Leonardo Da Vinci is the quintessential genius. Particularly in the engineering world, a clever idea might be described as a moment of Leonardo-esqe inspiration. Most people probably recognize the distinctive style of his sketches immediacy and even more quickly would identify the Mona Lisa or LAst Supper Paintings. I’ve often counted him as something of an inspiration when working on more speculative technologies. Yet despite all that I never knew much about him except from what I picked up from cultural references. I recently finally decided to change that and picked up a copy of Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci, a thourough biography that I particularly appreciated for all the images and inserts from Da Vinci’s famous notebooks. Here is some of what I learned:

• DaVinci reveled in the identity of an outsider for most of his life. He was born out of wedlock and his father never legitimized him. He was openly and sometimes flamboyantly gay.
• Leonardo had a reputation for being friendly and intensely generaous throughout his life.
• He was trained as a painter and artist (indeed, about two-thirds of the book features his art exploits) and excelled at the task due to his power of observation, intense attention to detail, and unending curioustity. Those traits often led him to perform groundbreaking science in service of art. For example, he spent years studying anatomy, essential inventing modern medical illustration, to paint more accurately. He studied light and water at various phases in his life and location specific geology often appears in his landscapes.
• At times in his life he fashioned himself as a military engineer and sold himself as such despite not having any experience in that field. This is where some of his famous drawing of offensive weapons and defensive mechanisms comes from.
• Interestingly, Isaacson doesn’t think that Da Vinci’s famous corkscrew helicopter was a serious attempt to fly, but instead was effectively a stage prop. Da Vinci enjoyed the theatre and often sought to blur the line between whimsy and reality. Part of Leonardo’s genius was the ability to marry observation and imagination into fantasy. He believed in basing knowledge an experience, but also was comfortable blurring the line between reality and fantasia.
• For all of Da Vinci’s skills, he was a pathological procrastinator and struggled to deliver on his commitments for his entire life. He left us a number of unfinished paintings, some of which he toted around for decades, and never published his work. Leonardo never had a steady career and was never driven by money. Instead his own interests and curiosities were a motivating force. He spent more time pursuing wisdom than working jobs that could make him money. He was not motivated by wealth or personal possessions. Although its plausible that posterity is poorer due to Leonardo’s inability to finish major works, its also plausible that the man’s own life was richer.
• Da Vinci was infatuated by shapes and geometry and was obsessed by trying to square a circle and solve other geometric problems, yet never could wrap his head around symbolic mathematics. That wasn’t the only thing he wasn’t a genius at either, ge tried to teach himself Greek at various points in his life yet never got very far. Some of the more amusing pages of his notebooks include lists of vocabular words combined with bored doodles in the margins.
• He boasted about his lack of education and preferred experience over handed down wisdom, which differentiated him from many Renaissance men who valued the knowledge systems of classical antiquity above all.
• He made some remarkable leaps of logic in astronomy claiming that “the sun does not move,” the earth nor the sun are at the center of the universe, something akin to gravity holds the oceans in place, and that the brightness of the moon is reflected sunlight.
• Leonardo was also an innovator of cartography. His map of Imola, created during one of his phases as a military engineer, looks suspiciously like a modern cartographically accurate overhead map at a time when cartography was just as much an art form as a science.
• Isaacson points out, and I tend to agree, that if you asked Da Vinci if he was an artist, a scientist, as an engineer he probably would not differentiate between the roles, and perhaps that is the most important lesson he has to give us.