On behalf of south motors miamidade footage, we are pleased to have you here, 60 years of a commitment. From the very beginning, and events, it is our pleasure to have someone like this here. And his magnitude at knowledge and wealth of experience. My notes are blanking out. The University Professor of history at tulane, a former ceo of the aspen institute, chairman of cnn and managing editor of time magazine. He is the author of the innovators, how a group of hackers created the digital revolution. Kissinger, a biography. Steve jobs. Benjamin franklin, and american life. And brings to life Leonardo Da Vinci for us. Without further ado, walter isaacson. [applause] thank you for from the miami book fest. Always a great pleasure to be in this city. One reason it is great to be in miami, like so many other cities of this world, failed to be a mix of creative people with tolerance for all sorts of people, that is what made Leonardo Da Vinci so creative. I have written about a lot of smart people, smart people are a dime a dozen. They dont usually amount to much. It takes being innovative and creative. One recipe for that is being able to stand at the intersection of arts and sciences, the humanities and engineering, what i remember watching steve jobs give a presentation that would always end with that street sign of the liberal Arts Technology and say that is where creativity lies. I thought that is what ben franklin did, even einstein, would play out his violin and play mozart when he had trouble with his equations saying music and art helps connect to the spirit of the cosmos and the harmony of the spheres. The ultimate of that, the person i decided to be the capstone of a series of books about creativity and how to achieve it is Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo had the Great Fortune to be born out of wedlock. Had he been legitimate born, he would have been a notary like his father, grandfather, greatgrandfather and greatgreatgrandfather. Leonardo loved, as he grew up in the tiny village of veggie, to blend fantasy and reality. He loved to think out of the box, he loved to do things different. All the things you do not want in your notary but it did help him become a creative artist and engineer who loved the pattern of nature. Also by being bored out of wedlock, said to one of the latin schools, crammed filled with dusty scholasticism of the middle ages. And became a disciple of experience, meaning he did experiment, always questioned whatever he was told and decided he was going to see if it was right. He wasnt going to accept perceived wisdom. Even as a little kid in da vinci, those streams, he put rocks in them to see how the water rippled. The swirl of water becomes one of the many patterns in nature that become his passion and we see it throughout his life. He looked at things you and i saw when we were age 10 and asked questions about, like why is the sky blue. Whatever it takes off to its wings go up faster or down faster . Leonardo, unlike us, never outgrew his wonder years. He was the most insatiably curious person in history and that is key number one to his creativity. Weird questions he decided to know, why is the sky blue but why does water swirl the way it does in a pond or what is the size of the sun and how would you measure it . My favorite, what does the tongue of a woodpecker look like . I tried to imagine what it would be like one morning to put in your notebook, describe the tongue of a woodpecker. How would you even know, open up a woodpecker . That is leonardo. If it struck his curiosity he put it in his notebook and tried to learn everything. By age 12 his father brings him, like the towns i have been talking about, creative cities, all sorts of people work together, he was lucky was born the same year guttenberg opened his print shop and spread it to florence. In his notebook he said go down to the station and by the translation, get the anatomy book, all the things he wanted to learn and constantinople fell the year he was born. People from the arab world bringing mathematics, leonardo is quite a misfit. Besides being illegitimate he is lefthanded, he is gay, he is a vegetarian, he is a bit of a heretic, it was under the metag family one of those places where people of diverse backgrounds all fit in, live and let live place. Leonardo worked in a workshop. Some call it an Artist Studio but it was much more than that. That was another secret for leonardo. He loved to do everything. Look at the famous duomo on the top of the cathedral. Leonardo, when he was a very young apprentice, helps the copper ball, he draws the mechanisms they use to put it on top of the dome, the ultimate connection he makes his whole life between art and science, between beauty and engineering, a number of things they do in the workshop, pageant and play, leonardo loves them. Kind of proud of how goodlooking he is. We know how goodlooking he is. There was a statue of david, a young 12yearold david and the younger 12yearold leonardo is in the center being sketched by somebody else in the workshop posing for david. In the plays they do, the costumes, one of leonardos first sketches, the warrior, the drawings that he liked, juxtaposed with the angelic young warrior, something we see leonardo doing his whole life but doing it as a set of costumes for the visit of the duke of milan, leonardo did the drawing on the left. You can see how they mix fantasy and reality. And the wings of a bat, scientifically accurate and anywhere in it, the swirls that leonardo liked. He even does it for his engineering, and the swirls, people say didnt invent the helicopter . This drawing here is a famous drawing, yes except it was done too for a play, bring the angels down for the rapture. One of the plays leonardo produced. Sometimes we dont focus on the fact that producing plays and doing pageants was a big job back then. They didnt have tvs and movies so there were pageants of plays each night and it blurred the lines between fantasy and reality. He so much love is blurring the line between fantasy and reality that once he does this with helicopter, maybe i will make a real flying machine, through his life trying to design flying machines and makes a great glider, can never make a man powered flying machine that will take off so he studies the flight of birds, the weight ratio to their muscles, realizes it is impossible was another small lesson from leonardo. Sometimes you should try to do the impossible because at least you will find out why it cant be done. He is a painter, that is one of the things they do in the workshop and he becomes such a good painter that the legend is for rodeo was so odd by him that he decided never to paint again, just have leonardo handle the painting in the studio, this, the baptism of christ, one of the patterns throughout leonardos life, this is when he was very young, leonardo does that river, the river jordan coming from the ancient eons of time and flowing into the bodies, in this case literally as john the baptist poured the water over jesus. If you look carefully, i thank Simon Schuster for using such high quality paper, that you can see the color reproductions. If you look at the ripples in the ankles of jesus you see how scientifically accurate it is was the kid who loves that rippling water has to turn it into engineering and art. Most importantly, in notebooks around this time, leonardo is saying the goal of a painter should also be to express the inner emotions throughout gestures and outward expressions. So the angel on the far left is leonardos. Next to him, look at leonardos angel, all sorts of deep emotions as we see the twists of the neck and the expression of the face, things he had sketched in his notebook as he walked around town seeing how people express different forms of our and other emotions. The one next to him, the only expression on that angels face that you can see is how did i get here next to this far more beautiful angel . We see in his first portrait that ability to show emotions on a face, the wife of a cloth merchant in florence, with a river again coming down and connecting us to nature, connecting from the ancient mountains, the river curving into the blood of humans connecting us to the world. This is not the mona lisa. A cloth merchants wife and 3 quarter profile. He wouldnt paint the mona alyssa until the end of his life and only after doing a lot more anatomy and science and geology other art historians say it is a shame he wasted his time doing all this math and geology and fines and anatomy because he could have painted more paintings. That is true, but if he hadnt done all those patterns of nature and been so enriched about being curious about everything i dont think he ever would have gotten to the mona lisa which is the combination of a lifetime spent finding the patterns of nature. He used his theatrical knowledge. The adoration of the magi also done, in florence, we dont just see a scene, we see that swirl he loves, the curving spiral, and it is a drama, stage drama. In perspective as if it were on a stage with the second kink offering the gift at the bottom, swelling up to the first king, already bowing down and each person in the spiral, expression, is reflective of the person before them. It was very complicated. Leonardo doesnt finish the painting. That happens to leonardo often. He puts things aside, flying machines the dont fly, take the dont roll, paintings that he puts aside. He gives it to the family of Amerigo Vespucci, and i dont think he gave up on paintings but always thought maybe he would learn more to apply another brushstroke, whether was the mona lisa which kept for 16 years or the adoration of the magi which he gives to friends to hold for him, he never fully gets back to it. This notion of always finding another brushstroke we see in saint jerome around the same time saint jerome in the wilderness and it is unfinished but you can see 20 or 30 years later after he put the painting aside, he does more anatomy experiments, gets the neck muscles exactly right in his anatomy drawings on the far right and goes back to a saint jerome painting and redoes that painting so what you see in leonardos somebody who procrastinates. It makes him a bad notary. Sometimes lets the perfect be the enemy of the good like steve jobs who wouldnt ship the original macintosh because the Circuit Board inside wasnt pretty so they held it up until they could make a Circuit Board no one would ever see. Likewise, leonardo holds onto his drawings, i will learn something more, i will be able to make it better. The way i sort of understood that was not just by looking at his paintings which other people have written about so brilliantly but i decided to use as the foundation for this book his notebooks. 20 years ago when i was wandering around, my wife had studied in florence, we saw the paintings, we go to italy, i kept stumbling across in the archives in italy, the notebook pages and that was the clue to how his mind danced around different subjects. Take a simple, page like this. Marvel technology, paper, for the storage and retrieval of information. 500 years later we can still see it. 50 years from now your facebook posts and tweets, fortunately, are not going to be retrievable. But paper is really good. The operating system never goes out. The centerleft, you see that warrior. But you see a tree trunk branching into the torso of the warrior. As leonardos mind is thinking about, the analogy between nature and human and leonardos law of branching, when there is the branch of a tree or branches the crosssection of the areas of the branch is totaled to the crosssection of the trunk and that is true of rivers and their tributaries, it is true of our honorees so leonardo is making the connections in the top left making connections between swirls of water and curls of hair, he writes about curls of hair, the same spiral form and even in these equations, he is always trying to transform one shape to a different shape with the same area. A problem called squaring the circle, to make a square the same area using only a ruler and the protraction was an ancient mathematical puzzle that is not totally solvable, but it is a very irrational number but leonardo, throughout his life, the square, the circle, you can see it up there. Finally on the left, he is writing from right to left, he is a lefthander, doesnt want to smudge the ink. You see the list of things he wants to learn, weird things like inflate the lungs of a pig and whether they expanded length and width. He is turning 30 when he does this and at the bottom left is a recipe for using the husks of certain nuts and oiling them in oil, in order to make a tiny, in other words hair dye. The guy is human, vain about his appearance, he is worried about going gray. Around that time, he finds the companion of his wife, sort of to be a petty thief, has his nickname and throughout his life we can watch his beautiful curly hair and see him in the notebooks as part of leonardos life but at that period of turning 30, turning gray, his father, the notary had notarized the contracts, the adoration in the saint jerome. It was time to move on, leaving wonderful a delegation, florence is not a great military power, to lose battles is hard to do. What we might call soft power, cultural diplomacy, and architects, an artist to do things like the Sistine Chapel or building in venice and in 1482 a big delegation that goes from florence to milan to the duke of milan led by a playwright and a poet, an architect, artist, engineer. Of all things, leonardo goes as a musician because he loves peter so invented Musical Instruments including one like a violin. But made it in the shape of a horse and brings it as a gift as part of the cultural delegation but wants to stay there, needs a new horizon and is tired of being a painter, blocked on the last couple of paintings he has done so he writes one of the coolest job application letters in history to the duke of milan. 11 paragraphs long, the first ten paragraphs are all about engineering and science. He says i can make great weapons of war, something he hadnt done but he sketched out a lot of them. The large crossbow. I can build great buildings, divergent rivers, only in the 11th paragraph almost as an afterthought when he says and i can also paint as any person. He could but he revels in the fact when he gets to milan he eventually earns a position as engineer and painter to the duke of milan. He works on projects collaboratively because i want to emphasize that creativity is a team sport. Innovation comes from collaboration. We think of leonardo as going to a castle in milan and doing his great drawing, but in fact he worked with a lot of other people especially in the court of milan. His close friend the great mathematician, leonardo does his drawings for his math book, leonardo gets a feel for that, useful in art. He also works with architect and engineers and his first real big thing is work with three or four friends on helping fix up the milan cathedral. Like steve jobs, leonardo believed that simplicity was the soul of beauty. If you look at this cathedral you are thinking this is not the soul of beauty. This is a gothic monstrosity. Leonardo and his friends are asked to design, i cant quite show it, the lantern tower on top and come up with a simple geometric design and as you can tell, the authorities in milan dont build it. They build a gothic monstrosity instead. And working on it leonardo has become Close Friends with other architects and engineers. The cool thing is he painted a picture of the two of them together, there he is on the right, balding, leonardo on the left, short, purple to the next that he loved to wear, the notebook in front of him, going right to left, he was always said to have had a muscular, well hills, well proportioned, athletic body, chiseled face and wonderful curly locks of blonde, or dyed blonde hair. So they go off and decide to do design. They like a very symmetrical how you really should do a building or charge, should be proportional to a human, connecting a human to nature and the renaissance as you know is partly a rebirth of classical knowledge. If you read the swerve, you know the rediscovery of lucretius is part of the renaissance, there was a manuscript that has been rediscovered by the ancient roman architect vitruvius who writes about how buildings, especially churches and temples should reflect proportions, page after page, the exact proportions of the human body. And the proportion, one thing i discovered, and said his childhood doesnt accept severe wisdom, and page after page of his notebooks, proportions, and sitting, standing, running, dozens and dozens of proportions that he does. With his friends he is peeking out totally obsessive on the issue of squaring the circle, ways to do that, the same area, having done that they go down to a town very close to milan, having their cathedral that is more to their liking, they all decide to go to the castle, a copy of the manuscript of vitruvius. You know leonardo, and the man in proportion in the circle, in the church design, to the proportion of vitruvius. And the dinner leonardo does his verse. A totally different thing. If you look at the vitruvian man, it is a work of brilliant science, puts it sideways to the measurement and everything is scientifically proportioned could the measurements and it is exactly accurate but it is also work of great man, vitruvius said the naval should be at the center of the earth but implies the genitals are the center of creation, the circle and he square, use either the circle goes up a little higher, the naval at the center, the circle goes up and squaring the circle making the same area. Besides being a work of great science and great mass, it is a work of unbelievable art. Necessary beauty and remember what his friends are doing, stick figures, leonardo with his lefthanded crosssections making it awesomely beautiful. To the fourth floor in venice where they keep it in storage, where it cant be exposed to light, my wife and i and the translator working with the talked them into showing it to us and you look at the dust jacket of my book, there i am leaning over a vitruvian man walking up four flights of stairs in july in venice in a nonairconditioned building sweating, if i drop some sweat under this picture, 500 years from now people will be saying i wonder what leonardo meant by that blot . I was very careful. He knew exactly what he was doing. The sketch, the protractor in the center of the naval and you get a chill almost, youre in the presence of the hands of the master and you look at the face. That face staring at you with emotion and intensity. As you stare at your mind should go back, things you have seen about leonardo and look at that picture and realize this to some extent is leonardo drawing himself, naked, spreadeagled, the earth, in the cosmos, the center of creation, asking how do i fit in. This makes it the greatest drying connecting the ar