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Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Audiobook17 hours

Leonardo da Vinci

Written by Walter Isaacson

Narrated by Alfred Molina

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life” (The New Yorker).

Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson “deftly reveals an intimate Leonardo” (San Francisco Chronicle) in a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.

In the “luminous” (Daily Beast) Leonardo da Vinci, Isaacson describes how Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance to be imaginative and, like talented rebels in any era, to think different. Here, da Vinci “comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography…a vigorous, insightful portrait” (The Washington Post).

Editor's Note

An enthralling read…

This biography of Leonardo da Vinci is terrific. Walter Isaacson’s writing really brings da Vinci to life, showing off how fascinating the legendary Renaissance man truly is with his balance between the scientific and the artistic, and the diversity of his contributions to humanity.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 17, 2017
ISBN9781508241997
Author

Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

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Reviews for Leonardo da Vinci

Rating: 4.4413232721598 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

801 ratings62 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Me was wondering that it could of been all about.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An extraordinary celebration of a most extraordinary personWalter Issacson unpacks the life of Leonardo in brilliant detail and then collects those details together and gives you multiply views of his life and contributions. After reading this wonderful work, I feel like I’ve know Leonardo. It has my Highest recommendation.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An excellent book by the master of biographies about one of the greatest artists of all time. I highly recommend it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Where is the accompanying PDF. Amazing book but I need the accompanying pdf
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved this book. It was magical and inspiring, I will forever try to see the world a little bit like Leonardo.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is great and tells me alot i didn’t know about Leonardo Da Vinci. I will definetly recommend this to all my friends!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful autobiography of Leonardo da Vinci, with many great illustrations
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5

    Everyone has heard his name but no one can know the man until they've read this book. What an incredible talent in so many fields and yes..he paints too!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After several starts and stops, finally completed this excellent biography of one of the first renaissance men. Anyone who knows me, know that Benjamin Franklin is one of my heroes, he was one of America’s first renaissance men. Both Franklin and Da Vinci were involved in many different sciences and arts. In July 1983, I had the privilege of visiting the Louvre and viewed Da Vinci’s and the world’s most famous painting the Mona Lisa. In 1983, I had no concept of the value and beauty of any of these paintings. I am thankful for the experiences of my youth and Isaacson for this excellent biography which gave me significantly more insight into the art and scientific work of Leonardo Da Vinci. Highly recommended...SLT
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    He was the greatest man of science, He drew engines we use nowadays
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very enjoyable and informative. Did not find the pdf though. Could you help?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Walter Isaacson is among the best at capturing the essence of the person he wrties about. The portrayal of the Renaissance era is fascinating and loved the comprehensive narrative of Leonardo's life as a brilliant painter, architect, engineer and scientist. Meticulously researched and an excellent read piece of literature about one of the greatest human minds!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fascinating! Really insightful about Leonardo's world with a very good degree of detail. I would really recommend to accompany it with the pdf.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It was the first biography I've ever read (actually listened to most of it) by Walter Isaacson and it is written beautifully. I'd suggest this book to anyone interested in Da Vinci, Renaissance and art.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love this author. He has an ability to illustrate how a genius thinks in simple way that a common man can understand.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    very informative and detailed book onto the life of the very complex character of the Renaissance period.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A masterpiece, never read such a well researched title. A masterpiece
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is actually a life changer. It made me smile and laugh. The reading is superb and the insights by the author are just indescribable . Thank you Walter!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fascinating look at an incredible mind! The level of genius of da Vinci kept me captivated through the whole book! The narrator was great too!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It inspired me by getting into the minute details of the life of one great individual whose curiosity resides in each one of us.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Does it take a year to read this book? No. Did it? Also, no... technically. I took it on a ten day trip to Europe last year and got half through, setting aside when I got back to close on a house, move into that house, do things on that house to make it ours... and read a bunch of other books. And each time I picked it up again, 1) I had no idea how I was going to pull selected highlights because I had margin notes on about every three pages (more on that), and 2) more life got in the way. Yes, I wrote more margin notes, and end notes, and sticky notes, than for probably any other book I've read.I have been a Leonardo nut since I was young. I read whatever was available in our small town. I built models of some of his inventions. Many years later I had a book of his notebooks (lost to a fire in 2013... still sad). I've read a lot. And Isaccson being Isaacson, I learned even more. Incredibly researched. Well documented. Properly documented - he cites in text, the way a professional does (sorry, not sorry, personal peeve when authors put notes at the end of a book with no indication other than in the TOC that the useless notes are back there.)I was disappointed in the binding of Simon and Schuster's hardcover. I had the glue break loose for first one large chunk, then several others, making it difficult to finish.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nearly everything there is to know about one of the most amazing people we have record of.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not knowing much about Leonardo da Vinci this biography covers many aspects of his life in fine details. However, the book is a bit dissatisfying in a number of aspects. Firstly, especially at the beginning the author inserts himself into the story - not sure why. Secondly, the author spends a lot of time on the art of Leonardo. This is great - that is what he is best known for. True, there is also a lot about his powers of observation. But we do not really get to know much about him, other than that he had tickets on himself, he saw himself more as an engineers than an artist, and he found it difficult to finish off works. Perhaps this is because there is not much else to tell. Although it was a work of fiction, I felt I learnt more about Leonardo from a book I read recently titled Tuscan Daughter by Lisa Rochon.I read this as a e-book - not ideal, as one can't easily flick back to view the photos of the art. However, that is one great thing about this book - wonderfully illustrated.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The thought and curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci is on display on every page in Walter Isaacson's masterful biography. Leading the reader like a tour guide through the many places and phases of Leonardo's life, Isaacson provides both details of the art but also context through capturing the background of the history, persons, and achievements that were experienced and made by Leonardo throughout his lengthy career.I was impressed with Leonardo's constant creativity noted as much, if not more, in his notebooks and in his completed works; which included drawings, sculpture, paintings, and more. Present are the differences that made Leonardo unique -- his left-handedness, his holistic views, his curiosity, and a relentless desire to know that made possible his improbable life as an artist, scientist, thinker, dreamer, and mathematician. The list of his interests is almost endless just as his curiosity was boundless. In the tradition of thinkers going back to Aristotle he revered man's desire for knowledge as seen in his statement: "The desire to know is natural to good men."Born out of wedlock in 1452 in the town of Vinci, he spent most of his life in Florence, Milan, and Rome, ending his days in France as a guest of the King. It was a peripatetic life premised on the primacy of sight and mind applied to the world around him in ways that seem phenomenal in retrospect and which, in spite of his successes and honors, were mitigated by his inability to finish projects. This too, impressed me as the wonders of his sketches and notes match and in some ways exceed the art he produced; art that includes "The Last Supper", the "Mona Lisa", and much more. Isaacson captures much of the wonder, but leaves the reader perplexed at times by his inability to truly penetrate the mind of Leonardo. The length of the text suggests a completeness that is not quite enough; perhaps no biographer could capture the totality of the magnificence of Leonardo. If ever there was an exemplar of the Renaissance Man it would be this polymath personnage from the small Italian village of Vinci.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An engrossing and informative work.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Inspiring in many ways - esp. since Leonardo wasn't perfect. He rarely finished anything and rarely took on new work - and neither bothered him. He just wanted to keep learning new things, and everything. This book humanized him for me.In my mind, the book itself took some time to find its stride, but eventually it did. It was worth the slog thru some of the early chapters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Great book about one of humanity’s all time great individuals. Isaacson does a great job illustrating Leonardo along with the world he lived in. My only desire is if there were even more images of the notebook pages as Isaacson described them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Slightly over long but there's obviously a lot to cram in. I'd never fully appreciated Leonardo da Vinci's efforts in science before reading - I knew of his attempted inventions and anatomy studies but he really was breaking new ground in several fields, albeit often purely for his own curiosity and never published or announced. Inspiring guy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As biographies, this one holds my attention and I have a good grasp of Leonardo's life, career, and his personality.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    With biographies of Steve Jobs, Einstein, and now Leonardo, Walter Isaacson has become America’s foremost biographer of intellectuals. In this work, which tracks the prodigious creative output of a genius, Isaacson tries to piece together a narrative from a series of artistic, scientific, and engineering feats and, of course, from Leonardo’s own diaries. That is a difficult chore to achieve about a man from over 500 years ago. It’s even more difficult to think that we have very little sense of the personal affectations of this genius.

    Unlike with recent bios Jobs and Einstein, Isaacson approaches Leonardo as a light appearing in an extraordinarily dark age. The lack of good sources certainly hamper this work. I found myself unable to read large swaths of this book at one sitting because of the lack of narrative. Certainly, scholarly discussion exists, and Isaacson makes good use of it. Nonetheless, the challenge of chronicling a life so far back limits this work’s human interest.

    Since Leonardo’s polymath ways showed most brightly in painting, this book contains many pages with color replications of Leonardo’s art. It reads like a 600-page work of art history, with the occasional rabbit trail into whatever curiosity fancied Leonardo’s mind. I don’t know a lot about art history, so I found this introduction helpful and accessible. Isaacson expressively engages the reader with wonder – as it should be with a genius.

    Isaacson concludes this work with some observations about what Leonardo’s genius can teach us moderns. “Seek knowledge for its own sake.” “Respect facts.” “Create for yourself, not just for patrons.” This advice provides a nice book-end to the sheer power involved in engaging Leonardo’s mind. Some in our day deny that human nature exists at all. I’m not sure Leonardo teaches us about particular human nature. But he does teach us about genius nature. Those who wish to extend themselves more into developing great work should heed Isaacson’s investigations.