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Simon & Schuster

Leonardo da Vinci

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Format: Paperback, Unabridged


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The 1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life” (The New Yorker).Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson “deftly reveals an intimate Leonardo” (San Francisco Chronicle) in a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius. In the “luminous” (Daily Beast) Leonardo da Vinci, Isaacson describes how Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance to be imaginative and, like talented rebels in any era, to think different. Here, da Vinci “comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography…a vigorous, insightful portrait” (The Washington Post). Read more


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (October 2, 2018)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1501139169


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 61


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.9 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.6 x 9.25 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #5,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1 in Historical Italy Biographies #3 in Artist & Architect Biographies #23 in Scientist Biographies


#1 in Historical Italy Biographies:


#3 in Artist & Architect Biographies:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • An excellent biography that will also help you think more like Leonardo
I didn’t buy this book because I was fascinated by Leonardo. I bought it because several people whose opinions I value said it was a great book and because the other books I’ve read by Walter Isaacson were excellent. I’m glad I bought it and read it. Before I started reading, I thought I knew the basics. Leonardo was the painter of perhaps the two most famous paintings in history: The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. I had that right. But most of the rest of what I thought I knew turned out to be either wrong or incomplete. The man certainly was a creative genius, but a lot of the things that I’d read about him, like that bit about the “first helicopter,” turned out to be wrong. I didn’t know how much he did beyond painting and how deep he went on so many topics. Leonardo was certainly the prototype of the Renaissance Man, and looking back, we can see that he was born at the right time for someone with broad interests and many talents. Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. That gave him a long, productive life of 67 years. He was a bastard, which wasn’t a problem in Florence when he was born and may even have given him some advantages. He didn’t get a lot of formal schooling, which meant that he started to learn on his own and developed methods that worked for him. He started out in Florence, where he was apprenticed to an excellent master, and learned the craft of painting. But early in his life, he moved to Milan. That turned out to be a good thing, too. Florence was more artistic, but Milan had a much more diverse culture of people interested in the sciences. And it was in the sciences and engineering that Leonardo would do a lot of work I knew nothing about and now shake my head at, in wonder. Leonardo’s work in science included the development of thinking on perspective. I always thought perspective was a kind of geometric thing about painting. But it turns out that he developed three views of perspective. One was the standard vanishing point thing, but the others were the way color changes as distance increases, and the way that we lose detail on things the further they are away. He made contributions to anatomy by doing dissections of cadavers of both humans and animals. He certainly learned from his dissections, and he also captured what he observed in drawings and notes. He may have made even more contributions to engineering. He did a lot of military engineering, and a lot that revolves around water flows, including water systems for cities and diverting rivers. By the time I got to the end of the book, it seemed like Leonardo had done some work in almost any area of human knowledge. Not all of that work was great, or groundbreaking, but an awful lot of it was. So, the question is, how did he do it? That’s where I got my biggest takeaways from the book. Leonardo was very smart. Okay, we got that out of the way. Most of the people we call geniuses are very smart. But there are an awful lot of very smart people who aren’t geniuses. What really separates geniuses from the rest of the pack is what they do, not raw brainpower. The good news is that we have a pretty good idea of what Leonardo did. Isaacson developed his book primarily from the 7,000+ pages we have from Leonardo’s notebooks. That’s a lot, but it’s probably only about a quarter of the total he created. Here’s what Leonardo did to produce the quantity of quality insight and production that characterized his life. Leonardo captured his ideas. Early in his life, he developed a habit of walking around with a notebook that he used to jot down observations and make quick sketches. He even developed a shorthand that would help him recreate things he’d seen when he got back to his studio and wanted to draw them in detail. Leonardo was an acute observer who trained himself to be better. It helped that he was also a facile drawer. But the main driver of his close observations was curiosity. He developed his own process for observing things. It began with what Isaacson calls “marching orders.” Leonardo described what he needed to do to learn or properly observe something. Then he would go and observe. Leonardo learned by experimenting. Besides observing, Leonardo was an avid experimenter and he recorded both the experiments and what he learned from them. Leonardo got ideas and sharpened ideas through his reading. The printing press was invented the year Leonardo was born. By the time he was 40, books were increasingly common, and an autodidact like Leonardo could learn and get ideas from books. Leonardo had many friendships and collaborators over the years. This was not the lone genius retiring to his studio and producing bursts of insight. This is a man who went out into the world to observe, made careful observations, and then hone his understanding with reading, discussion, and experiment. Isaacson includes a final chapter in the book about things you can learn from Leonardo, and it’s a chapter worth reading. But there’s a statement of Isaacson’s near the beginning of the book that sums up the takeaway for me. “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.” And, I would add, experiment and collaboration. Before you read the book straight through, read that final chapter about what you can learn from Leonardo. It will give you a frame for learning as you go. In A Nutshell This is a thorough and well-written biography of one of history’s most fascinating individuals. You’ll enjoy the read. You’ll learn a lot. With a little effort, you can improve the way you see the world and develop some discipline so that you can be more like Leonardo than you are today. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2018 by Wally Bock
    • A genius in multiple fields
Before reading Walter Isaacson’s biography, I knew of Leonardo Da Vinci as a great Italian painter during the renaissance period who painted the Mona Lisa, probably the most famous painting in the world. I was also aware that he made several scientific discoveries, but I would be hard pressed to name a specific discovery he made. A most pleasing feature of the book is that, in the front pages, the primary periods of Leonardo’s life were summarized, with detailed dates, accompanied by reproductions of his paintings. Significant historical events are also noted beside the timelines, such as when Columbus sailed to the New World, when Michelangelo finished painting the Sistine Chapel etc. These few pages greatly enhance the attractiveness of the book. Leonardo became an apprentice in the painter Verrocchio’s studio in Florence around 1468. Teacher and student collaborated in some paintings. In the painting “Baptism of Christ”, the radiant angel painted by Leonardo so awed Verrocchio that he “resolved never again to touch a brush". Isaacson went on to describe in great detail several other paintings: The Annunciation, several Madonnas, Virgin of the Rocks. There is a whole chapter on The Last Super. He pointed out several distinct characteristics of Leonardo’s art: ● The ability to deploy light and shade in ways that would better produce the illusion of three-dimensional volume on a two-dimensional surface. ● The effect of light reflection, eyes conveying inner thoughts, sense of motion. ● He liked to rely on shadows, rather than contour lines, to define the shape of most objects. This stemmed from an insight that he derived from observation that there was no such thing in nature as a precisely visible outline or border to an object. Isaacson described Leonardo’s work on science. It was astonishing that, by being relentlessly curious - observing the flight of birds, water flowing into a bowl etc., Leonardo had anticipated: (1) Galileo’s principle of relativity as well as Newton’s law of action and reaction; (2) Bernoulli’s principle: when air (or any fluid) flows faster, it exerts less pressure. Leonardo’s work on anatomy was equally amazing, if not more so. He dissected around 30 bodies, with hundreds of diagrams depicting what he discovered. Unfortunately, Leonardo never prepared his findings for publication. He did not declare a painting finished or complete, and tended to come back to it, often years later. A case in point: he worked on Mona Lisa for sixteen years. He also left some major paintings unfinished, such as the Battle of Angbiari and Adoration of the Magi. Perhaps intentionally to taunt the patience of the reader, the chapter on Mona Lisa was placed almost toward the end of the book. Isaacson analyzed different parts of the painting in detail: the eyes, the smile, the pupil, the background landscape. He declared that “Lisa sitting on her balcony against the backdrop of geological cons is Leonardo’s profound meditation on what it means to be human.” He ended the chapter with a most memorable sentence: “And what about all of the scholars and critics over the years who despaired that Leonardo squandered too much time immersed in studying optics and anatomy and the patterns of the cosmos? The Mona Lisa answers them with a smile.” An added bonus for the reader is the knowledge that Leonardo Di Vinci knew both Niccolo Machiavelli and Michelangelo. When Leonardo worked as a military engineer for Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, and an illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, he and Machiavelli were together in the winter of 1502-03 in a town named Imola. (It should be mentioned that Leonardo’s military gadgets and designs existed in sketches in notebooks only and had not become reality.) As for Michelangelo, their personalities were opposite and they despised each other. “Leonardo was handsome, urbane, eloquent and dandyishly well dressed. In contrast, Michelangelo was intense, disheveled and irascible”, according to Michelangelo biographer Martin Gayford. “My delight is melancholy,” Michelangelo once confessed. Another unexpected addition to my knowledge is that Amerigo Vespucci, the third person to make the voyage across the Atlantic, landing in what is now Brazil, correctly reported to his Florentine patrons that he had “arrived at a new land which for many reasons…. we observed to be a continent.” His correct surmise led to its being named America, after him. I wonder whether this is what is taught in schools. Leonardo Di Vinci died on May 2, 1519, in France, less than three weeks after he turned sixty-seven. King Francis I was holding him in his hands when Leonardo died. He had indeed realized what he wrote in his notebook: "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death." ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 18, 2022 by Kai Lee

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