You Can be the World’s Greatest Genius and Still be Unhappy
What Leonardo Da Vinci can teach us about living
In 2018, Walter Isaacson followed up his biographies of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs with a book about Leonardo Da Vinci.
You may be able to tell based on Isaacson’s choice of subjects that there is a theme that runs through much of his work. He seeks to understand what makes “geniuses” tick.
Isaacson, and many modern biographers and historians, look to Da Vinci’s life and attempt to distill what we can learn from it. What made Leonardo who he was. Was it the fact that he was “eccentric?” Was it that he was left-handed? Because he was gay? Maybe it was the fact that he was a vegetarian? Was it his comically short attention span or legendary curiosity?
However, I think this line of questioning starts from a faulty premise. The better thing to question is whether we would want to learn from Leonardo.
Let me be clear, I do believe that Leonardo is one of the greatest geniuses of all time. I didn’t read a 600+ page biography because I thought he was a halfway decent painter. His contributions to the world of art are so fundamental to the discipline that it’s hard to explain just how much he changed. The insights he was able to derive from observation alone about everything from the human body to machines and nature are dumbfounding.
And yet, for all of his “success,” I wouldn’t necessarily wish Leonardo’s life on anyone.
Leonardo’s notebooks are what make the Isaacson’s book fascinating. He jumbled together “rough sketches” for future projects or ideas (his rough sketches belong in museums), to-do lists, and accounting records, all within a few pages of each other, and all in his famous “mirror script.” However, Leonardo’s notebooks were not a journal. So, while we can try to get a grasp of how his mind worked, it’s not easy to get a feel for how he felt about his life.
And this is a shame, because Leonardo’s life was far from ordinary, and by no means easy. Being an illegitimate son meant that he had no birthright, and had to find his own way. His success did not come easy, and came only after many, many years of working for lesser artists, or as a craftsman in noble courts. His insatiable curiosity and short attention span meant that he left more projects unfinished than finished, and as a result, spent much of his life broke.
In addition, Leonardo was described as a “misfit.” He wore flamboyant clothes, was almost certainly gay, and was a vegetarian. If he lived today, you could make a case that these traits would have made life more difficult for him, but now imagine what that meant in the 15th century?
The closest we get to understanding how Leonardo felt about his own life comes towards the end of the biography, when Isaacson gives us details about his last few years.
By that point, Leonardo had achieved most of the “success” he was to achieve in his lifetime. However, I think it’s also important to note that while Leonardo had achieved a certain reputation during his lifetime, he was not regarded the same way he is today. He was respected, but he had not yet become the near-mythical figure he is today, one of the greatest geniuses to ever live. That came much later with the discovery that he had correctly observed how things like flying machines and the human heart worked centuries before anyone else.
So, by the end of Leonardo’s life he was by most measures a successful artist, but not a world famous genius. For most, I think that’s probably good enough, but what about the rest of his life? Was he happy? Fulfilled?
Isaacson paints a picture of an aging man who seems lonely and melancholic. The closest thing to a relationship we ever hear of is his relationship with a young assistant, known as Salaì, decades younger than him, which ambiguously straddles the line between fatherly and romantic affection. Salaì for his part, is painted in an unflattering light, because while there are indications he did indeed care for Leonardo, there are also numerous examples of him being a liar, a thief, and just a generally despicable person.
But surely Leonardo must have felt some measure of fulfillment or pride for all that he had accomplished? Perhaps, but that is not the impression that endures. Rather, the image that stuck in my mind was of a man who was so obsessed with solving every mystery of nature (squaring the circle, studying the tongue of a woodpecker, etc.), that this obsession kept him from enjoying that which he had achieved.
Isaacson’s biography clearly wants us to look to Leonardo as a sort of role model. His call to embrace our own curiosity, and maybe we could see part of the world Leonardo did may be inspiring, but there’s an underlying message in this story that seems more important.
Leonardo may well be the greatest genius to ever live. But, in his day, most didn’t recognize just how incredible he was, and so Leonardo was never able to experience this recognition. “So what?” you may be saying, “maybe he didn’t need external validation.”
And perhaps that’s true, but if it’s true, it’s because he likely had to teach himself not to care about the opinion of others throughout his life while being treated as a bastard and a weirdo. Add to that the fact that while external validation may not have mattered to him, it doesn’t appear that Leonardo had achieved any kind of internal peace either. To his dying day, he was still trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, and in so doing appeared frustrated, at best, and depressed, at worst.
And then there’s the loneliness.
The images we have of Leonardo later in his life depict a very old looking man, but Leonardo was only 67 at the time of his death. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but to me, when I look back on Leonardo’s life, I see a sad story about the greatest genius who ever lived, who after living a difficult life, died feeling unfulfilled and alone. What good does it do Leonardo to know that over 500 years later we regard him as a genius?
So, with all due respect to Mr. Isaacson, my takeaway from Leonardo’s life isn’t that we need to embrace our curiosity a bit more. My takeaway is that chasing success and a legacy, even if you achieve it, will not guarantee you happiness or fulfillment.