Leonardo da Vinci

- Hi, I am Ken Burns for our series of Unum chats focused on Leonardo da Vinci.

I'm excited to speak with Debbie Millman, a celebrated writer, educator, artist, curator, and designer.

Welcome Debbie to our Unum Chat.

- Hi, Ken.

Thank you so much for having me.

- We'll start off by watching a short clip from our new film, upcoming film, Leonardo Da Vinci.

This was made by Sarah Burns, David McMahon, and myself.

This clip is from, the first part of the film is we're exploring the beginnings of Leonardo's career, and it delves into how nature inspires his designs.

The first voice you'll hear is an actor, Adriano Giannini Renie from Leonardo's manuscripts.

So let's play the clip.

- Painting is born of nature, or rather, it is the grandchild of nature for all visible things are produced by nature, and these her creations have given birth to painting.

So we may justly call it the grandchild of nature.

And related to God, - Nature is God.

Nature is perfection, nature is proportion.

Nature is the entity which obtains every effect with the shortest and direct way that is possible.

The best a scientist or a painter can do is imitate nature.

- He has an amazing sense that nature is a perfect invention, that there is nothing superfluous and nothing lacking.

Nature does nothing in vain.

If the the bone is that shape, then it must do something.

Every small aspect of that form must have a function.

He does claim that the human being can take things from nature and put them together in a different way, and that you can invent things that nature didn't invent, so you could act as a second nature in the world.

- In the late 1470s, Leonardo finally left Veo studio and opened one of his own with his own apprentices and assistants between commissions.

He devised and drew machines for an array of purposes.

Some were inspired by the designs of classical inventors or renaissance engineers, and all were informed by his close observations of nature, the spirals in a snails shell, the eddies of water in a surging stream, and the swirls of wind induced by a thunderstorm.

He drew an edes screw, an ancient device created to force water to flow upwards and sketched construction machines, a mill for processing grain and a human flying contraption featuring bat like wings.

For Leonardo building, the machines often seemed beside the point.

- What is beautiful Leonardo is proportion and harmony among his parts, and is a balance between light and shade is organization of all the inner parts in a way that provide an immediate perception of coherence.

This is why I like to call these drawings portraits.

It takes the same care in making them as he put into portraying one of his famous ladies.

- Well, first, Debbie, let me get your response.

What did you think of, of the clip?

And I understand you also watched the whole film, so what'd you think?

- Well, just from a more technical perspective, I really loved the split screens.

I loved seeing the sort of tension between nature and the drawings and inventions and the way in which these objects become part of our world.

I was also really moved by the notion that Leonardo thought that painting was not of the hand, but of the mind.

Leonardo had one of the most curious minds in all of humanity, and so I think this fueled his genius as a painter and a thinker.

I also really loved the way in which Leonardo was brought to life through his work and his art and his intellect.

- You know, I I do you subscribe.

I certainly do, and I, it came as a revelation to me working on the film what?

Paolo Galluzzi, the scholar just said that for him, nature's perfect.

There's not, nature does nothing.

That's not perfect.

And so for us, it's the ultimate backstop to whatever we're doing.

- Yes.

Everything we do for the most part is self-directed.

You know, we, we are very much in charge of what our lives look like and what we are able to make.

Nature is very much a mystery in terms of how it's directed, how it knows things, how it grows, how it dies.

It's, it's in many ways the ultimate mystery.

- Yeah.

The, the narrator at one point says in the clip, we just watched that, that building the machines that he's dreaming of and drawing often seem behi beside the point, sort of emphasizing a conceptual aspect to his designs.

Does this relate, does this ring a bell with you, this iterative design process of today and your own work?

The idea of of, of the thing itself is really the ideas behind it, not the actual drawings.

- I, I write, I conduct and write a column for Print magazine where I ask creative people to compete, to complete a bit of a ian questionnaire, where I ask these really accomplished designers and artists how long the feeling of pride or happiness lasts after a success or an accomplishment or finishing something.

And I think the average amount of time they've stated is somewhere between 10 minutes and an hour.

- Yeah, I I then I was gonna think you were gonna head towards the nanosecond.

It's right, right.

What have I done for me lately?

Because of - Exactly.

- It isn't, it isn't the thing, it's the process and the relationship to the thing.

- Well, I think that the feeling fades so quickly because these artists and designers subconsciously realize the actual joy they were experiencing was the actual making of something.

And after the making comes this sort of void and the need to keep making, hence the disappearance of the pride at what was already made.

I mean, I personally feel happiest when I'm making something.

It's the making wherein I go into a zone of timelessness and of sort of the, the sort of what feels like the highest power of living.

- I, you know, I agree completely, and I, I think it's embedded in that idea that's implied in one of the comments that in essence the human responsibility is to transform nature.

And in that transforming of nature makes something that may be in some ways almost as perfect and, and, and really it's the doing and not the completed object that matters.

The thing that's so amazing about him, and, and the question I wanna ask is, does the tension between the expanded definition of an artist that Leonardo constantly promotes and pioneers someone who is not only a craftsperson, not only an artist and but an poet and a philosopher and a scientist, versus the notion of art as a craft still, does that exist today?

I mean, I don't think he ever saw a distinction.

I, I, I think the Mona is a great work of science anatomy, and I think those anatomical drawings are great works of art and, and for him, the divisions are, are a fool's errand.

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think this exists as much, if not more, designers now must be polymaths in the last 30 years alone as technology has become a tool of the designer.

In addition to mastering the old school skills of graphic design, typography, color theory, page layout, and so forth, we're now required to have expertise in business and strategy and UX and UI design.

In marketing and market research.

We must have extensive computer and software knowledge.

We have to set our own tight, manage our own retouching code, our own websites, and create our own social media strategy.

And now most recently, learn and leverage AI in our work designers must also have a deep knowledge and curiosity of cultural anthropology, of behavioral psychology, of statistics, of ergonomics, sometimes even engineering.

So it's required that we have a whole plethora of skills that all ultimately create our ability to design things effectively.

- I I just find it amazing that some guy 500 years ago without a telescope or a microscope with just his eye is had, has done stuff that we're only now sort of beginning to catch up and fill in the various shade in the various shadows and areas of, of, of his own job description.

- Yeah.

- You know, the thing that I like and I, as a little boy, I've stared at my ceiling and seen designs or the wall that I'm looking at in my barn in which I can see eyes and figures and horses, heads and monsters and that sort of thing.

And, and Leonardo was very much a part of finding in familiar everyday forums, this sort of moment where as the romantic poet William Blake said, you could find the world in a grain of sand.

Does that have a relevant in in any of the di designs that you've created?

Do you have that same sense of inspiration?

Like it's right in front of my face and he's always saying, look at a wall this way, look at the floorboards this way.

- Well, I think the difference, one of the, one of the many, many, many differences between Leonardo and maybe the rest of humanity was his infinite ability to see and recognize patterns in everything.

And that in many ways is the holy grail for any artist.

And that just seemed to come to him so much, so naturally as if, as if it were water running through him.

For me, from an artistic point of view, about 25, 30 years ago, I picked up a very large book of Leonardo's diaries and journals and writing, and was for a time really obsessed with the way in which he approached his art.

Just the notion of even his drawings being portraits.

A lot of young artists and designers tend to copy their heroes in an effort to find their own voice.

And so back in the day, I actually used to paint pages of his notebooks.

And one thing that I can share that I'm really proud of is that like Leonardo, probably the only thing we have in common is that I can also write mirror backwards, and I am a lefty and apparently quite a lot of lefties can do it if they practice.

I learned from the movie, from your film that he did this in an effort not to smear the ink.

For years I thought it was, I think one of the mythologies about his writing backwards was that he was hiding what he was writing, or it was supposed to be this sort of mysterious secret.

And I learned that it was actually just a rather performative way of keeping the ink from, from blotting.

But because I was able to write backwards, mirror backwards, and I've been able to do this since I was a child, for me it was this exploration of patterns.

And because I also don't understand Italian, I didn't know what I was painting, I just felt what I was painting.

But from a design perspective, I actually have a really interesting example that I can share with you.

For designers, the most beautiful design layouts still adhere to the principles of the Fibonacci sequence.

We see the golden ratio where the golden sequence, as Leonardo referred to it in the, in the Mona Lisa and in the Vitruvian Man, and then the swirls of the snails and Leonardo's drawings in the clip we just saw.

And Leonardo's ability to infuse perspective in his drawings and paintings has a through line to a logo that I helped create for the no more movement.

And the organizations behind the effort of this movement needed a strategy and an identity to reflect the overarching aspiration of eradicating all sexual violence forever.

And we created a blue circle with a very small white circle embedded in the exact center of the blue one.

And that white circle is such that it creates a perspective driven vanishing point, which signifies sort of a light at the end of the tunnel and a safe, inclusive stigma free zone for discussion and activation of, of really trying to get all of our culture to that, that this was something that needed to be stopped.

When I was watching the film and saw how Leonardo perfectly situated Jesus' body in the very center of, of the Last Supper, which I've seen and is remarkable, it, it reminded me of that a little bit.

- Oh, Debbie, you have made my day.

I'm, I'm a lefty too.

I've always struggled with the smudge and I've always thought working on this film every day about what that conscious intentionality of writing, not just back, but in the mirror script and and what that did and how it focused his mind.

And here you are 500 years later, a practicing Leonardo as well.

I am so grateful for the time you gave us today.

I've learned so much in the short time and I'm so thrilled that you like our film.

And I will share with Sarah Burns and David McMahon just that Thank you so much.

Thank you.

- My absolute pleasure, Ken.

Thank you for having me.