Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [9]
Later, in 1481, he was hired to create The Adoration of the Magi, a painting for the friars of a Florentine monastery. This was never finished, either.
In fact, Leonardo left behind more sketches and plans—and less finished work—than probably any other artist in history. How to explain this apparent lack of follow-through? Art lovers throughout history have mourned Leonardo’s lack of productivity. The number of paintings (finished or unfinished) that we know to be his is only thirteen.
Is it possible for someone to be too smart? For him, a man with so many talents and so many passions, focusing on one idea or project may have been tricky. In a case, perhaps, of Renaissance attention deficit disorder, he always wanted to be on to the next thing.
Painting was not a means of self-expression for Leonardo—he thought of each painting as “a thing of the mind,” a set of problems a brain could gnaw on. He was always much more interested in the conception of a project—figuring out how it would look or be constructed—than the completion of it. Sometimes he was so ambitious in his designs that he imagined ways of doing projects that were technically impossible, that no human could pull off.
It sounds like he could be bristly to work with. He turned down commissions from people he didn’t like, or who had the nerve to treat him in a demeaning way. He hated being given orders or being rushed. Deadlines and contracts were obviously not sacred to him.
Perhaps Leonardo daydreamed instead of focusing. The artist did always have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. “Lying on a feather mattress or quilt will not bring you renown,” he once wrote, as if scolding himself. One of his early designs was for a personal alarm clock cleverly powered by water.
Or maybe he was growing ambivalent about fame, realizing it could bring attention of an unwanted kind.
Anyway, he was busy—busy reading, another pastime that earned him nothing. But it was important to him to fill in the craters in his education. Luckily, he was talented at teaching himself. He made notes of books he needed to read. By the time he was twenty-nine, in 1481, some 40,000 titles were in print.
Florence was home to a flourishing library, protecting thousands of rare items collected by the Medici. Like all libraries at that time, it wasn’t open to the public, but Leonardo could have made the right connections to gain entry, reading what had been translated into Italian.
He also made notes of scholars to meet—an astronomer and geographer, a doctor, several mathematicians, a scholar of Greek. He must have discovered the fact that most experts adore talking about their area of expertise.
He was currently most interested in animal and plant biology, human organs, and the principles of flight. A beloved subject of Florentine art was the Greek myth of Icarus, the boy who flew too near the sun with wings of wax and feathers. Leonardo was obsessed with the possibility of flying. A long-standing legend is that Leonardo, who cherished animals, would often buy caged birds at the market just to set them free. First, though, he would study them—even his earliest paintings of angels showed that he was using real bird wings as models. He studied birds’ wings and tails, how their feathers were arranged. Then he watched and made notes describing how birds flew up and down, changing direction, soaring, gliding, and coming in for a landing without breaking their legs.
His papers from this time show his deep interest in classical learning. He knew about Archimedes, the mathematician who was considered the greatest scientist of ancient Greece. Among other accomplishments, Archimedes had worked out the principles of the lever, using notions that were two thousand years ahead of his time.
Leonardo was also getting acquainted with the work of Plato, the Greek philosopher who linked knowledge with virtue.
Plato’s best-known student, Aristotle, was Leonardo’s favorite ancient Greek. Aristotle had studied biology,