a Dolphin in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and his statue of David in the Bargello). The first painting known to be by Da Vinci’s hand is the angel and a bit of the landscape in the lower left-hand corner of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ.

Da Vinci biographer Serge Bramly, author of the brilliant Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci, comments on the difference between the young Leonardo’s work and that of his teacher: “When the Baptism of Christ is X-rayed, the difference between his [Leonardo’s] technique and Verrocchio’s emerges quite staggeringly. Whereas the master still indicated relief by highlighting contours with white lead (which blocks the X rays and therefore shows up clearly on them), Leonardo superimposes very thin layers of paint, unmixed with white; his application is so smooth and fluid there are no brush strokes to be seen. The X rays go straight through his section; the angel’s face shows up completely blank.” As though he really created an angel.

In The Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari records that when Verrocchio saw the delicate, exquisite, and numinous quality of his pupil’s work, he vowed “never to touch colors again.” Although this may sound like reverential humility or despair at his own limitations, it is most likely that Verrocchio made a business decision to delegate more painting commissions to his gifted apprentice and to concentrate his own talents instead on the profitable practice of sculpture.

“The knowledge of all things is possible.”

– LEONARDO DA VINCI

Leonardo’s precocious talents drew the attention of Verrocchio’s prime patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico. Leonardo was introduced to the extraordinary milieu of philosophers, mathematicians, and artists cultivated by Lorenzo. There is some evidence that during the period of his apprenticeship, the young Leonardo lived in the Medici home.

After six years with Verrocchio, Leonardo was admitted to the Company of St. Luke, a guild of apothecaries, physicians, and artists headquartered in the Ospedale Santa Maria Nuova, in 1472. It is likely that he took the opportunity, provided through the location of the guild, to deepen his study of anatomy. The most educated guessers assign his anatomically outstanding evocation of St. Jerome in the Vatican Gallery and his Annunciation in the Uffizi to this period.

Verrocchio’s bust of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico.

The Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci. The misty background, detailed botanical studies, and luminous curly hair are early trademarks of the maestro’s style.

We can imagine Leonardo in his late teens and early twenties, strolling the streets of Florence in his silk leggings, his long auburn-blond curls cascading over the shoulders of his rose-colored velvet tunic. Vasari extolled “the splendor of his appearance, which was extremely beautiful, and made every sorrowful soul serene.” Renowned for his physical grace, beauty, and talents as a storyteller, humorist, conjurer, and musician, Leonardo probably spent a fair amount of his youthful time enjoying life. But this lighthearted period came to an abrupt close when shortly before his twenty-fourth birthday, he was arrested and brought before a committee of the Florentine government to answer charges of sodomy. One can imagine the traumatic effect upon someone so sensitive of being accused of what was then a capital crime and being held in jail. As he noted, “The greater the sensibility the greater the suffering … much suffering.”

Although the charges were eventually dismissed due to insufficient evidence, the seeds of Leonardo’s departure from Florence had been sown. Nevertheless, he did receive a number of commissions in the next few years including a few from the Florentine government. By far his most significant work of this first Florentine period is The Adoration of the Magi for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto.

In 1482 Leonardo moved to Milan. Working under the patronage of Ludovico “the Moor” Sforza, Leonardo created his masterpiece, The Last Supper. Painted on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie from 1495 to 1498, Leonardo’s Last Supper captures, with stunning psychic force, the moment that Christ proclaims, “One of you shall betray me.” Christ sits alone, resigned and serene, at the center of the table as the disciples explode in turmoil around him. Yet in a geometrically perfect composition, the disciples counterbalanced – left and right, higher and lower – in four groups of three, Leonardo brings the uniqueness of each soul to life. Christ’s tranquillity, conveyed through Leonardo’s seamless sense of order and perspective, contrasts with the surrounding human emotion and chaos to yield a moment of transcendence unparalleled in the history of art. Although the painting has deteriorated considerably, despite, and in some cases because of, attempts at restoration, it remains, in the words of art historian E. H. Gombrich, “one of the great miracles of human genius.”

St. Jerome by Leonardo da Vinci. This painting was discovered in the nineteenth century. It was in two pieces, one of which was being used as a tabletop.

Bernard Berenson, the art critic who introduced the word connoisseur into the English language, called Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi (left) “truly a great masterpiece” and added, “Perhaps the quattrocento produced nothing greater.” Preparatory work for the Adoration below.

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Imagine looking at this painting through the eyes of the monks who commissioned it. “Never before,” comments art historian E. H. Gombrich, “had the sacred episode appeared so close and so lifelike.”

Leonardo da Vinci: Study for the Sforza equestrian monument.

When he wasn’t charming Ludovico’s court or creating transcendent paintings, Leonardo was busy with studies of anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, flight, and geography and plans for inventions and military innovations. He also received an important commission from the Moor to build an equestrian monument honoring his father, Francesco Sforza, the previous grand duke of Milan. After exhaustive researches into the anatomy and movement of horses, Da Vinci crafted a plan to create what critics agree would have been the greatest equestrian statue ever produced. After more than a decade of work Leonardo constructed a model twenty-four feet high. Vasari wrote that “there was never a more beautiful thing or more superb.” Leonardo calculated that casting this masterpiece would require more than eighty tons of melted bronze. The bronze, unfortunately, was not forthcoming, as Ludovico needed it to build cannons to stave off invaders. He failed, and in 1499 the French overwhelmed Milan and drove Sforza into exile. In a historical act of bad taste and barbarism that ranks with the Ottoman army’s blowing the nose off the Sphinx, and the Venetian fleet’s landing a mortar projectile on the Parthenon, the French archers destroyed the model horse by using it for target practice.

“About the horse I will say nothing for I know the times.” – From Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico on learning that the bronze for the monument would not be supplied.

Ludovico’s defeat meant that Leonardo was without a patron or a home. He found his way to Florence in 1500 and the next year he unveiled his preparatory drawing for The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John, commissioned by the Servite Friars. Describing the public reaction, Vasari writes that the painting “not only filled every artist with wonder, but when it was set up … men and women, young and old, flocked for two days to see it, as if in festival time, and they marveled exceedingly.” Although Leonardo never completed the painting for the Servites, his drawings formed the basis of a later work, the exquisitely tender Virgin and Child with St. Anne, now in the Louvre.

In 1502 Leonardo shifted his attention from the sublime evocation of divine femininity to take up an appointment as chief engineer to the infamous commander of the papal armies, Cesare Borgia. He traveled extensively for the next year, making six remarkably accurate maps of central Italy for his new patron. Despite his access to Leonardo’s maps and military innovations, Cesare saw his battlefield fortunes wane. The Signoria of Florence sent Niccolò Machiavelli to advise Borgia in his struggles, but the great strategist was unable to prevent the collapse of Borgia’s forces. Machiavelli did, however, befriend Leonardo during this period, a friendship that set the stage for the maestro to receive an important commission from the Signoria of Florence after his return in April 1503.

Ludovico “the Moor” Sforza, regent of Milan and patron of Leonardo.

Leonardo’s Drawing of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.

During the same period that he was struggling with The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo painted a portrait, according to Vasari, of the third wife of a Florentine nobleman, Francesco del Giocondo. Madonna Elisabetta, nicknamed Mona Lisa, was to be immortalized in history’s most famous and mysterious painting. Leonardo took the painting with him when he returned to Milan, this time in the service of Louis XII’s viceroy, Charles d’Amboise. During his second stay in Milan, Leonardo focused on studies in anatomy, geometry, hydraulics, and flight while designing and decorating palaces, planning monuments, and building canals for his patron. Leonardo also managed to paint his St. John and Leda and the Swan.

Peter Paul Rubens’s rendition of The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci.