Jan van den Berg

j11g.com

Tag: leonardo da vinci

  • Leonardo da Vinci – Walter Isaacson

    My favorite biographer, Walter Isaacson, did it again. He created a gorgeously illustrated book about the quintessential renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci. The book is based on the mind blowing — in number and content — 7200 pages of notes Leonardo left behind (which probably only accounts for one quarter, the rest is lost). As far as I am concerned this biography is the definitive introduction to this left-handed, mirror writing, ever procrastinating, sculpting, painting, stargazing, riddle creating, bird watching, theatre producing, water engineering, corpse dissecting, observing and ever curious dandy polymath.

    Leonardo da Vinci – Walter Isaacson (2017) – 601 pages

    “Leonardo’s notebooks are nothing less than an astonishing windfall that provides the documentary record of applied creativity.”

    Walter Isaacson

    I don’t want to go into too much detail about Leonardo da Vinci; just read the book! But needless to say he was one of a kind, his mind worked differently from other people and he made wide varying discoveries. I always thought he must have been a reclusive person. Because he was so far ahead of his time — sometimes centuries — that he must not have enjoyed present company. But, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

    Leonardo was very much a people person. And this is one of the key arguments made by Isaacson about Leonardo’s art and skill. Not only was he a keen curious (the most curious) observer and tinkerer but he also sought cooperation to bounce ideas off. Isaacson makes a strong case of Leonardo specifically becoming and being a genius because of the combination of these things.

    A different print than my copy, but still gorgeous. Also, my copy has an autograph 😉

    As I’ve come to expect of biographies by Isaacson, his own personal passion and admiration for the subject shine trough. Which is why I always enjoy his writing. Of course, some things that happened 500 years ago are up for debate, but Isaacson demonstrates enough knowledge and backstory to his findings to come to mostly natural conclusions. This book does an especially good job of going through da Vinci’s life chronologically but still managing to show the cross-sections and connections between art and science (and everything else) throughout Leonardo’s life. And with Leonardo everything was interconnected and related, so this is quite an accomplishment!

    All of Leonardo’s skills and knowledge, of course, came together in the painting he worked on for 16 years. The Mona Lisa. The book beautifully works towards that conclusion. And by reading this book you come away with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what exactly it is you’re looking at.

  • Can we replace paper?

    Paper always beats rock and scissors. Because one of the few inventions greater than writing itself, is writing on paper. Paper writings are absolute, self-contained and transferable units of knowledge, which after publishing become and stay available and accessible for hundreds of years or more.

    Don’t take my word for it, there is this great quote by J.C.R. Licklider found in Libraries of the Future and brought to my attention by Walter Isaacson in The Innovators.

    Message and medium

    Take da Vinci’s work. We are able to witness and experience and read the exact paper he put his thoughts on some 500 years ago. Our language may have changed but the medium and therefore message survived. You can pick it up, look at it, and see exactly what he saw (if you can afford it).

    And in the same vein, I can easily pick up a book, written and printed 100 years ago, and read it. Or nearer by, I can open any textbook I used in college from my bookshelf and read it. And my class notes just sit in a box, unchanged, ready to be read. All I need are my eyeballs. But my 3.5 inch floppies from that era, I can no longer access those (with ease). And the CD-ROMs, I wonder if they would even work. And when the medium becomes inaccessible the message is lost.

    Part of my bookshelf

    The internet

    So as I am typing this on an electronic digital device, that translates key presses into binary numbers which are stored on a solid state disk on another computer somewhere else, which is connected with my device through countless other specialised electronic devices and protocols, I can’t help but wonder about what will be left in 100 years — or more — from what is written everyday on the internet.

    The internet is right up there with the written word as one of our greatest inventions, but it is much more fragile and dependant on many layers (i.e. electricity, storage, network, specialised devices, formats) that all interact with one another.

    We have accumulated large parts of human knowledge in millions of paper books over the past millennium, but most written text nowadays is digital. And digital formats and transfer methods change. Fast and often. So I wonder how we can best preserve our written thoughts for the next millennium: self-contained and transferable. But I can’t come up with anything better than paper?