By Leonard Shlain
Best-selling writer Leonard Shlain explores the potential of humankind during the existence, artwork, and brain of the 1st real Renaissance guy, Leonardo da Vinci. the writer hypothesizes that da Vinci’s awesome diversity of achievements demonstrates a harbinger of the way forward for our species. Da Vinci’s suggestions as an artist, scientist, and inventor are recast via a contemporary lens, with Shlain utilizing modern neuroscience to light up da Vinci’s inventive strategy. No different individual in human historical past has excelled in such a lot of parts of innovation: Shlain finds the how and the why.
Shlain theorizes that Leonardo’s awesome brain got here from a uniquely constructed and built-in correct and left mind, and he bargains a version for a way we can also evolve. utilizing earlier and present examine, Leonardo’s Brain offers da Vinci because the point of interest for a clean exploration of human creativity. together with his lucid variety and memorable skill to figure connections between quite a lot of fields, Shlain brings the reader into the area of history’s maximum brain.
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Additional info for Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius
Sample text
Despite his extraordinary achievements, his destiny was intimately entwined with a double-dealing ruler, which proved disastrous to Leonardo’s career. The Duke, having engaged in belligerent machinations toward Florence, Naples, and the Papal States, found himself in a precarious situation. He schemed to invite the French king Louis XII to come to his assistance. During the monarch’s visit, the king could not help but notice the riches apparent in the city. indd 24 7/10/14 2:47 PM Milan/Vatican remembered that the French had an ancestral claim on Milan and the surrounding countryside of Lombardy.
The Duke offered the position to Leonardo. In 1482, the thirty-yearold artist left the city in which he had come of age and embarked on an entirely new venture. He could not have known then that he was destined to spend the next eighteen years of his life in Milan, under the rule of a man who was his complete opposite. Fifteenth-century Milan was renowned as the Italian peninsula’s armorer. The prosperous city-state occupied a position similar to that of Detroit in mid-twentieth-century America.
Leonardo told the city fathers that the water behind the dams could be released when an invading army attempted to attack Venice from the land, thus drowning them. While exceedingly ingenious in its scope, the plan was too impractical for the Venetians to put into use. After leaving Venice, Leonardo stayed for a time at the Melzi estate south of Milan while he contemplated his next move. It must have been a dark period for him. He was without a patron, home, or income, and he was still responsible for the retinue of people that depended on him for their livelihood.