#Notes

  • Leonardo was active during the late 1400’s. He first lived in Florence and later moved to Milan.
  • He came back to Florence later in his life but soon returned to Milan.
  • He seemed to have carried his art with him undelivered for years. He was having a hard time letting go of his favorite works.
  • When he arrived in Milan he actually wanted to be a weapons designer and engineer. He tried to convince Ludovico Sforza, who was the lord in Milan at the time, to give him job as military advisor.
  • Leonardo carried notebooks with him everywhere he went and had a commonplace book to note down his observations of nature and things going on around him.
  • Since the military ambitions didn’t work out he instead got involved in designing pageants and stage performances while he was in Milan. Both the mechanics and the visuals stimulated his imagination in art and engineering.
  • He also tinkered with creating music instruments.
  • Leonardo’s anatomic studies also helped to get an understanding of the human skull and how the teeth looked. He got this very close to correct without any tools at the time.
  • The Last Supper was finished in 1498.
  • When Leonardo was working for Cesare Borgia he also met with Machiavelli, who was an ambassador for Florence.
  • In order to gain advantage on Pisa Leonardo wanted to take away the Arno river and basically change its course and cut it off from the sea.
  • Leonardo was famous for his sfumato technique. By using shadows and blurred borders his drawings have a more natural feel to them. Other painters drew shapes with sharp outline which made them feel more stiff and unnatural. Look at the drawings of Michelangelo for example.
  • Leonardo became 67 years old and died in 1519.

#Reading log

2022-04-03: Have been reading the Leonardo Da Vinci biography this week. It’s about 700 pages which feels nice right now. I want to dive into something and forget about all the other interesting books I could read. I like that it transports me back to Florence in 1450 and makes me understand a person that lived during that time. Leonardo wrote a lot in his journals. He kept notebooks with todo-lists and the things he wanted to learn. He observed nature and reality to become a better painter. He does remind me of myself somehow. And that’s what I like about this book so far—that I can relate.

2022-04-09: The story about how Leonardo drew Vitruvian Man is a fascinating one. It’s the whole build up from traveling with his architecture friend to this little Italian village where they’ve heard they could find the treatise from Vitruvius. Reading the old Roman’s book on architecture from 1500 years earlier led them to the analogy of designing temples like men. He described how a man proportionally fits within a circle and a square. Leonardo and his friends were excited, started talking about it and first his friends drew a couple of examples. And at the end Leonardo drew his own version, more meticulous than any of the others. I just love tidbits like these. They help me understand the story behind things. And that it’s not just a drawing from a genius, but rather a collaboration between friends that leads up to this.

2022-04-19: I like the way the book is structured. It’s not purely chronological but instead it focuses in on different topics. Like telling the story of Vitruvian Man which led Leonardo into further refining his anatomical properties. Or how he got almost obsessively determined to define painting as a science. Or how when he came to Milan he first wanted to become a military engineer and weapons designer.

2022-04-20: As I’ve been reading 📚 Leonardo Da Vinci I noticed how he first write things down in his notebooks, accumulating notes over the years. Then he comes back later and write a thesis on a subject that he’s passionated about, and this is then based on those notes. This is much in line with the ideas in 📚 How To Take Smart Notes. It’s about building up a substantial amount of notes and also building up the thinking about a specific topic. Then you come back and do the sense-making afterwards to bring it all back together. I’ve recently revamped my topic journal and it’s very similar to this now. For each topic I put a date on top and add my notes in bullets below. The important part is not to become too general but keep topics titled the way my brain thinks about them. “On skim reading” is a topic I can return to over the years, but I don’t want to have everything in an “On reading” note. That will become too general.

2022-05-09: I didn’t know that much about Leonardo Da Vinci when I started this book. But after having read I feel as if he was a good friend. That’s what these types of biographies does to me. I get the follow along on the life journey of a specific person. That’s what makes it personal and interesting. I can put the person into context, what kind of problems they faced, when they lived and what kind of culture they inhabited.