Leonardo: The Artist and the Man [Paperback]

Bramly postulates that when the very young Leonardo first came to Verrochio's workshop, the first thing he saw was the master working on a problem that required a knowledge of mathematics, geometry, engineering and physics: The design and construction of an over six foot diameter bronze sphere with cross on top, weighing over a ton, which had to be transported from its place of casting and construction to the principal cathedral of Florence, lifted over 250 feet in the air, attached to the top of "Il Duomo" and secured in such a manner that it would never topple even when buffeted by the strongest storm winds. As Bramly aptly points out, there was no such thing as "art for arts' sake" back then, the concept never even having occurred to these artists because they would have considered it absurd. The same as any scientist or engineer of the day would never have dreamed of a life or world without art. All knowledge and all skills related to one another.

When Leonardo learned to draw and paint, he had to learn how to create pencils and brushes from scratch, to find and understand the properties of the raw materials from which to grind the pigments for his paints, how to work with wood and cloth so as to create a canvass. Those things alone involve the fields of geology, physics, biology (the various types of animal hairs suitable for brushes), carpentry +. The composition of his works required an in depth study of geometry, trigonometry and some degree of calculus; the faithful execution of living subjects a knowledge of anatomy and the physics of light. Each thing lead to another, and Da Vinci followed all of these paths of scientific and artistic discovery - which for him and others of his day were one and the same. This hands-on type of training in all things relevant to his trade - which meant just about all things - is what lead Da Vinci to be interested in so many diverse fields of study. The more dots he connected, the more dots he discovered that needed connecting.

All of this stands in stark contrast to how we educate people today: On career paths to ever more finite fields of specialization, excluding and discarding anything and everything that does not relate to that narrow path. The vast majority of dots are excluded, so it is no wonder why so few people know how to connect them.

So read and imbibe the training of this genius and his contemporaries. Then compare, for example, what Alan Blum said in his provocative and controversial "Closing of the American Mind;" John Ralston Saul's take on our age of the enshrinement of the idiot-savant in "Voltaire's Bastards;" or Robert Hughes' short, enjoyable but nevertheless stinging critique of our times in "Culture of Complaint." Then also consider that in the eighteenth century in the English colonies of North America there existed more or less contemporaneously a Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and so many others. Like with North Italy during the Renaissance, it was no historical accident. If you sat at the dinner table of any of these men, it would be not just normal but expected for you to converse intelligently on topics as diverse as politics, philosophy, economics, history, agriculture, horticulture, architecture, physics, biology, botany. And to recite a few memorized poems, create puns, match wits, play a musical instrument and perhaps compose a piece or two for entertainment. Their training, likewise, was one which taught that all knowledge was important, interrelated and was interesting.

In sum, in my mind Bramly's greatest achievement in this work was to show that Da Vinci's don't just fall out of the sky. They are taught, and they are taught and trained in a very broad, inclusive manner. Would that we could return to the basics of that type of education instead of the super-specialist who excludes all else. Da Vinci's type brought us the wonders of the Renaissance. Our "modern" methodology has brought us the type of individual whose arrogance is inversely proportional to the narrowness of his knowledge, the kind who create meticulously planned and detailed exercises that inevitably become disasters, like Viet Nam, Serbia's "ethnic cleansing" and today's Iraq. Devote an individual's education to a particular species of tree and he'll want to cut down all the others to get to the one he knows the most about. But teach people about forests, and they'll be interested in all the trees - and see how each is important in its own right as well as its importance to the whole.