Leonardo drew incessantly, that was how he thought. Far different from the serenity of his paintings, his drawings are frenetic, explosive. Yet drawings can't move, they too are still, despite the dynamic processes he was trying to understand, such as the flow of blood in arteries and the flow of water in rivers. He drew analogies from visually similar processes such as these, and used the actions of his hand as he drew as if they were mirroring the actions of nature. I will discuss Leonardo's process and put that in the larger context of using drawing as a way of thinking.
This conversation was part of
The Soul of Leonardo da Vinci: A symposium in celebration of the quincentenary of Leonardo’s death, with Hanna Arie-Gaifman, Jonathan Berger, Howard Morgan, Michael Kubovy, Israel Nelken, Barbara Tversky, Timothy Weaver, and Robert Zwijnenberg.
Co-Produced by the 92nd Street Y and Stanford University’s Symposium on Music and the Brain.