All of the other muscles he studied acted by pulling rather than pushing a body part, but the tongue seemed to be an exception. This was true in humans and in other animals. The most notable example is the tongue of the woodpecker. Nobody had drawn or fully written about it before, but Leonardo with his acute ability to observe objects in motion knew that there was something to be learned from it.
Many of the figures in his preparatory drawings are nude; he had come to believe in Alberti’s advice that an artist should build a picture of a human body from the inside out, first conceiving of the skeleton, then the skin, then the clothing.
Only in the eleventh paragraph, at the end, did he add that he was also an artist. “Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible,” he wrote.
Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday.
The result is a whirlwind of drama and emotion. Not only did Leonardo render each of the reactions of those first beholding the Christ child, but he turned the Epiphany into a swirl in which each character is swept by the others’ emotions, and then so is the viewer.
From the eyes of his angel in the Baptism of Christ to the smile of the Mona Lisa, the blurred and smoke-veiled edges allow a role for our own imagination.
Every part will be drawn, using all means of demonstrations, from three different points of view; for when you have seen a limb from the front, with any muscles, sinews, or veins which take their rise from the opposite side, the same limb will be shown to you in a side view or from behind, exactly as if you had that same limb in your hand and were turning it from side to side until you had acquired a full comprehension of all you wished to know.
Plato inscribed over the door of his Academy: “Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work.
In narrative paintings you should closely intermingle direct opposites, because they offer a great contrast to each other, especially when they are adjacent. Thus, have the ugly one next to the beautiful, the large next to the small, the old next to the young.
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.
The central area of the retina, known as the fovea, is best at seeing color and small details; the area surrounding the fovea is best at picking up shadows and shadings of black and white. When we look at an object straight on, it appears sharper. When we look at it peripherally, glimpsing it out of the corner of our eye, it is a bit blurred, as if it were farther away.
One was how computers could be networked; the second was how object-oriented programming worked.
Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it.
An irresistible glimpse into his complex and often contradictory life.
Markkula and some others could never quite appreciate Jobs’s obsession with typography.
Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines.
Macintosh.” Jobs, clean-shaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked.
For the fashionable gentlemen of the aristocracy, elegant eating and gambling clubs, such as White’s and later Brookes’s and Boodle’s, were starting to spring up in St. James’s. For the burgeoning new class of writers, journalists, professionals, and intellectuals whose company Franklin preferred, there were the coffeehouses.
And we would relate to the way he tried to balance, sometimes uneasily, the pursuit of reputation, wealth, earthly virtues, and spiritual values.2.
It’s good to have strong opinions about gene engineering in humans, but it’s even better if you know what a gene is.