Leonardo da Vinci (Penguin Lives) [Hardcover]

Sherwin Nuland (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Lives | Publication Date: October 2, 2000

A distinguished chronicler of the human body and spirit interprets a Renaissance genius

The enigma of the Mona Lisa's smile is not less than the enigma of her creator's life force."In Leonardo da Vinci, Sherwin Nuland (whose own work Time has called "awe-inspiring") completes his twenty-year quest to understand an unlettered man who was painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. What was it that propelled Leonardo's insatiable curiosity? How could he be, in the same moment, as naive as a child and as profound as a sage?

Nuland finds clues in his subject's art, relationships, and scientific studies--as well as in the manuscripts spotlighted by their sale at auction to Bill Gates. Nuland detects the siren voice that lured the great artist so often into the arms of science--his fascination with anatomy, first as the basis for his paintings and then as the crucial component in his aim to systematize all knowledge of nature. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland's Leonardo da Vinci takes us deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Say what one will about Edna O'Brien's ravishing clip job of Joyce, Peter Gay's moderate Mozart or Edmund White's microcosmic Proust, the editors at Penguin Lives have a knack for matching up free-thinking meditators and their subjects. A surgeon and a writer about medicine, Nuland (How We Die) uses much of his brief bookAlimited in size and scope to the series's quick-take, authorially inflected formatAto explain the prodigal da Vinci as pioneering anatomist. The first 11 pages detail Nuland's personal obsession with da Vinci; the later pages describe da Vinci's concern with human and animal anatomy, and review the bibliographical jumble of his surviving notebooks and papers. Nuland's da Vinci is tireless, perhaps sublimated, in his intellectual and artistic activity, finishing few canvases (one the Mona Lisa, another The Last Supper) and almost nothing else during a long life largely financed, sometimes erratically, by patrons who indirectly supported an expensive retinue of friends, assistants and servants. He emerges as a compulsive investigatorAof geometry, optics, hydraulics, architecture, sculpture, painting, botany, biology, military mechanics and the flight of birdsAmoving from city-state to city-state in Italy, encountering ruler after ruler who sought to harness his gifts. Yet perhaps unforgivably, given the series's promise of New Yorker profile-like effervescence, da Vinci as personality slips away; what we get is a clean condensation of the facts. Only the final chapter, "Matters of the Heart and Other Matters," injects some of Leonardo's own fervor, in an in-depth look at one of his abiding obsessions, the structure and function of the human heart. Nuland's account is solid, but lacks enough of the flourish that its subject so effortlessly achieved and, that, on a much smaller scale, the Lives series seems to strive for. 4 illus. BOMC, QPB, History Book Club selections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American

Artist, anatomist, architect, mathematician, military engineer-few have been as protean as Leonardo. Sir Kenneth Clark called him "the most relentlessly curious man in history." To Nuland, "he is also the historical figure about whom we are most relentlessly curious." In this brief life, Nuland summarizes Leonardo's achievements skillfully. Being a physician (clinical professor of surgery at Yale University), he is particularly interested in Leonardo's pioneering anatomical dissections and drawings. But to him as to other biographers, Leonardo remains essentially elusive. As the English critic Walter Pater said, "he seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men."

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (October 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670893919
• ISBN-13: 978-0670893911
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,042,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sherwin B. Nuland is Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and a Fellow at Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies. He is the author of over ten books, including the National Book Award-winning, HOW WE DIE: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, an inquiry into the causes and modes of death that spent 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. In addition he is a contributor to leading publications including the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Introduction to Leonardo Da Vinci, December 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Leonardo da Vinci (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

I have read all the Penguin Lives (except for Virginia Woolf; next on my list) and this one is the best of the series. It is such because it meets the perceived goals of these books.

Most of the subjects are mystical; persons with whom we hold an inexplicable fascination. Well, Nuland does an excellent job in explaining this fascination, which he clearly holds. His love of Da Vinci's life and works is manifest. Even though I have never read any of his other books, Nuland leaves me with this impression that this was the project of a lifetime.

Pengiun Lives are necessarily brief. The best ones leave the reader anxious to find out more. Nuland has succeeded with me on this count as well. (So did Edmund White's biography of Proust)

It is a pleasure to recommend this book.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Aesthetics of an Insatiable Curiosity, November 13, 2002

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Leonardo da Vinci (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

This is one of several volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Each provides a concise but remarkably comprehensive biography of its subject in combination with a penetrating analysis of the significance of that subject's life and career. I think this is a brilliant concept for a series of such studies. My only complaint (albeit a quibble) is that even an abbreviated index is not provided. Those who wish to learn more about the given subject are directed to other sources.

When preparing to review various volumes in this series, I have struggled with determining what would be of greatest interest and assistance to those who read my reviews. Finally I decided that a few brief excerpts and then some concluding comments of my own would be appropriate.

On Leonardo's "place": "Leonardo was not to be found in that place [Casa di Leonardo]. In fact, he is not to be found in [italics] any place. He is not a creature of places or monuments or even of permanence. He flashed across his time and was gone, leaving a vast body of work almost none of which except the paintings could be fully appreciated until centuries after his death, and far away from the house in which he was almost certainly not born. Quoting the famous statement of Freud, 'He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while others were all still asleep.'" (pages 3-4)

On Leonardo's "humanism": "Though he has often been called the ultimate Renaissance man, there is much to be said for the argument that Leonardo was only in part a man of the Renaissance. While he epitomized the zest for life and nature that was the guiding theme of humanism, he did at the same time eschew the dependence on ancient sources and the worshipful repetition of its principles that equally characterized its scholarship." (page 7)

On Leonardo's cosmology: "Leonardo was intrigued by motion, and the forces involved. The continuous flowings of energy in nature and in the life of man are a constant and even a central theme running through his manuscripts like the streamings of waters to which he often alluded. Moving water, in fact, is his symbol of these flowing energies; it is vital to his conception of the universe." (page 47)

On Leonardo's research: "...there is no evidence at any time during his seven decades of life that he ever stopped long enough in his constant pursuit of knowledge to allow himself the leisure to organize what he had discovered....putting it into neat little piles of knowledge must have seemed a waste of time and talent. What is more, his studies were really undertaken for Leonardo alone, and not for any wider purpose of educating his contemporaries; it was with himself that his studies conversed." (page 89)

As is also true of the other volumes in the "Penguin Lives" series, this one provides all of the essential historical and biographical information but its greatest strength lies in the extended commentary, in this instance by Sherwin B. Nuland. He also includes a highly informative "Bibliographical Note" for those who wish to learn more about Leonardo. I hope these brief excerpts encourage those who read this review to read Nuland's biography. It is indeed a brilliant achievement.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A DaVinci I never knew, April 28, 2003

By 

Andy Kaylor (Beaverton, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leonardo da Vinci (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

I was aware that in addition to being a master painter DaVinci was also a visionary scientist with ideas far ahead of his time, but I had no idea that he had made such remarkable leaps forward in the investigation of anatomy. This is a very interesting side of Leonardo that I'm glad to have learned more about. Even so, I don't know if it deserves to degree of focus this biography gives it.

This work gives a functional overview of the major events of DaVinci's life and dabbles a bit in the interpretation of a few of his more famous works of art. But it is first and foremost a biography of DaVinci the anatomist, to the detriment (it seems to me) of DaVinci the artist and DaVinci the mechanical engineer.

Beyond that, two things bugged me about this book. First, the author is a bit preoccupied with the idea of Leonardo's homosexuality and uses that as a tool to pschoanalyze many areas of his life. The speculations on his early childhood are almost exclusively retrospections guessed at by looking backward from an adult homosexual male.

The second thing that bothered me was the author's treatment of DaVinci's religious beliefs. I recognize that religion may not have been a central focus in DaVinci's life, but he does seem to have had a definite belief in God, whearas Nuland more or less apologizes for that fact whenever he is forced to bring it up and it seems that he would like to simply dismiss it as one of the areas in which DaVinci was a product of his times.