Response to Charles Nicholl's, "Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind"

             The time of the Renaissance is widely known as a time of great intellectual transformations.  It is known as sort of a new beginning.  However in Charles Nicholl's book "Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind", he brings up an interesting perspective that is, what was it like during this time?  Although there were many great changes happening, they must have also been counteracted with uncertainty.  It was an exciting time, but it must have also been accompanied with worry and danger for those immersed in it.  The author does not discount the great accomplishments of the Renaissance man though.  In one section after talking about how he believes it was not all perfection, he says about Leonardo, “With the dream of flying comes the fear of falling, and we understand this Renaissance man better if we see him also as a trader in doubts and questions, and with them self-doubts and self-questionings”.  This statement brings to light a good point.  We can learn to appreciate the genius and talent that is Leonardo da Vinci if we understand him more as a real man.  He is so widely known just as that, a genius, that perhaps the magnitude of his accomplishments have not been fully appreciated or understood. 

            Leonardo da Vinci was born in the year of 1452, in the small town Vinci in Tuscany.  His family was the da Vinci family.  They were a respected family who had professional ties to Florence.  There has been quite a bit of research and documentation done on the house which Leonardo supposedly grew up in.  It has been proven however that he was not actually born in this house. 

             There are about 7,000 pages of manuscript that are still around today which are written by Leonardo.  Some of his most well known texts are the Codex Atlanticus, which consisted of 481 folios, the Codex Arunndel, the Codex Urbinas, and the Codex Huygens.  Although his texts are great bodies of work, it is through viewing his notebooks that we come to have a real insight into Leonardo.  There are about 25 books which are intact today, which are left just about exactly as Leonardo left them.  He bound them with a vellum or leather wrap-around cover.  They were closed shut with a small wooden dowel, which went through a loop.  In one entry of his notebook he writes “onde del mare di Piombio, tutta d’acua sciumosa, dell’acqua che risalta del sito, dove chadano li gran pesi perchussori delle acque”, which translates to, “Waves of the sea at Piombino; all the water spumy; water which rears up from the place where great percussive weights of water fall.”

            Through his notebooks comes a great understanding of Leonardo.  His interests have no limits, and this is shown in his notebooks.  His pages are occupied with subjects anywhere from architecture, to music, to philosophy, and much more.  In the book the author quotes Kenneth Clark describing Leonardo as “the most relentlessly curious man in history”.  I think this quote is so marvelous because it sums up the major identity of him.  He was so passionately curious, and I am sure that it must have been that trait alone which drove him to pursue so many different paths, and become the talented “genius” that he is now known as. 

            Other important documentation of Leonardo’s life is his paintings.  The author of the reading says however, “A Renaissance painting is not a personal statement in the way that a modern painting can be, but it can still tell us things about the man who painted it and about the circumstances in which he was working.  It carries messages, both on the two-dimensional picture-plane (with the usual caveats about interpreting works of art biographically) and in the mysterious third dimension of the paint surface, with its micron-tick layers of suspended pigments which tell the story of a painting’s composition just as the stratifications of a rock tell a geological story.”  In the case of Leonardo’s paintings there have been traces of his hand recorded on the surface.  There have been finger smudges, smoothings, and occasionally a thumbprint discovered.  This tells us about his style as an artist.  It shows what an innovative person he was, because using the human hand in drawing and painting was not a technique that was even used yet at that time.