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    Leonardo Da Vinci
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    Leonardo Da Vinci
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    Leonardo Da Vinci
    Audiobook17 hours

    Leonardo Da Vinci

    Written by Walter Isaacson

    Narrated by Alfred Molina

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Read by acclaimed actor Alfred Molina, star of The Da Vinci Code, An Education and Chocolat, this is the definitive biography of Leonardo Da Vinci.

    Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

    Da Vinci produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.

    His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions.

    Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it – to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

    Hear to the true story of Leonardo Da Vinci, brought to life by the brilliant Alfred Molina.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio UK
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9781471168420
    Author

    Walter Isaacson

    Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

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    Reviews for Leonardo Da Vinci

    4.5/5

    541 ratings45 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Such a brilliant account of this icon's life story. My favorite part is the rivalry with Michelangelo and how different they were, and the way the story of the Monalisa is delivered as the grand finale to an already epic tale is just the icing on the cake. Real good to know what moved Leonardo to become who he became, not to mention how inspiring it is to an artist like myself. Great writing and great narration to such a great story but for God's sake can the author stop comparing (or even mentioning) Steve Jobs in a story about Leonardo? It's like repeatedly mentioning your local pastor in a book about Jesus. Other than that I think Leonardo would approve...et cetera. I have to leave now, the soup is getting cold ;)
    • 5/5
      Need to go through lot many times to soak it all, pure Genius.
    • 5/5
      well written, able to catch your attention and your imagination, explains things in a manner that makes it believable and understandable. the PDF with illustrations was hard to get, but is very usefull. Loved it!
    • 5/5
      Does it take a year to read this book? No. Did it? Also, no... technically. I took it on a ten day trip to Europe last year and got half through, setting aside when I got back to close on a house, move into that house, do things on that house to make it ours... and read a bunch of other books. And each time I picked it up again, 1) I had no idea how I was going to pull selected highlights because I had margin notes on about every three pages (more on that), and 2) more life got in the way. Yes, I wrote more margin notes, and end notes, and sticky notes, than for probably any other book I've read.I have been a Leonardo nut since I was young. I read whatever was available in our small town. I built models of some of his inventions. Many years later I had a book of his notebooks (lost to a fire in 2013... still sad). I've read a lot. And Isaccson being Isaacson, I learned even more. Incredibly researched. Well documented. Properly documented - he cites in text, the way a professional does (sorry, not sorry, personal peeve when authors put notes at the end of a book with no indication other than in the TOC that the useless notes are back there.)I was disappointed in the binding of Simon and Schuster's hardcover. I had the glue break loose for first one large chunk, then several others, making it difficult to finish.
    • 4/5
      Nearly everything there is to know about one of the most amazing people we have record of.
    • 4/5
      Not knowing much about Leonardo da Vinci this biography covers many aspects of his life in fine details. However, the book is a bit dissatisfying in a number of aspects. Firstly, especially at the beginning the author inserts himself into the story - not sure why. Secondly, the author spends a lot of time on the art of Leonardo. This is great - that is what he is best known for. True, there is also a lot about his powers of observation. But we do not really get to know much about him, other than that he had tickets on himself, he saw himself more as an engineers than an artist, and he found it difficult to finish off works. Perhaps this is because there is not much else to tell. Although it was a work of fiction, I felt I learnt more about Leonardo from a book I read recently titled Tuscan Daughter by Lisa Rochon.I read this as a e-book - not ideal, as one can't easily flick back to view the photos of the art. However, that is one great thing about this book - wonderfully illustrated.
    • 3/5
      The thought and curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci is on display on every page in Walter Isaacson's masterful biography. Leading the reader like a tour guide through the many places and phases of Leonardo's life, Isaacson provides both details of the art but also context through capturing the background of the history, persons, and achievements that were experienced and made by Leonardo throughout his lengthy career.I was impressed with Leonardo's constant creativity noted as much, if not more, in his notebooks and in his completed works; which included drawings, sculpture, paintings, and more. Present are the differences that made Leonardo unique -- his left-handedness, his holistic views, his curiosity, and a relentless desire to know that made possible his improbable life as an artist, scientist, thinker, dreamer, and mathematician. The list of his interests is almost endless just as his curiosity was boundless. In the tradition of thinkers going back to Aristotle he revered man's desire for knowledge as seen in his statement: "The desire to know is natural to good men."Born out of wedlock in 1452 in the town of Vinci, he spent most of his life in Florence, Milan, and Rome, ending his days in France as a guest of the King. It was a peripatetic life premised on the primacy of sight and mind applied to the world around him in ways that seem phenomenal in retrospect and which, in spite of his successes and honors, were mitigated by his inability to finish projects. This too, impressed me as the wonders of his sketches and notes match and in some ways exceed the art he produced; art that includes "The Last Supper", the "Mona Lisa", and much more. Isaacson captures much of the wonder, but leaves the reader perplexed at times by his inability to truly penetrate the mind of Leonardo. The length of the text suggests a completeness that is not quite enough; perhaps no biographer could capture the totality of the magnificence of Leonardo. If ever there was an exemplar of the Renaissance Man it would be this polymath personnage from the small Italian village of Vinci.
    • 4/5
      An engrossing and informative work.
    • 5/5
      Inspiring in many ways - esp. since Leonardo wasn't perfect. He rarely finished anything and rarely took on new work - and neither bothered him. He just wanted to keep learning new things, and everything. This book humanized him for me.In my mind, the book itself took some time to find its stride, but eventually it did. It was worth the slog thru some of the early chapters.
    • 4/5
      Great book about one of humanity’s all time great individuals. Isaacson does a great job illustrating Leonardo along with the world he lived in. My only desire is if there were even more images of the notebook pages as Isaacson described them.
    • 4/5
      Slightly over long but there's obviously a lot to cram in. I'd never fully appreciated Leonardo da Vinci's efforts in science before reading - I knew of his attempted inventions and anatomy studies but he really was breaking new ground in several fields, albeit often purely for his own curiosity and never published or announced. Inspiring guy.
    • 4/5
      As biographies, this one holds my attention and I have a good grasp of Leonardo's life, career, and his personality.
    • 4/5
      With biographies of Steve Jobs, Einstein, and now Leonardo, Walter Isaacson has become America’s foremost biographer of intellectuals. In this work, which tracks the prodigious creative output of a genius, Isaacson tries to piece together a narrative from a series of artistic, scientific, and engineering feats and, of course, from Leonardo’s own diaries. That is a difficult chore to achieve about a man from over 500 years ago. It’s even more difficult to think that we have very little sense of the personal affectations of this genius.

      Unlike with recent bios Jobs and Einstein, Isaacson approaches Leonardo as a light appearing in an extraordinarily dark age. The lack of good sources certainly hamper this work. I found myself unable to read large swaths of this book at one sitting because of the lack of narrative. Certainly, scholarly discussion exists, and Isaacson makes good use of it. Nonetheless, the challenge of chronicling a life so far back limits this work’s human interest.

      Since Leonardo’s polymath ways showed most brightly in painting, this book contains many pages with color replications of Leonardo’s art. It reads like a 600-page work of art history, with the occasional rabbit trail into whatever curiosity fancied Leonardo’s mind. I don’t know a lot about art history, so I found this introduction helpful and accessible. Isaacson expressively engages the reader with wonder – as it should be with a genius.

      Isaacson concludes this work with some observations about what Leonardo’s genius can teach us moderns. “Seek knowledge for its own sake.” “Respect facts.” “Create for yourself, not just for patrons.” This advice provides a nice book-end to the sheer power involved in engaging Leonardo’s mind. Some in our day deny that human nature exists at all. I’m not sure Leonardo teaches us about particular human nature. But he does teach us about genius nature. Those who wish to extend themselves more into developing great work should heed Isaacson’s investigations.

    • 5/5
      Whew! After quite a spell, I finished the book - well worth it, as it is quite detailed, with illustrations and images and explains the nature of Leonardo's genius. I was particularly taken with the discussion of Leonardo's interest in and knowledge of mathematics and various theorems which would not be [re]discovered for a couple of hundred years. A long read, but well worth it - enlightening and entertaining.
    • 4/5
      I don't think this is a great biography. While Isaacson does a good job at giving both details and a high-level big picture, and at trying to draw lessons from Leonardo da Vinci's life, I don't think that he does a great job in giving us a feeling for Leonardo or his time (perhaps because of a dearth of sources), Isaacson isn't insightful when writing about da Vinci's art, and he has a strange penchant for quoting Steve Jobs. Despite the flaws, though, I loved the book. Da Vinci was such an amazing person, truly inspirational. I learned so much. I don't know if the facts are on Wikipedia, but Isaacson does a good job tying them together into a strong narrative. > Yet another prolonged attempt involved dividing a circle into many sectors, which he then subdivided into triangles and semicircles. He arranged these slices into a rectangle and repeated the process with smaller and smaller slices, approaching the limit of infinitely small triangles. His impulses prefigured those that would lead to the development of calculus, but Leonardo did not have the skills that allowed Leibniz and Newton to devise this mathematical study of change two centuries later.
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure that any book could adequately cover the achievements and creativity of Leonardo da Vinci. Though this book is over 524 pages, I am sure another 500 pages could easily be written on this amazing man. I rated this book four stars but if I had an appreciation for art history, sculpture and painting, I probably would rate it 5 . There is a lot of detail and analysis of various da Vinci paintings, art and sculpture that regrettably this reader has no appreciation. Nonetheless the biography of da Vinci is a fascinating story in itself. Da Vinci had incredible mental bandwidth – – he was an artist, painter, sculptor, military engineer, scientist, botanist, musician, theater director, mathematician, astronomer etc.

      Da Vinci did provide examples and a paper trail of his creative work, projects and thoughts. He provided notebooks totaling over 7200 pages. His notebooks contained his to do lists, ideas, sketches and random thoughts on a variety of disciplines.

      If readers are not intrigued in knowing about da Vinci they may be turned off by the sheer weight of the book. They can wait for the movie version which I understand is in the works.

    • 5/5
      I've heard this book described so well this way: A book about a Renaissance man, by a Renaissance man. Walter Isaacson is a wonderful writer, and provides us with a nice mix of both Leonardo the man, and his accomplishments.I attended a lecture about Leonardo at a local university and learned that thousands of pages from his notebooks are missing. My mind boggles at what else Mr. da Vinci may have envisioned! This book is beautiful, with many drawings and illustrations. It is a tribute to the importance of curiosity.
    • 5/5
      This was an amazing biography. In it is Leonardo da Vinci in all his majesty, and intimacy, pieced together from accounts, his notebooks, and supporting documents. All in all, it's a swooping masterpiece that abounds with technical skill as he entices it, and rewards it, with the fruits of what Leonardo da Vinci meant for history and what he stood for.Definitely recommended: 5 stars!
    • 4/5
      Rating based on readability of the book. Excellently written, never boring, very interesting - looking forward to reading more by Isaacson.
    • 4/5
      It took me almost one year to read this biography of da Vinci and it was not because it wasn’t interesting but because there was so much information about this genius to absorb.Isaacson takes a chronological approach to Da Vinci’s life which began on April 15, 1452 near Florence until his death in Amboise, France, May 2, 1519.What I retained from the story of his life were his insatiable curiosity, quest for knowledge, his perfectionism which led to procrastination and his ability to mingle the art of science and the science of art. He filled notebooks with ideas, engineering experiments, anatomical drawings and shopping lists. His curiosity regarding the natural world, household inventories, the human body and basic engineering showed how his mind searched for answers to questions that amazed him. His obsession with how water flows inspired his engineering and architecture.Dissecting corpses, drawing musculature, bones, fetuses allowed him to perfectly draw the human body and face. His curiosity regarding the human blood circulation system and his conclusions regarding the function of the heart was centuries ahead of other scientists.Da Vinci loved life, lived a very unconventional liberal lifestyle, was generous to his family, was almost always broke, had many friends and patrons and likely frustrated many of these with his inability to stay focused and finish projects. He spent his final years in Amboise at a home owned by King François I who wanted this renaissance intellectual to be comfortable as the “first painter, engineer and architect to the King”.
    • 3/5
      Nowhere as good as Steve Jobs or Einstein.
    • 5/5
      Isaacson is a consummate biographer of scientific and technical men. This work on Leonardo da Vinci is a brilliant analysis of An exceptional man, someone who can easily be labelled ‘genius’.Isaacson tells us little about who da Vinci was and focuses much more on what da Vinci did. He has absorbed da Vinci’s extensive writings that survive and has clearly been astonished at the breadth, depth, the sheer wonder of what he found. The range of subjects covered from arts and science, the depth of da Vinci’s studies and the juxtaposition of his notes on the page that reveal he was often thinking deeply about five different completely unrelated things at once and then drawing out that these things are actually related in some deep and previously unseen way.This work led me to understand the artist and scientist in da Vinci better than any other biography of a similar figure has ever done. I was moved by Isaacson’s last chapter where he attempts to describe what genius is and how da Vinci’s character led him to be such a great man.This book deserves a five star rating, but loses half a star because of the rather poor quality of the illustrations (of which there are many). Often Isaacson’s detailed descriptions of da Vinci’s paintings and drawings cannot be followed through the illustrations because the definition is too low - we cannot see the detail that both da Vinci and Isaacson want us to see.
    • 3/5
      Okay, given could only rely on notebooks for most part. Not as good as other large scale biographies. Loved how much of a procrastinator LDV was. Remarkable for any time. Nice that was reading during whirlwind weekend in Rome.
    • 4/5
      I listened to this on audio which might seem strange for a book where the illustrations matter but it actually works well. I don't know that I would have gotten through the detail when reading it but on audio it didn't matter so much. I did slightly speed up the narration as I found it a bit slow.Like most people I know a little bit about Leonardo and I have seen some of the notebooks in the British Library but a little was all it was.I now know a lot more and very interesting it was too. For a man who rarely completed anything he's pretty famous!!! Gives hope to all us procrastinators ;) Recommended read.
    • 5/5
      Extremely well written by Isaacson. This book captures the importance of Leonardo's accomplishments. Most of the chapters filled me with excitement about Leonardo. This book represents the best in non-fiction biography.
    • 4/5
      People throw around the word genius a lot these days and you can become pretty jaded about it. That’s why reading about someone as staggeringly brilliant as Leonardo can be a bit exhausting. Not only is it the sheer number of things he pioneered or perfected, but the detail Isaacson goes into. That is the main reason it took me most of a year to finish this book. Another is that it is a bit repetitive in the sense that his paintings, studies, notebooks and life circumstances didn’t differ that much and all received the same breathless awe. Not that he wasn’t deserving; he was. He more than many others. Here are a few things I learned and loved about Leonardo -> He was gay and almost out...as out as you could be at this time> He eschewed religion, but paid it lip service as the times and patrons dictated> He had a fine sense of frivolity and whimsy > He invented musical instruments, but didn’t play them> He didn’t complete a lot of paintings and left very few completed ones behind considering how revered he is as a painter> He is the first person to have understood and explained that arteriosclerosis is a function of time> He discovered that the blood itself makes heart valves work> He was often distracted and did not complete a lot of his work, or else bring it to its most logical conclusion> He hardly published anything> Some paintings are lost as are some notebooks, but surprisingly a lot survivedEarly on we understand that while Leonardo was a book buyer and had an extensive library, he wasn’t formally educated and considered it a benefit. He was of the opinion that rote learning stifled true discovery and thinking. He preferred to experiment and not just take someone else’s conclusions as the truth. Admirable and the genesis of the modern scientific method. It is too bad that he didn’t publish his findings as they could have been beneficial decades and even centuries before someone else found the same thing and it became commonly accepted or the de facto best practice. An amazing person and an interesting book, but one that tried my patience at times.
    • 5/5
      A great read, its only real drawback being Mr. Isaacson's predilection toward fawning over the individual pieces of art displayed in a book printing on photo-quality paper, which gave it the curb weight of a Greyhound bus. The history, however, was a wonderful tour of Da Vinci's world and, as much as was possible, the workings of the great man's mind.
    • 5/5
      Long read, but very fascinating along with photos of his art and scientific data. It's not a quick read, but one to be savored and appreciated.
    • 4/5
      A very solid, well researched biography of the painter, sculptor, inventor, architect, and all around genius. Isaacson delves into the connections between Leonardo and his family, patrons, lovers, rivals, and subjects. In exploring the paintings, he employs a standard art historian approach, analyzing the works and how they demonstrate DaVinci's artistic development. I gained a better understanding and appreciation for the artist, and my knowledge of politics and society in Renaissance Italy was expanded. I listened to the book on audio, admirably read by the actor Alfred Molina. It came with a downloadable supplement that was helpful--but I'd recommend springing for the print version, if you can afford it.
    • 4/5
      This was a difficult book for me to get through, because there was so much detail about his art and how he did it and what it meant, etc. Those who want to know about that will find it in this book. There is also great detail about his life and the many other interests he had. That made it worth wading through the technical info about painting. One does get a chance to meet the man in this very comprehensive book.