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Book: Leonardo da Vinci
Quotes of Book: Leonardo da Vinci

Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
the shadows caressed the folds. I tried to see how light that was reflected from one object subtly colored the shadows of another object. I noticed how the glint of a lustrous spot on a shiny surface moved when I tilted my head. When I looked at a distant tree and a near one, I tried to visualize the lines of perspective. When I saw an eddy of water, I compared it to a ringlet of hair. When I couldn't understand a math concept, I did the best I was able to visualize it. When I saw people at a supper, I studied the relationship of their motions to their emotions.
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci.31
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
His comparisons between man-made machinery and the handiwork of nature produced in him a deep reverence for the latter. "Though human ingenuity may make various inventions," he wrote, "it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."15
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
Oddest of all, there is this entry: "Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men."10 We can imagine Leonardo wanting to do
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
Study of light hitting a head.
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
This would require moving a million tons of earth, and Leonardo calculated the man-hours necessary by doing a detailed time-and-motion study, one of the first in history. He figured out everything from the weight of one shovel-load of dirt {twenty-five pounds} to how many shovel-loads would fill a wheelbarrow {twenty}. His answer: it would take approximately 1.3 million man-hours, or 540 men working 100 days, to dig the Arno diversion ditch.
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
Most of Leonardo's drawings for Pacioli's book, which was finished in 1498, are variations of the five shapes known as Platonic solids. These are polyhedrons that have the same number of faces meeting at each vertex: pyramids, cubes, octahedrons {eight faces}, dodecahedrons {twelve}, and icosahedrons {twenty}. He also illustrated more complex shapes, such as a rhombicuboctahedron, which has twenty-six facets, eight of them equilateral triangles that are bordered by squares {fig. 58}. He pioneered a new method for making such shapes understandable: instead of drawing them as solids, he made them see-through skeletons, as if constructed of wooden beams. His sixty illustrations for Pacioli were the only drawings he published during his lifetime. Fig.
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
As usual, he combined experience and experiment; in fact he used the same word, esperienza, for both. While in Florence, he devised a pair of goggles for his dives in the Arno so he could study the water as it flowed past a weir. He threw oak apples or corks into a river and counted "beats of time" to study how long it took those in the center and those nearer the banks to move two hundred feet. He made floats that could hover at different depths to see how the currents changed from the surface to the bottom, and he crafted instruments that could measure a river's downhill course so he could determine the "rate of fall of a river per mile.
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
He was able to avoid pedantry by regularly bringing his theories down to earth, so to speak, and tying them to practical applications. As he instructed himself in a typical notebook jotting, "When you put together the science of the motions of water, remember to include under each proposition its application, in order that this science may not be useless."15
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
In collecting such a medley of ideas, Leonardo was following a practice that had become popular in Renaissance Italy of keeping a commonplace and sketch book, known as a zibaldone. But in their content, Leonardo's were like nothing the world had ever, or has ever, seen. His notebooks have been rightly called "the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper."3
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo's "inhumanly sharp eye." It's a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That's important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely.
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Walter Isaacson _ Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo's initial anatomy studies of 1489 focused on human skulls. He started with a skull that had been sawed in half, top to bottom {fig. 60}. Then the front of the left half was sawed off. His groundbreaking technique of drawing the two halves together made it easy to see how the inner cavities were positioned relative to the face. For example, the frontal sinus, which Leonardo is the first person to correctly depict, is shown to rest just behind the eyebrow.
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