Résumé
Résumé
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 ).
Critiques (7)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Screen, television, and stage actor Molina (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Not Without My Daughter), elegantly narrates Isaacson's sweeping biography of Leonardo da Vinci. Molina effortlessly navigates Italian place names and surnames, and there is a sharp intelligence throughout his performance, as he joins Isaacson in peeling back the layers of a man whose surviving notebooks are crammed with fantastic designs but only contain tantalizing hints of a personal life. Isaacson manages to piece together chronologically the artist's life from his apprenticeship at age 14 in Florence under Andrea del Verrochio to his death in France in 1519, focusing primarily on his evolution as an artist. Isaacson reads the foreword and the conclusion, in which he ruminates on the legacy of an artist whose trail of unfinished projects vastly outnumbers his completed works. The only hiccup in this excellent audio production is that the nearly 150 illustrations mentioned throughout are available in PDF form but are not easily accessible for those listening on the go. Still, it's a great performance by Molina and a pleasure to listen to. A Simon & Schuster hardcover. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Booklist
*Starred Review* Isaacson's writings of late have been concerned with genius: biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. Now he takes on perhaps the ultimate genius, a man whose interest in art and science intertwined in spectacular ways. Putting together the life of Leonardo da Vinci (despite his own numerous entries in his famous notebooks) seems to have been a more complicated task for Isaacson than was presenting his previous subjects (and, of course, he had the advantage of numerous personal interviews with Jobs). On the surface, the book doesn't seem to reveal much more about the man personally illegitimate, gay, sometimes unfocused than does a solid encyclopedia entry. Ah, but when Isaacson discusses da Vinci's artistic and scientific endeavors, all manner of fascinating connections begin to emerge. With the strong advantage of having four-color images of Leonardo's work placed throughout his text, Isaacson can both show and tell, writing with assurance about the different influences on the artist's works, where his passions lay and overlapped. Leonardo's fascination with anatomical structure informed his paintings; his profound interest in math and the transformation of shapes influenced his inventions. His delight in staging theatricals led to dramas that offered interpretations of his allegorical art and drawings. Encompassing in its coverage, robust in its artistic explanations, yet written in a smart, conversational tone, this is both a solid introduction to the man and a sweeping saga of his genius.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2017 Booklist
Critique du New York Review of Books
SPECIALISTS ON LEONARDO DA VINCI have to work like detectives. They must draw information from the tiniest of clues. A few years ago, a German scholar spotted a marginal note that a Florentine had entered in 1503 in his copy of Cicero's letters. On a page on which Cicero remarked that the painter Apelles "finished the head and bust of his Venus with the most refined artistry, but left the rest of her body incomplete," the Florentine reader, Agostino Vespucci, connected past to present: "Leonardo da Vinci works this way in all his paintings, as in the head of Lisa del Giocondo and that of Anne, mother of the Virgin. We will see what he will do in the Hall of the Great Council." This little note confirmed that the subject of the infinitely mysterious "Mona Lisa" was Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant. It showed that Leonardo's contemporaries recognized and discussed the special qualities of his art. And it gave a taste of the way in which Renaissance Italians creatively combined disciplines. Vespucci was a classical scholar, trained by the most brilliant philologist of the late 15 th century, Angelo Poliziano. He used his training not in the academy but in Florentine government, where he served as the assistant to another great innovator, Niccolö Machiavelli. Vespucci was reading Cicero's lessons about the ancient Roman republic to help him better serve the modern Florentine republic. In Renaissance Italy, cultural borders existed only to be crossed. Walter Isaacson follows dozens of clues to reanimate Leonardo da Vinci, one of the boldest of these bordercrossers. Though Leonardo wrote endlessly, he revealed little directly about his inner life. Without fuss and without Freud - though Dan Brown, unfortunately, makes an appearance - Isaacson uses his subject's contradictions to give him humanity and depth. A dandy, known for his bright pink clothing, Leonardo lived at times in rooms full of dissected bodies. A vegetarian who bought birds so that he could set them free, he designed killing machines. A connoisseur of grotesques, he painted glorious, glowing angels. As Isaacson follows Leonardo from one locale and occupation to another, his energy never fails and his curiosity never dims. Again and again he turns up a surprising and revelatory detail - the averted eyes that suggest Leonardo used mirrors to create a marvelous late self-portrait, human vertebrae drawn with precision and delicacy. Leonardo embodies the creativity of the "many-sided people" of the Renaissance" - the term that the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt coined for him and his contemporaries. He is most famous, today, as the painter of the "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper." Yet when he offered his services to the ruler of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he promised to invent bridges, cannons and war machines. Only at the end of his letter did he mention that he could sculpt and paint. And Leonardo's dedication to STEM subjects was absolute. In his notebooks, he recorded the movements of everything from the water in rivers to the blood in the human aorta (the patterns of which he worked out centuries before anyone else). He designed machines to lift huge weights and enable men to fly. And he made apparent that because he could draw these anatomical and structural wonders, he saw more and more clearly than professional scholars and medical men. Isaacson toggles between Leonardo's works of art and his contemplation of nature, tracing the connections between them. As Leonardo studied sight, he found that shadows, not hard outlines, defined the shapes of objects. As he worked on the geometry of perspective, he learned how to manipulate the formal rules in order to compensate for the distortions inevitable when a spectator moved from place to place in front of a large painting on a wall. "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper," as Isaacson reads them, are not only paintings of infinite depth and complexity, but demonstrations of new methods and principles for studying nature. Isaacson does not offer a seamless story. Nothing is simple in Leonardo studies. Historians of science debate the meaning and importance of his manuscripts, while historians of art and curators wrangle over the authenticity and chronology of his works. Is the newly discovered "Salvator Mundi" (recently sold at auction for an eye-popping $450 million) a genuine Leonardo painting? Isaacson takes the reader through the story of its authentication, which involved both evaluation of its quality and technical analysis of its execution. Trade editors have been known to discourage authors from treating problems like this in detail. Leave the pedantry, they say, for the academics. Isaacson, however, puts on his professor's hat - he teaches history at flilane University - and lucidly describes the controversies. This brave decision gives his book the character of a mosaic, assembled piece by piece, rather than a smooth fresco - and makes it far more instructive than a simple narrative could ever have been. Isaacson shows that the work of great scholars like the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp can be exciting in its own right. Isaacson could have pressed another sort of information from the words and drawings he read so carefully. Earlier engineers anticipated Leonardo's deep interest in the underwater world and diving apparatus. Leon Battista Alberti even hired divers in the hope of raising a sunken Roman barge from the bottom of Lake Nemi. Before Leonardo, earlier natural philosophers argued that thousands of years of flooding and erosion had shaped the surface of the earth. Connecting these dots - showing that Leonardo shared interests and ideas with many predecessors and contemporaries - would have made Isaacson's history even richer. Then again, the choice of a tight angle lens might have been deliberate. After all, Leonardo himself painted his portrait subjects against blurry, indistinct landscapes.
Critique de CHOICE
Who is not familiar with the versatile genius Leonardo da Vinci? He was an artist, scientist, innovator, and bold thinker, an icon on whom volumes have been written. But here comes a new biography by a biographer par excellence. Isaacson (Tulane Univ.) presents a wealth of fascinating material on the hero with superb clarity and erudition. We read about this unschooled scholar exploring optics and anatomy, fantasizing about technologies to be actualized centuries later, painting masterpieces; we consider his genius as a military engineer and architect. There is reference to the challenges Leonardo faced as a gay man (though in Florence's art world da Vinci was not alone). We read of his Vitruvian Man and that of Giacomo Andreas, about the range of the artist's attire, and much more of significant and trivial interest. There are thoughtful comments on the master's paintings and details on his stay with François I of France. The inclusion of many color reproductions adds considerably to the book's charm, besides making one feel that the price is a bargain. Leonardo's immense accomplishments jolt us to the recognition of what the human spirit is capable of. A must-read for all educated people and for those seeking to expand their education. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Varadaraja V. Raman, emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology
Critique du Guardian
Flamboyant, illegitimate and self taught, he was unreliable and an unashamed self-publicist. He was also one of the most gifted and inventive men in history In 1501, desperate for Leonardo to paint her portrait, the immensely rich Isabella d¿Este employed a friar to act as go-between. The friar met Leonardo in Florence but found his lifestyle ¿irregular and uncertain¿ and couldn¿t pin him down. ¿Mathematical experiments have absorbed his thoughts so entirely that he cannot bear the sight of a paintbrush,¿ Isabella was told. With promises he¿d get round to it eventually, Leonardo kept her dangling for another three years. Pushy to the end, she changed tack and asked him for a painting of Jesus instead. Even then, he didn¿t come up with the goods. The story encapsulates contrasting versions of Leonardo that have been in play ever since Vasari extolled him in his Lives of the Artists. On the one hand, the lofty genius who wouldn¿t kowtow to affluent patrons; on the other, the feckless fantasist who failed to fulfil his commissions. On the one hand, the Renaissance Man to whom maths and science were as important as painting; on the other, the artist who ¿left posterity the poorer¿ (Kenneth Clark ¿s phrase) by pursuing hobbies ¿ engineering, architecture, pageantry, military strategy, cartography, etc ¿ on which his talents were wasted. He achieved so much. But did multitasking prevent him achieving more? Walter Isaacson has no doubt about the answer. The subjects of his previous books ¿ Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs, among others ¿ were all blue-sky thinkers, with the ability ¿to make connections across the disciplines¿ and ¿to marry observation and imagination¿. His life of Leonardo (rather cheekily subtitled ¿The Biography¿, as if there were no others) doesn¿t neglect the paintings. But it¿s more fascinated by the notebooks, with their 7,200 pages of sketches and ideas. Isaacson¿s premise is that Leonardo¿s scientific interests nourished his art ¿ that only through the work he put into dissecting corpses and studying muscles was he capable of painting the Mona Lisa¿s smile. Gay, vegetarian, flamboyant in dress (with a preference for pink), erratic in his work habits and astute when it came to self-promotion, Leonardo would have felt at home among the hipsters of today. Being illegitimate was no great stigma: it meant he grew up with two mothers (which Freud thought explained a lot). It also saved him from becoming a notary, a profession closed to sons born out of wedlock. His lack of a formal education was no handicap, either. Self-taught, he derided ¿puffed up¿ scholars who relied on received ideas: ¿He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar.¿ Experience was what counted, he said ¿ that and a relentless curiosity. At 14, he was apprenticed to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was (so Vasari claimed) ¿astonished¿ by his talent and with whom he collaborated before producing at least two early masterpieces, The Annunciation and (his first non-religious effort, and one to rank with the Mona Lisa) Ginevra de¿ Benci. A charge of sodomy, involving a 17-year-old, might have halted his progress by landing him in prison or worse. But one of the four young men with whom he was accused had connections with the Medici family and the case was dropped. His attitude to sex was ambivalent: ¿Whoever does not curb lustful desires puts himself on the level of beasts,¿ he wrote, with conventional piety, but he also acknowledged that the penis ¿possesses a life and an intelligence separate from the man¿. His companion of many years ¿ servant, pupil and the subject of many drawings ¿ was the rascally Salai, who came to him at the age of 10. At some point they probably became lovers. Later, in his mid-50s, Leonardo adopted another young man, Francesco Melzi, whom he loved as a son. Not surprisingly, his depictions of men are more erotic than those of women. He described the act of coitus as ¿repulsive¿; only the beauty of human faces redeemed the ugliness of genitalia. His lack of desire for women is perhaps what makes his paintings of them so tender and attentive: by objectifying less (and leaving their clothes on), he sees more. Some of his men look feminine, too. The angel in Virgin of the Rocks ¿ intended to be Gabriel or Uriel ¿ is often mistaken for a woman. A later drawing of an angel, either by Leonardo or by someone in his studio, showed a figure with breasts and an erect penis. Androgyny appealed to him. His men lack the muscularity of Michelangelo¿s nudes, which he dismissed as looking like ¿a sack of walnuts rather than a human figure¿. The rise of Michelangelo (20-odd years his junior) may have been a factor in his preference for Milan: having spent much of his 30s and 40s there, he returned in his mid-50s. It was a bigger city than Florence and was well stocked with intellectuals and scientists (less so with artists). Later he moved to Rome and later still, leaving Italy for the first time, to France. But it was Milan that encouraged the odd mixture of the practical and the fantastical that went into his inventions ¿ his schemes for flying machines, giant crossbows, scythed chariots, needle grinders, screw jacks and so on. As Isaacson sees it, his inventions and ideas occupy an important place in the history of science and technology, anticipating the discoveries of Galileo and Newton. He contributed to medical knowledge too: by dissecting the body of a 100-year-old man, he came up with the first description of arteriosclerosis as an outcome of the ageing process. Even his wackiest ideas (such as the plan to protect Venice with a team of underwater divers wearing breathing apparatus) had potential, though it was several more centuries before scuba gear came along. Anatomy was his abiding specialism. Other artists might aspire to get the measure of man but he went about it literally, computing the right proportions (¿from the top of the ear to the top of the head is equal to the distance from the bottom of the chin to the duct of the eye¿, etc). This kind of perfectionism underlaid his reluctance to complete his paintings, notably The Last Supper, to which he¿d sometimes add just a couple of brush strokes before knocking off for the day (serious artists occasionally ¿accomplish most when they work least¿, he told the impatient duke who¿d commissioned it), and the Mona Lisa, with which he fiddled on and off for 15 years and which was still in his studio when he died. He described the act of coitus as ¿repulsive¿; only the beauty of human faces redeemed the ugliness of genitalia Like almost everyone who has written about it, Isaacson is reverential towards the Mona Lisa, though not as much as Walter Pater (¿hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come¿) and not without using it to underline one of his main themes ¿ Leonardo¿s sfumato technique, whereby lines are blurred and boundaries (like those between art and science) disappear. More illuminating is his account of the recent controversies over two other paintings attributed to Leonardo, La Bella Principessa and Salvator Mundi : through carbon dating and digital magnification, experts have assessed the key evidence (palm prints, left-handed brush strokes, stitching holes), but whether they¿re the genuine article remains a matter of dispute. Five hundred years on, you¿d have thought that everything it¿s possible to know about Leonardo would now be known, but authentication of his work remains an issue and surprises still keep turning up ¿ a lost drawing of Saint Sebastian in 2016 and new details about the identity of his mother Caterina only this year. Isaacson doesn¿t claim to make any fresh discoveries, but his book is intelligently organised, simply written and beautifully illustrated, and it ends with a kind of mental gymnastics programme that suggests how we can learn from Leonardo (Be curious, Think visually, Go down rabbit holes, Indulge fantasy, Respect facts, etc). Leonardo¿s notebooks are full of similar exhortations: ¿Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock ¿ Observe the goose¿s foot ¿ Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.¿ In his thirst for knowledge, he was like a small child endlessly asking ¿Why?¿ His last drawings were turbulent images of water and wind. You can read them as metaphors for apocalypse and death (he¿d had a stroke by then). Or as the culmination of a lifelong drive to find connections between natural phenomena ¿ to link the curve of waves to a curl of human hair. Either way, Isaacson¿s claim that no other figure in history ¿was as creative in so many different fields¿ doesn¿t seem far-fetched. - Blake Morrison.
Critique de Kirkus
A majestic biography of "history's most creative genius."With many exceptional popular history books under his belt, Isaacson (History/Tulane Univ.; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, 2014, etc.) is close to assuming the mantle currently held by David McCullough. Here, Isaacson takes on another complex, giant figure and transforms him into someone we can recognize. The author believes the term "genius" is too easily bandied about, but Leonardo (1452-1519), from the tiny village of Vinci, near Florence, was "one of the few people in history who indisputably deservedor, to be more precise, earnedthat appellation." He was self-taught and "willed his way to his genius." With joyous zest, Isaacson crafts a marvelously told story "of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical." Like a child in a candy store, Isaacson often stops to exclaim; he shares his enthusiasm, and it's contagious. For the author, the starting point are da Vinci's notebooks, all 7,200 pages, the "greatest record of curiosity ever created." Da Vinci's groundbreaking, detailed drawings charted the inner worlds of the skull, heart, muscles, brain, birds' wings, and a working odometer, along with doodles and numerous to-do lists. In his iconic Vitruvian Man, completed when he was 38 and struggling to learn Latin, "Leonardo peers at himself with furrowed brow and tries to grasp the secrets of his own nature." Isaacson is equally insightful with the paintings, of which there are few. The Last Supper is a "mix of scientific perspective and theatrical license, of intellect and fantasy." Regarding the uncompleted Mona Lisa, he writes "never in a painting have motion and emotion, the paired touchstones of Leonardo's art, been so intertwined." As Isaacson wisely puts it, we can all learn from Leonardo. Totally enthralling, masterful, and passionate, this book should garner serious consideration for a variety of book prizes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
For this biography, Isaacson (Steve Jobs) used his subject's notebooks for his research since they helped to understand Leonardo as a person. Born illegitimate and middle class in the city of Vinci outside of Florence, Italy, Leonardo had a fascination with both science and art. This melding of both subjects was a main component of Renaissance life. The audiobook examines Leonardo's birth, early adulthood, his homosexuality, his works (e.g., The Last Supper; Mona Lisa), his contemporaries, including Michelangelo and Cesare Borgia (upon whom Machiavelli's The Prince was based), and his lasting impact. Alfred Molina does a wonderful job of telling this story. His accent and pronunciation make for a vivid listening experience. Isaacson narrates the introduction and conclusion, providing a more personal presentation of the material. The first CD contains a 111-page PDF with a time line, images from Leonardo's notebooks, his paintings and sculptures, and photographs of buildings and rooms where he lived. VERDICT A phenomenal title for fans of Isaacson's previous biographies, Renaissance life in Florence, and da Vinci himself. ["A must-read biography": LJ 10/15/17 starred review of the S. & S. hc.]-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.