Think Like Da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius. Michael Gelb

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      All of us come into the world curious. Curiosità builds upon that natural impulse, the same impulse that led you to turn the last page – the desire to learn more. We’ve all got it; the challenge is using and developing it for our own benefit. In the first years of life our minds are engaged in an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. From birth – and some would argue, even before – the baby’s every sense is attuned to exploring and learning. Like little scientists, babies experiment with everything in their environment. As soon as they can speak, children start articulating question after question: “Mommy, how does this work?” “Why was I born?” “Daddy, where do babies come from?”

      “The desire to know is natural to good men.”

      – LEONARDO DA VINCI

      As a child, Leonardo possessed this intense curiosity about the world around him. He was fascinated with nature, showed a remarkable gift for drawing, and loved mathematics. Vasari records that the young Leonardo questioned his mathematics teacher with such originality that “he raised continuous doubts and difficulties for the master who taught him and often confounded him.”

      Great minds go on asking confounding questions with the same intensity throughout their lives. Leonardo’s childlike sense of wonder and insatiable curiosity, his breadth and depth of interest, and his willingness to question accepted knowledge never abated. Curiosità fueled the wellspring of his genius throughout his adult life.

      What were Leonardo’s motives? In his book The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination, Pulitzer prize-winner Daniel Boorstin tells us what they were not. “Unlike Dante, he had no passion for a woman. Unlike Giotto, Dante, or Brunelleschi, he seemed to have had no civic loyalty. Nor devotion to church or Christ. He willingly accepted commissions from the Medici, the Sforzas, the Borgias, or French kings – from the popes or their enemies. He lacked the sensual worldliness of a Boccaccio or a Chaucer, the recklessness of a Rabelais, the piety of a Dante, or the religious passion of a Michelangelo.” Leonardo’s loyalty, devotion, and passion were directed, instead, to the pure quest for truth and beauty. As Freud suggested: “He transmuted his passion into inquisitiveness.”

      Leonardo’s inquisitiveness was not limited to his formal studies; it informed and enhanced his daily experience of the world around him. In a typical passage from the notebooks Da Vinci asks: “Do you not see how many and how varied are the actions which are performed by men alone? Do you not see how many different kinds of animals there are, and also of trees and plants and flowers? What variety of hilly and level places, of springs, rivers, cities, public and private buildings; of instruments fitted for man’s use; of diverse costumes, ornaments and arts?”

      Elsewhere he adds, “I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the imprints of coral and plants and seaweed usually found in the sea. Why the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it, and why immediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone, and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engage my thought throughout my life.”

      Leonardo’s intense desire to understand the essence of things led him to develop an investigative style equally noteworthy for its depth of study as for its range of topics. Kenneth Clark, who called him “undoubtedly the most curious man who ever lived,” describes Da Vinci’s uncompromising quest in accessibly contemporary terms: “He wouldn’t take Yes for an answer.” In his anatomic investigations, for example, Leonardo dissected each part of the body from at least three different angles. As he wrote:

      Three views of a flower by Leonardo da Vinci.

      In addition to his helicopter and other flying machines, Leonardo also developed a parachute: “If a man has a tent made of linen, of which the apertures have all been stopped up, and it be twelve cubits across and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any great height without sustaining injury.” Leonardo’s work on the parachute is particularly amazing. No one was yet able to fly, and he designed a means for safely exiting a flying machine. And, incredibly, Leonardo’s proportions for a parachute were the only ones that actually work.

      This depicting of mine of the human body will be as clear to you as if you had the natural man before you; and the reason is that if you wish thoroughly to know the parts of the man, anatomically, you, or your eye, require to see it from different aspects, considering it from below and from above and from its sides, turning it about and seeking the origin of each member … Therefore by my drawings every part will be known to you, and by all means of demonstrations from three different points of view of each part.

      But his curiosity didn’t stop there: Da Vinci studied everything with the same rigor. If multiple perspectives yielded a deeper understanding of the body, for example, they would also help him evaluate his attempts to share that understanding. The result: layer upon layer of rigorous examination, all designed to refine not only his understanding but its expression, as he explains in his Treatise on Painting:

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