Leonardo’s Bio in Brief
Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452, two months after Christopher Columbus, one year before Constantinople fell to the Turks cutting off land-based trade routes, and three years before Guttenberg’s innovation took off which meant that Leonardo’s generation would be the first to come of age with wide spread access to books. Where Columbus pushed the limits of maritime navigation, Leonardo’s pushed the frontiers of perception. Leonardo made little distinction between art and science. One served the other, both catalyzed by a wide-ranging curiosity, both refined through sensory discipline. The life of Leonardo is marked by two tensions, contractual agreements to patrons and the private pursuits of his genius. He painted little more than a dozen paintings, some contracts left unfinished, and yet his fame today is based to a large degree not on these works but on his working methods as revealed in more than seven thousand pages of surviving notes. Born into the Renaissance, the great awakening of the humanities, Leonardo came to represent the ideal of multi-disciplined genius.

Learn more at these links!
Interview with Peter Donaldson
Learn more about Leonardo
New Renaissance Forum
20 Questions for the New Renaissance
Sightline Institute Statement, Subscribe!
City of Olympia Statement by Joe Hyer
School Workshops
College Seminars
Peter’s Book List
Peter Donaldson Bio
Buy Tickets

“How could you describe this heart in words without filing a whole book?”

“The heart does not beat nor the lung breathe while the child is in the womb, which is filled with water, for if it were to draw a breath it would be instantly drowned. But the breathing of the mother, and the beating of her heart, work in the life of the child.”

“Describe how the clouds are formed and how they dissolve, and what causes vapor to rise from the waters of the earth into the air, and the causes of mists, and of the air becoming thickened, and why it appears more or less blue at different times…”

“Describe the woodpecker’s tongue.”

“Man has great power of speech, but what he says is mostly vain and false; animals have little, but what they say is useful and true.”

“While you are alone you are entirely on your own; and if you have but one companion you are but half your own.”

“All our knowledge has its foundation in our senses.”

“He is a poor pupil who does not go beyond his master.”

“The plucked string of a lute will produce a corresponding movement in a similar string of the same pitch on another lute, and this can be seen by placing a piece of straw on the string similar to the one that is played.”

“Having wandered some way among somber rocks I came upon the mouth of a huge cavern, in front of which I stood some while, astounded by this place I had not known before. I stooped down with my back arched, and my left hand resting on one knee; and with my right hand I shaded my lowered and frowning brows; and continually bending this way and that I looked in and tried to make out if there was anything inside, but the deep darkness prevented me from doing so. I had been there for some time, when there suddenly arose in me two things, fear and desire; fear of that threatening dark cave; desire to see if there was some marvelous thing within.”

“Human subtlety… will never devise an invention more beautiful or simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”

"When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come."

“Just as food eaten without caring for it is turned into loathsome nourishment, so study without a taste for it spoils memory, causing it to retain nothing which it has taken in."

"The great bird will take flight above the ridge... filling the universe with awe, filling all writings with its fame..."