Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius
Leonard Shlain
Language: English
Pages: 238
ISBN: B01N8Q7I6J
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Best-selling author Leonard Shlain explores the potential for humankind through the life, art, and mind of the first true Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci. The author hypothesizes that da Vinci’s staggering range of achievements demonstrates a harbinger of the future of our species. Da Vinci’s innovations as an artist, scientist, and inventor are recast through a modern lens, with Shlain applying contemporary neuroscience to illuminate da Vinci’s creative process. No other person in human history has excelled in so many areas of innovation: Shlain reveals the how and the why.
Shlain theorizes that Leonardo’s extraordinary mind came from a uniquely developed and integrated right and left brain, and he offers a model for how we too can evolve. Using past and current research, Leonardo’s Brain presents da Vinci as the focal point for a fresh exploration of human creativity. With his lucid style and remarkable ability to discern connections among a wide range of fields, Shlain brings the reader into the world of history’s greatest mind.
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exceptions, critics delivered harsh verdicts, criticizing his paintings as clumsy and unpolished. Acceptance for artists at this time in France depended upon winning a cherished spot to show their art in the prestigious annual Salon, and it was the grand old graybeards of the Academy who made up the jury of this much-anticipated public event. But change was in the air, and many younger artists decried the selection process, suspecting that it was heavily biased against them. Rebelling against
of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere. Yet despite his observation, painters and viewers alike remained sure that the boundary did lie on this crisp margin. Five hundred years later, Henry Moore understood that the sharp boundary between the mass of an object and the negative space around it was an illusion, and he expressed this difficult idea with smooth-flowing statues, such as Internal and External Forms (1953–54), in which the space pours
as a species to extract ourselves from this dilemma? Thinking about the wiring in the brain of Leonardo provides a convenient jumping-off point. He had, from what we know, the most creative brain in history. And he was a vegetarian pacifist. He overcame his initial aggressive stance toward designing weapons. How do the rest of us achieve greater creativity while becoming more peaceful? As I have done in my earlier books, I will capitalize the terms Natural Selection and Mother Nature. Also, I
threat) and the connection of both narratives to the desert raises the possibility that Matthew’s story was completely fabricated. None of the other three Gospel writers mention this tale. Further, The New Testament does not contain any passage about a meeting between John the Baptist and Jesus when they were infants. Instead, an unverifiable and extremely implausible legend has the two babies meeting during Mary’s flight into the desert. Only a strained and fanciful interpretation of any
create these designs because they could visualize the figures as if they were looking back down at them from a remote point high in space. Only individuals so positioned could appreciate the extremely large outlines of spiders, monkeys, whales, hummingbirds, plants, or geometrical designs. Scientists have tried unsuccessfully to come up with an explanation for the Nazca Lines. The one that is most likely, and often dismissed, is that the people who made these large displays were capable of what
