Think Like Da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius. Michael Gelb

      Each principle is highlighted by excerpts from the maestro’s notebooks and illustrated with his sketches or paintings. This illumination is followed by some questions for reflection and self-assessment. These questions are designed to stimulate your thinking and inspire your application of the principles. The questions are followed by a program of practical exercises for cultivating a personal and professional Renaissance. To get the most benefit from Think Like Da Vinci, read the whole book first, without doing the exercises. Just contemplate the questions for reflection and self-assessment. After this preview, review the explanation of each principle and then do the exercises. Some of the exercises are easy and fun, while others require challenging inner work. All are designed to bring the spirit of the maestro to your daily life. In addition to the exercises, you will find an annotated reading and resource list to guide you in exploring and applying each principle. The reading list includes recommendations on the Renaissance, the history of ideas, the nature of genius, and, of course, the life and work of Leonardo.

      In the final section of the book you will discover “The Beginner’s Da Vinci Drawing Course,” and you’ll also learn how you can participate in a history-making project that embodies the essence of the Da Vincian spirit.

       The Renaissance, Then and Now

      Just across the Arno River, a bit off the well-trodden Florentine tourist track, you’ll find the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Enter, make a left and then another quick left, and you are in the Brancacci Chapel, surrounded by the frescoes of Masolino and Masaccio. The first fresco on the left is Masaccio’s evocation of Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden. And it is here that the Renaissance begins: Instead of having the two-dimensional otherworldliness of medieval paintings, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve look like real human beings. Their slumping postures and downcast faces express real emotion. Portrayed in three dimensions, with their feet solidly on the ground, Masaccio’s figures herald a new era of human promise and potentiality.

      To appreciate this new era, and to get the most from our study of Leonardo da Vinci, we must first gain some insight into the preceding period. In A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, William Manchester claims that pre-Renaissance Europe was characterized by “a mélange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.” Describing the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the dawn of the Renaissance, Manchester writes, “In all that time nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined. Except for the introduction of water wheels in the 800s and windmills in the 1100s, there had been no inventions of significance. No startling new ideas had appeared, no new territories outside Europe had been explored. Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could remember. The center of the Ptolemaic universe was the known world – Europe with the Holy Land and North Africa on its fringes. The sun moved round it every day. Heaven was above the immovable Earth, somewhere in the overarching sky; hell seethed far beneath their feet. Kings ruled at the pleasure of the Almighty; all others did what they were told to do … The church was indivisible, the afterlife a certainty; all knowledge was already known. And nothing would ever change.”

      The word Renaissance comes from the combination of the French verb renaître, meaning “to revive,” and the noun naissance, meaning birth. The Italians call it Rinascimento. After centuries of serfdom and superstition, the ideal of human power and potentiality was reborn. The revival of this classical ideal was presaged by Giotto, initiated by Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Masaccio, and reached full expression through Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. This dramatic transformation of worldview from the medieval era went hand in hand with a number of discoveries, innovations, and inventions, including:

      

The printing press – Made knowledge available to vast numbers of people beyond the clergy and ruling elites. In 1456 there were fewer than sixty extant copies of Gutenberg’s bible, the first book printed in Europe. By the turn of the century there were over fifteen million printed books in circulation.

      

The pencil and inexpensive paper – Made writing, note-taking, and therefore the recording of learning accessible to the common citizen.

      

The astrolabe, the magnetic compass, and the large sailing ship – Resulted in a tremendous expansion of ocean traffic, international trade, and exchange of information. As Columbus and Magellan proved that the world is not flat, much of traditional wisdom was rendered flat.

      

The long-range cannon – Although catapults, mangonels, and small cannons were in use for many years, they were not able to breach fortress walls. The powerful long-range cannon was pioneered by a Hungarian engineer named Urban in the mid-1400s. As the new technology spread, the feudal fortress, and therefore feudalism, soon lost its impregnability. The stage was set for the birth of the modern nation-state.

      

The mechanical clock – Stimulated commerce by allowing people to experience time as a controllable commodity. In the Middle Ages people had no concept of time as we understand it. The vast majority of people didn’t know what year it was or even what century they lived in.

      Many of these innovations and most of the great art masterpieces of the period were fueled by the entrepreneurial spirit, the spreading desire for consumer goods, and a rush to capital. In Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine shows, with magnificent illustrations and incisive, detailed text, how the cultural and intellectual transformations of the Renaissance were driven by expanding capitalism. She suggests that “those impulses which today we disparage as ‘consumerism’ ” were present in the Renaissance mind-set that produced the works and advances we treasure today. Even commercialism played a role: “A painter’s reputation rested on his ability to arouse commercial interest in his works of art, not on some intrinsic criteria of intellectual worth.”

      This extraordinary burgeoning awareness of human capability was delightfully reflected by changes in the rules of chess. Prior to the Renaissance, the queen moved only one square at a time; but as the perception of human horizons and potential expanded, she was granted the wide-ranging powers she maintains to this day.

      Still, the question remains why the Renaissance took place when it did. For one thousand years prior, European accomplishments in the realms of science and exploration were negligible. Throughout the Middle Ages, the vast majority of human intellectual energy and effort was diverted to questions of doctrinal minutiae and “holy” war. Instead of exploring new lands, innovations, and ideas, the best minds engaged in debates on how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, and the church rarely hesitated to torture anyone who questioned its dogma. This, of course, put something of a damper on independent thinking.

      The seminal event that led to the Renaissance, my colleague Raymond Keene and I believe, occurred in the fourteenth century when the Black Plague swept through Europe. Almost one half of the population was destroyed in a rapid and hideous fashion. Priests, bishops, nobles, and knights died in the same proportion as peasants, serfs, harlots, and tradesmen. Devotion, piety, and loyalty to the church provided no protection, shaking the faith of people from all walks of life. Moreover, wealthy families had their ranks thinned almost overnight, concentrating wealth in the hands of the lucky survivors. While they would previously have spent this wealth on the church, the wealthy began to hedge their bets after the plague and began to invest in independent scholarship. In what was at first an almost imperceptibly subtle shift of consciousness, answers