Transcript: Walter Isaacson on "Face the Nation," Nov. 26, 2017
"Face the Nation" sat down on Sunday with Walter Isaacson, author of "Leonardo da Vinci," to discuss the artist's genius and creativity.
What follows is a transcript of the interview, which aired Sunday, Nov. 26, 2017, on "Face the Nation."
DICKERSON: We're joined now by Walter Isaacson, the author of a new book, "Leonardo Da Vinci," which explores the life and work of the original renaissance man.
All right, Walter, you were my boss. You always said stories are at the heart of these things. So what story for you starts it with Leonardo?
WALTER ISAACSON, "LEONARDO DA VINCI": I think when he turns that unnerving milestone of becoming 30 years old and he's been -- you and I remember that a bit. And he's been a painter, moderately successful in Florence, but he has trouble finishing his paintings. And it's kind of worse because his father is a notary and has notarized some of the contracts of those paintings. So Leonardo decides it's time to seek new horizons.
And so he's part of a delegation that goes from Florence to Milan, a cultural delegation because that's how Florence had its influence. You know, it was -- it didn't have a great military. It kept losing the Pisa. But, you know, they would send it to architects and artists, other cities, and so Florence became, you know, what Joe Nye (ph) would call soft power.
And so he goes there and he goes as a musician because he's invented a lot of musical instruments. But when he gets the Milan, he doesn't want to go home. So he writes the coolest job application letter in history. It's 11 paragraphs. And the first ten are all about what he can do in engineer and anatomy and art and science and controlling the flows of waters and building castles. Only in the 11th paragraph at the end does he say, I can also paint as well as anyone. And so you see Leonardo loving everything in nature just wanting to be, you know, a jack of all trades.
DICKERSON: Is that his key quality, that he had this rapacious just hunger for everything?
ISAACSON: Yes, his key quality, what makes him a creative genius, I think, is that he was curious about everything. Sometimes it was a curiosity that could be useful, like he would dissect the neck and figure out, how do I do St. Jerome in the Wilderness. But then he'd kept dissecting and he would dissect the heart and the liver and he would do layered, anatomical drawings. It was a curiosity that was passionate, that was playful and ends up being curious for its own sake, which is what makes him feel the patterns of nature.
DICKERSON: Right. This is something Nancy calls the gathering. You just gather everything up and then it expresses itself in various different times in your life.
ISAACSON: Right. Some -- some people who have written about Leonardo in the past century, they approach him as an art critic was and they say, it's such a shame that he squandered so much time doing anatomy and the Flight of Birds and squaring the circle in mathematics, otherwise he could have finished one of those paintings.
That's true. But he wouldn't have been Leonardo. And he wouldn't have had the Mona Lisa. It was that gathering of -- and that's what we have to understand today is that being curious about everything, not only makes you more creative, it enriches your life.
DICKERSON: And makes you a better dinner table conversationalist.
ISAACSON: Yes. He would have been a great, you know, he would have been great at this table. Sorry.
DICKERSON: You mentioned St. Jerome. Is that the one -- he went back to it later, right, was that the one?
ISAACSON: Yes, that's the one.
DICKERSON: He keeps working and working and working.
ISAACSON: People say he abandoned his paintings. But one of the things I discovered is like with St. Jerome, young painter in Florence, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, very skeletal, because St. Jerome's in the wilderness. And he gets the neck muscles wrong early on and puts the painting aside. Gives it to Amerigo Vespucci's family, the guy who's about to go discover America.
But he comes back 25 years later, after he's done more anatomy drawings, and he redoes the neck muscles. So I've discovered, it wasn't so much that he abandoned paintings, he thought sometimes a perfect has to be the enemy of the good. There's always a brush stroke. I can make it better.
And it reminded me of Steve Jobs, who holds up shipping the original Macintosh. I wrote a book about him earlier. And there's a lot of similarities. Because Steve wanted the circuit board inside the Mac to look beautiful. And so they hold up shipping it.
So that notion of sometimes you hold on to something until you can make it perfect. It's not a good recipe for business, but it is a good recipe to do every now and then in life.
DICKERSON: The Mona Lisa. So I -- explain why -- because I think this touches on what you -- why is this such a great painting?
ISAACSON: Yes, you know, I think people come to it and you see huge crowds and you wonder, OK. You know, when you look at the Mona Lisa, it's the culmination of somebody who spent a life looking at science, anatomy, geology, but also philosophy and spirituality. And so like even his early paintings, but culminating with the Mona Lisa, you have the river that curves from the ancient mountains, and curves into the roads and then curves into the human body as our veins do. He always made an analogy between the earth and between us. So that's his fundamental philosophy.
And just to give you one example of the science doing it. He had dissected the human eye and knew that the center of the retina is where you see black and white detail, but the edges of the retina you see shadows and color. And so over 16 years he keeps painting the lip. He had dissected the human face and done every muscle and every nerve that touches the lip. But 16 years he's painting it, but he does the tiniest black and white details at the edge of the lips, going straight or turning down, but the shadows and colors turning up. So it becomes an interactive painting.
Every time you see her, she seems to have a different emotion. Then you have a different emotion. Your eyes change a bit. And the smile flickers back on. This is magical. It's showing inner emotion reflected on a face.
DICKERSON: Last question. We have 30 seconds.
You mentioned what he'd be like at a dinner party. What would -- what kind of a person was he?
ISAACSON: He was very collegial. Very friendly. He had everybody at the time, Luca Pacioli, the mathematician down at Dobermondi (ph), they all refer to him as his best friend. And what he kind of does is, he makes everybody feel that the way to be more creative is not to specialize, not to silo yourself, as we sometimes do to our kids, but to be curious about everything for curiosity sake.
DICKERSON: Walter Isaacson, thank you so much.
ISAACSON: Thank you, John.