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LEADERS & SUCCESS
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Big Picture
By CORD COOPER, FOR INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 09/21/2010 05:44 PM ET
Leonardo produced this self-portrait and “Mona Lisa” in the early 1500s.
Leonardo da Vinci excelled in all corners: painting, sculpting, architecture, engineering.
He drew the first known plans for aircraft, including a helicopter.
He created the first designs for machine guns, tanks and submarines.
He drew the first accurate representations of the human anatomy.
He painted “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa.”
His output was due as much to the way he thought as to his talent, says Michael Gelb, author of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo (1452-1519) rose from Vinci in present-day Italy. He saw a world of possibilities, pursued them vigorously and became the quintessential Renaissance figure. His life offers lessons we can all apply.
• Stay curious. Leonardo recorded observations, ideas and queries in notebooks he kept with him constantly. In all, he wrote more than 14,000 pages of notes, Gelb says.
The author told IBD: “His notebooks are filled with questions, like ‘How did life begin?’ ‘What are the secrets of the human body?’ ‘What is the meaning of birth?’ ‘What is the meaning of death?’ He became the first to — with a large degree of accuracy — sketch the embryo in the womb. To understand the secret of life, he investigated the process of gestation and birth. To understand death and the reasons for it, he performed more than 30 autopsies. He’s considered one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived because his curiosity was all-encompassing.”
Said Peter Dent, former chairman of the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pa.: “His passion and curiosity helped him achieve the ultimate in human potential.”
Curiosity also marked his artwork.
“Leonardo was one of the first artists to sketch everything from at least three angles before starting one of his paintings,” Gelb said. “He was so curious that he examined everything from multiple viewpoints.”
When Leonardo did different perspectives of a face, “that opened up new possibilities for capturing the end result,” Gelb said.
• Raze boundaries. Leonardo refused to restrict himself. “Limits didn’t occur to him,” Gelb said. “He was not restrained by the conventional wisdom of the time.”
• Never assume. He had a firm “commitment to test knowledge and learn from mistakes,” the author said. Particularly in the sciences, Leonardo tested traditional assumptions and his own beliefs through trial and error. He referred to himself as a “man without letters” and a “disciple of experience.”
“Early on, Leonardo was sent to vocational school,” Gelb said. “He didn’t have an academic background. It was through his vocational training that he developed this very hands-on approach to learning. He was a strong believer in thinking for yourself, demonstrating things through your own experience.”
The scientist-artist tested ideas instead of taking the word of others. “He urged his students (who were also assistants and apprentices) to become independent, original thinkers.” Gelb said.
He didn’t see mistakes as negatives; they were learning tools that he embraced. A hydraulic engineer, Leonardo was engaged by the government of Florence in northern Italy to come up with a plan to divert the Arno River. “It didn’t work,” Gelb said. “In his notebook, he listed what he did wrong and how it could be done differently. He always tried to add to the next generation’s body of knowledge.”
• Confront the unknown. Leonardo had a “willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty,” Gelb said.
The supreme examples are in his artwork, particularly “Mona Lisa,” the author said: “It vividly shows a technique Leonardo pioneered — the hazy, mysterious quality that marks his paintings. The technique involved an intentional blurring of edges. It’s evident in the corner of the mouth of the ‘Mona Lisa’ and is one of the elements that makes her smile so mysterious.”
• Observe. His “continual refinement of the senses — especially sight — helped him look beyond the obvious,” Gelb said. “He often used the Latin phrase for ‘knowing how to see.’ As you read his notebooks and look at his sketches, you see that Leonardo was training his sensory awareness throughout his life. He said that the five senses are the ministers of the soul.”
The average person, Leonardo wrote, “looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking.”
To sharpen our senses, Leonardo said, is to improve the mind.
His perception was extraordinary. “He recorded elements about the flight of a bird and did detailed drawings,” Gelb said. “His observations were confirmed when high-speed photography was invented. He noticed minutiae in the nature of the bird’s movement that no one else recorded.”
Leonardo used those observations to craft what we now call a hang glider. Said Cynthia Phillips, co-author of “101 Things You Didn’t Know About Da Vinci”: “Channeling his imagination — thinking differently about subjects no one had thought about before — led to breakthroughs.”
Noticing how objects “move through air — for example, how leaves fall out of trees — led to his invention of the parachute,” Gelb said.
When Leonardo tested the hang glider and parachute, they didn’t work. “But several years ago, British sky divers and parachutists built Leonardo’s hang glider and parachute based on (da Vinci’s) instructions in his notebooks,” Gelb said. “They used materials that were available in Leonardo’s time. And both the hang glider and parachute worked. His ideas were correct.”
He simply missed on execution.
• Balance. He blended science with art, says Gelb; Leonardo’s balance of logic and imagination led to his development as an artist and sculptor and his mastery of astronomy and the human anatomy.
• Stay agile. Leonardo was among the first to see a connection between an active mind and a healthy, fit body. He promoted exercise as a way to achieve agility and grace, and touted it as one of the best routes to physical health and an improved mental outlook.
• Link. Making connections between seemingly dissimilar things was one of the keys to Leonardo’s creativity.
“He designed the spiral staircase, which he said was inspired by the day he spent collecting nautilus shells (spirally, fairly elongated shells) on the coastline,” Gelb said. “Leonardo made a connection between the (shell’s design) and the design of a staircase.”
• Eye outcomes. Leonardo advised his contemporaries to “consider first the end.”
His point: Decide what you want the result to be when reaching your goal. Then plan backward from that point. You’ll have a more direct and logical path, saving time and unnecessary steps along the way.
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