Book review

Recently, I have been reading Leonardo Da Vinci: Flights of the Mind by Charles Nicholl. It goes a long way in illuminating Leonardo the human being, as opposed to the fixed image of him as genius or Renaissance Man.

Here is an excerpt from The Washington Post review by Alexander Nagel:

"Mistresses pleasure pain love jealousy happiness envy fortune penitence." This stream of consciousness account of the roller coaster of desire, scribbled by a thirtysomething Leonardo da Vinci, is not just an inventory of the trials of love. In the thinking of Leonardo's time, desire is movement impelled by the urge to make up for a lack, and motion is, in Leonardo's words, "the cause of all life." For Leonardo, as for most thinkers of his time, the elements are restless, the sea roils, the wind gusts, rain falls, gravity pulls -- all because things are constantly seeking a place of rest and completeness and not finding it. In the Italian of his day, the same word, moti, described both motions and emotions. Psychology was an application of physics, and physics revealed the passionate life of nature.

Leonardo spent his whole life investigating these movements inside and around us. Since in his eyes everything was connected, there were no boundaries to his investigations. It is customary to treat Leonardo as a rare genius, and he was. But go and dip into his countless notebooks, many of which have been translated into English, and you will encounter a hearteningly flat-footed seeker, a man who doggedly asks "How?" again and again -- indeed, more frequently than he does the metaphysical "Why?" You will also recognize, with great sympathy and relief, the unmistakable symptoms of attention deficit disorder.

In his deeply researched, engaging and illuminating biography, Charles Nicholl is drawn again and again to Leonardo's preoccupation with flight -- his obsession, from his earliest infancy, with birds, as well as his designs for parachutes, hang-gliders, helicopters and planes. Nicholl will convince any reader that this fascination was a major, abiding concern of Leonardo's life, but he never tells us why this should be so. A very simple reason may be that levitation was the one thing that offered a reprieve from all that earthly movement. In the most fundamental sense, the aspiration to take flight deeply informed Leonardo's paintings, far beyond the depiction of birds and winged angels. Nicholl shows, for example, that the famous landscape drawing in Florence's Uffizi Gallery, proudly dated 1473 by a 21-year-old Leonardo, is not a sketch of any one view from a given spot, but a composite of various landscapes in the area around his hometown of Vinci -- a composite presented as if seen from the air. It is a bird's-eye view.

The full review can be read here.

I have read many biographies of Da Vinci, but none of them have been this informative about his day to day life.