Scan barcode
A review by bhnmt61
Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
4.0
Unexpectedly, in spite of this book’s 500+ pages, Isaacson’s style is more of a journalist writing for a popular magazine than an academic creating a definitive biography. That contrast describes my experience of reading Leonardo. I would never have finished a dense academic biography, but on the other hand, I weirdly ended up feeling a little disappointed. How can you read 500 pages about someone and end up wishing you knew more?
That probably says more about Leonardo than it does Isaacson. Leonardo is endlessly fascinating. He’s clearly one of the most intelligent, curious people ever to live, but he rarely completed anything. If all of his finished paintings were gathered in one gallery, the gallery wouldn’t need to be very big.
I remember as an undergraduate at a liberal arts school, I was required to take an art history course. That sounded horribly dull to me, so I put it off until I couldn’t put it off any more—and I ended up being sorry I had. I loved it. One of the things I learned is that when you’ve seen iconic works of art over and over in popular culture, you don’t realize why they are iconic. It’s only in the context of other painters of the era, or the immediately preceding era, that you realize how groundbreaking the work is.
Isaacson does a decent job of making this clear. The book was clearly intended to be mass produced, so there isn’t as much (expensive) contextual illustration as you could wish, but the text does a good job of spelling out exactly why the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper or the Vitruvian Man are the timeless works that they are.
Maybe Isaacson’s real gift to the reader is showing all the contradictions wrapped around Leonardo’s genius. Why did he leave so many paintings unfinished? How could he have written thousands of pages describing groundbreaking experiments and dissections, and yet left them unpublished? Leonardo discovered things about architecture, engineering, and the human body that wouldn’t be replicated/confirmed for two hundred years or more, but outside of his friends and associates, no one knew. It’s almost heartbreaking to think about.
I won’t say I was riveted all the way through, but all in all, this is a thoroughly worthwhile read.
That probably says more about Leonardo than it does Isaacson. Leonardo is endlessly fascinating. He’s clearly one of the most intelligent, curious people ever to live, but he rarely completed anything. If all of his finished paintings were gathered in one gallery, the gallery wouldn’t need to be very big.
I remember as an undergraduate at a liberal arts school, I was required to take an art history course. That sounded horribly dull to me, so I put it off until I couldn’t put it off any more—and I ended up being sorry I had. I loved it. One of the things I learned is that when you’ve seen iconic works of art over and over in popular culture, you don’t realize why they are iconic. It’s only in the context of other painters of the era, or the immediately preceding era, that you realize how groundbreaking the work is.
Isaacson does a decent job of making this clear. The book was clearly intended to be mass produced, so there isn’t as much (expensive) contextual illustration as you could wish, but the text does a good job of spelling out exactly why the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper or the Vitruvian Man are the timeless works that they are.
Maybe Isaacson’s real gift to the reader is showing all the contradictions wrapped around Leonardo’s genius. Why did he leave so many paintings unfinished? How could he have written thousands of pages describing groundbreaking experiments and dissections, and yet left them unpublished? Leonardo discovered things about architecture, engineering, and the human body that wouldn’t be replicated/confirmed for two hundred years or more, but outside of his friends and associates, no one knew. It’s almost heartbreaking to think about.
I won’t say I was riveted all the way through, but all in all, this is a thoroughly worthwhile read.