Цитаты из книги Леонардо да Вінчі

Начиная примерно с 1480 года, записные книжки Леонардо явно свидетельствуют о его мрачном настроении, порой даже о мучительной тоске. На листе с рисунками, изображающими водяные и солнечные часы, он оставил горестное замечание, в котором сквозит грустная мысль о недоделанной работе: «У нас нет недостатка в приборах, измеряющих жалкие наши дни, которые лучше было бы не расточать попусту, не оставляя никакой памяти в умах людей». Он начинал писать одну и ту же фразу всякий раз, когда ему нужно было найти новый наконечник пера или просто ненадолго убить время: «Скажи мне, сделано ли что-нибудь… Скажи мне… Скажи мне». А однажды он излил на бумагу страдальческий вопль: «Я-то думал, что учусь жить, а оказывается, все это время учился умирать».

Be curious, relentlessly curious. “I have no special talents,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. “I am just passionately curious.”4 Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for the perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a woodpecker, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon, and the edges of shadows. Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did. Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure.

If he had lived another decade, he likely would have continued to refine the Mona Lisa for that much longer. Relinquishing a work, declaring it finished, froze its evolution. Leonardo did not like to do that. There was always something more to be learned, another stroke to be gleaned from nature that would make a picture closer to perfect. What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Any person who puts “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” on his to-do list is overendowed with the combination of curiosity and acuity. His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about: Why is the sky blue? How are clouds formed? Why can our eyes see only in a straight line? What is yawning? Einstein said he marveled about questions others found mundane because he was slow in learning to talk as a child. For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom.

Leonardo cast himself as an engineer because he was going through one of his regular bouts of being bored or blocked by the prospect of picking up a brush. As his mood swung between melancholy and exultation, he fantasized and boasted about being an accomplished weapons designer.

These boasts were aspirational. He had never been to a battle nor actually built any of the weapons he described. All he had produced thus far were some elegant sketches of concepts for weapons, many of them more fanciful than practical.

Verrocchio’s bottega, like those of his five or six main competitors in Florence, was more like a commercial shop, similar to the shops of the cobblers and jewelers along the street, than a refined art studio.

On the ground floor was a store and workroom, open to the street, where the artisans and apprentices mass-produced products from their easels, workbenches, kilns, pottery wheels, and metal grinders. Many of the workers lived and ate together in the quarters upstairs.

The paintings and objects were not signed; they were not intended to be works of individual expression. Most were collaborative efforts, including many of the paintings commonly attributed to Verrocchio himself. The goal was to produce a constant flow of marketable art and artifacts rather than nurture creative geniuses yearning to find outlets for their originality.

When his friend the mathematician Luca Pacioli described Leonardo’s mirror writing, he made the point that some other lefthanders wrote likewise. A popular fifteenth-century calligraphy book even shows left-handed readers the best way to do lettera mancina, or mirror script.

Being left-handed also affected Leonardo’s method of drawing. As with his writing, he drew from right to left so as not to smudge the lines with his hand. Most artists draw hatching strokes that slope upward to the right, like this: ////. But Leonardo’s hatching was distinctive because his lines started on the lower right and moved upward to the left, like this: \\. Today this style has an added advantage: the left-handed hatching in a drawing is evidence that it was made by Leonardo.

Beautiful Florence has all seven of the fundamental things a city requires for perfection,” the essayist Benedetto Dei wrote in 1472, when Leonardo was living there. “First of all, it enjoys complete liberty; second, it has a large, rich, and elegantly dressed population; third, it has a river with clear, pure water, and mills within its walls; fourth, it rules over castles, towns, lands and people; fifth, it has a university, and both Greek and accounting are taught; sixth, it has masters in every art; seventh, it has banks and business agents all over the world.