leonardo da vinci biography walter isaacson

But because Leonardo was born out of wedlock (his mother was a poor, orphaned peasant girl), he was not sent off to school. His father was a notary, a profession that gave him some prominence and prosperity, so Leonardo never had to work in the fields.

He studied, in meticulous detail, everything from the flow of water and the rise of smoke to the muscles you use when you smile.Īmazingly, he did it with almost no formal schooling. That’s partly because scientific knowledge was relatively limited back then, partly because he had a high IQ, but mostly because he was insatiably curious about pretty much every area of natural science and the human experience. He came close to understanding almost all of what was known on the planet at the time. More than any other Leonardo book I’ve read, this one helps you see him as a complete human being and understand just how special he was. If you liked Walter’s major biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, you’ll probably appreciate this one. Walter-a talented journalist and author I’ve gotten to know over the years-did a great job pulling it all together. I’ve read a lot about Leonardo over the years, but I had never found one book that satisfactorily covered all the different facets of his life and work. Given my fascination with Leonardo, I was eager to read Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson’s new biography. In fact, there are insights, such as one about how blood flows through the heart, that were so far ahead of their time that researchers finally verified them only a few decades ago. And Dan Brown fans will be disappointed to know that it doesn’t contain codes protecting age-old secrets. The Codex Leicester is not nearly as famous as artworks such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. I was supposed to change the name from Codex Hammer (the previous owner was the industrialist Armand Hammer) to Codex Gates, but I thought that sounded silly and I changed the name back to Codex Leicester, the name it held from 1719 until 1980. The notebook in question was one of the 32 surviving journals of Leonardo da Vinci.Īfter I won the bid, I broke a longstanding tradition. And by “old-fashioned,” I meant really old-fashioned, as in more than 500 years old.

I explained that by “notebook,” I meant the old-fashioned kind. “Don’t you already have a great portable computer?” she asked. Shortly after Melinda and I got married, I told her I was bidding on a notebook that could wind up costing a lot of money.

Leonardo da vinci biography walter isaacson