What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Be open to mystery. Not everything needs sharp lines.
Leonardo’s dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others.
Likewise, what emphasis should be put on great individuals versus on cultural currents has long been a matter of dispute;.
If you wish to make an imaginary animal invented by you appear natural, let us say a dragon, take for the head that of a mastiff or hound, for the eyes a cat, and for the ears a porcupine, and for the nose a greyhound, and the brows of a lion, the temple of an old cock, the neck of a terrapin.
The first intention of the painter,” Leonardo later wrote, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane, and he who surpasses others in this skill deserves most praise. This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say chiaroscuro.”30 That statement could stand as his artistic manifesto, or at least a key element of.
When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the “modern manner” in painting, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich called sfumato “Leonardo’s famous invention, the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form.
The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.
Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog sought to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he said. “He got the notion of tools for human use.” Brand’s.
The front of the white lectern has a slight blue tinge, since it is lit mainly by the refracted light of the sky rather than the yellowish direct glow of the setting sun.59 “Shadows will vary,” Leonardo explained in his notebooks. “The side of an object that receives a reflected light from the azure of the air will be tinged with that hue, and this is particularly observable in white objects. That side that receives the light from the sun will partake of that color.
The branches of the leafless tree merge into the man’s body, then into the conical geometrical pattern, and finally into the mountainous landscape. What Leonardo probably began as four distinct elements ended up woven together in a way that illustrates a fundamental theme in his art and science: the interconnectedness of nature, the unity of its patterns, and the analogy between the workings of the human body and those of the earth.
Jobs took McCollum’s class for only one year, rather than the three that it was offered. For one of his projects, he made a device.
There was a lonely intensity to him, reflected in his love of long-distance running and biking.
The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs.
But even Leonardo was practical enough to realize, eventually, that such a large monument so precariously balanced was not a good idea, so he settled for a horse that would be fancifully prancing.
Leonardo refuted this by arguing that painting is not only an art but also a science. In order to convey three-dimensional objects on a flat surface, the painter needs to understand perspective and optics. These are sciences that are grounded in mathematics. Therefore, painting is a creation of the intellect as well as the hands.
Machines such as these emerged in the 1950s, and during the subsequent thirty years there were two historic innovations that caused them to revolutionize how we live: microchips allowed computers to become small enough to be personal appliances, and packet-switched networks allowed them to be connected as nodes on a web.
Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex.
We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential,” he said. “To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?
Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father’s knee. But their lessons were different. Paul Jobs was a high school dropout who, when fixing up cars, knew how to turn a tidy profit by striking the right deal on parts. Francis.