Leonardo Da Vinci

Really bummed, but killing this at 25%. The Renaissance - and the Renaissance masters - are an integral part of my self-identity; the (Italian!) pursuit of beauty and truth, the mix of science and art, the glory of the human form, blah blah blah. But this was just a chore. It was also, ahem, BAD VALUES.

On why it's a chore

Welp, this is my own fault, but I listened to the audiobook, and thus missed the visuals. And having Alfred Molina (who is quite a good actor!) narrate how wondrous and beauteous the shining curls of Leonardo's painting of Random Catholic 15th century Italian thing is, ho boy. (Though good on Molina - who I think is half-Italian? - for his smooth Italian pronunciations, brrrrravo.)

But it's also a chore because it TELLS, rather than SHOWS, us why Leonardo was so special. Everything is “magnificent” or “wondrous”, but - well, WHY? Is it because Leonardo had such a wide-ranging, rapacious curiosity for everything and every topic? Is it because his paintings are beautiful? Is it because he had such zany engineering sketches? Is it because he was so prolific? I guess so? Maybe?!

There are some interesting biographical bits that I didn't know about - for example, Leonardo was (semi-openly) gay; he was an illegitimate son; he was notorious for being flighty and starting a million things but never completing them. But the biography is thin on the ground, and it's mostly a series of breathless descriptions of Leonardo's paintings and notebooks. Isaacson doesn't build up the scene of what 15th century Florence - ONE OF MY FAVE SPOTS IN SPACE AND TIME - was like. As a comparison, both Brunelleschi's Dome (which kinda suffered from the same plodding reverential tone as this) and Galileo's Daughter (which was MUCH BETTER) present a rich and fascinating portrait of the city at the time. This book soooort of does; I liked hearing about Milan under the Sforzas (where Leonardo spent many years), and we did learn a bunch about the theater productions they put on there (though Isaacson is strangely defensive (?) about this stuff - being like, “SOME PEOPLE consider Leonardo's contributions to costume design and stage craft boring/not important, BUT...” dude, it's OK!).

On its bad values

But the MAIN thing that really started to irk me the really wrong way was that, beyond just TELLING us repeatedly how “genius” Leonardo was (without being able to describe what “genius” exactly means - again, is it wide-ranging interests? tireless production? beauty?), the book also huuuuugely suffers from what Carol Dweck would call the “fixed mindset”. That is, since Isaacson seems incapable of understanding HOW or WHY Leonardo is a “genius”, he attributes Leonardo's “genius”-ness to some ethereal, God-given, magical quality. It's the narrative of the effortless, “conduit of God” genius - think Amadeus - the kind that is starkly binary. Some people have it, most people don't.

And while I do agree with a GENERAL ranking of people's abilities (e.g. this A.O. Scott of Pixar's The Incredibles is an excellent essay on that), I STRONGLY disagree with those abilities being portrayed as entirely internal (no help), entirely binary (haves/have-nots), and entirely unearned (no need to study if you're “smart”). Leonardo's output was amazing BECAUSE of his curiosity, but his curiosity was also nurtured by his circumstances: as an illegitimate son, he was free NOT to pursue his father's profession (notary!); he was wealthy enough to not have a trade; he lived in a world that rewarded a good art/science hustle. He was confident - even too much so! - and sold himself well and allowed himself the luxury of pursuing flights of fantasy. He wasn't too worried about conforming, but also didn't need too. And he's been lionized, perhaps even disproportionately.

Like, as a contribution to human ideas, I think Brunelleschi's work with perspective - the insight of using mathematical principles from geometry to portray 3-dimensional space in paintings was, well, “GENIUS”. But Leonardo is much more well known. Again, why! He worked in a bottega with and under other artists; art historians spend a lot of time x-ray analyzing the paintings to separate Leonardo's left-handed brush strokes from the rest of the bottega's artists but - again - WHY SO BINARY? Why are the contributions of Leonardo's colleagues, with whom he worked so closely, completely discarded in favor of the guy with the cool notebooks?

I don't want to hate on Leonardo. I love Leonardo. I love all the Renaissance masters. I LOVE THE VALUES OF THE RENAISSANCE. But this book - BAH. This book sullies those values, transforms them into a Great Man history of humanity's pursuits of truth/beauty/knowledge, and that just kinda pisses me off. I guess I should have seen it coming, given Isaacson's reverential biographies of other Great Men like Steve Jobs. Sigh. My 2018 resolution to “be more Italian” hits a speed bump.