As if by magic, none other than Leonardo da Vinci

Who better to motivate Pittsburgh’s aspiring product managers and business titans to think with both sides of their brains than the genius whose own ability to bridge the worlds of art and technology 500 years ago remains the model of creative brilliance? Meet Leonardo da Vinci, as channeled by Carnegie Mellon drama professor Don Marinelli, in his surprise visit to a recent Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network reception.

Dressed in a flowing crimson-lined tunic, topped with strand of gold medallions and a black chapeau, the genius of Florence strode around the Renaissance Hotel reception room, radiating an infectious sense of optimism about creativity, invention and Pittsburgh’s future. His inspirational remarks, following a dramatic surprise entry, captivated the astonished reception guests.

Leonardo, whose character was vividly brought to life by CMU Drama Professor & Entertainment Technology Center leader Don Marinelli, provides a striking metaphor for the circumstances of today’s Pittsburgh, as the city struggles to emerge as a technology powerhouse in the 21st century.

Prejudice

Beyond his landmark paintings, drawings, and prodigious notes foreshadowing amazing new technologies, Leonardo’s most enduring legacy was his intense curiosity about a wide range of disciplines coupled with an openness to new and unconventional approaches in all of them. His achievements were all the more remarkable because the times in which he lived – which for centuries had been marked by brutality, serfdom, superstition, and disease – were generally hostile to unorthodox ideas.

The resulting cultural and scientific transition was profound. In his popular 1998 book How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb notes that “in five hundred years we’ve moved from a world where everything was certain and nothing changed to a world where nothing seems certain and everything changes.” In essence, the Renaissance turned the Old World and all that it represented on its head. But for da Vinci, that change wasn’t simply his pursuit of abstract ideal. It was the result of his need to earn a living.

Low status

Leonardo was born in 1453, the out-of-wedlock son of a low-level bureaucrat and a chamber maid. Denied entrée to high society and its elite schools, Leonardo was forced to live by his wits and by his own evolving practice of pushing beyond the expected, tackling new ideas, taking those ideas to their limits, and never letting himself be restricted to what either he or others had done before.

Infused with a tremendous curiosity that embraced the arts, engineering, anatomy, and more, da Vinci created some of the world’s best-loved paintings and most vivid anatomical drawings, as well as killing machines whose deadly impact on the battlefield would have been previously unimaginable. Yet his career as one of the world’s premier artists, engineers, anatomists, and architects was marked by a lifelong struggle against the prejudices that resulted from his illegitimate birth status.

It was also hurt by his own jealous rivalries toward other artists of his day, including Michelangelo, as well as a tendency to leave his works unfinished, almost as though he felt that the detailed execution of great ideas was something beneath him.

Scraping for a buck

The need to earn a living also forced him to repeatedly relocate during his career. From Florence, where he first apprenticed to become a member of the artist’s guild, he moved to the embattled principality of Milan. There, he became its principal military engineer, designing gigantic war machines including tanks, scythes, canons, catapults and assault boats, as well as a prototypical machine gun. His imaginative concepts for fortresses, underwater diving suits, and giant crossbows were also emblematic of his determination to push beyond the limits of the expected, even in warfare.

But Milan’s fortunes were short-lived, forcing him into still more relocations – first to Venice, and then back to Florence, and eventually to France, where he died at age 67. And precisely because of its many twists and turns, da Vinci’s career provides an instructive model for any modern-day renaissance.

For one thing, his work as an artist was always linked to his work in the world of commerce; great works of art in that era were typically done on commission. Da Vinci would paint whenever he had cash flow problems. So art and business, in Leonardo’s eyes, were not enemies. If anything, they were joined at the hip.

Not seeing

Then there’s the fact that many of da Vinci’s futuristic inventions simply didn’t work, and many others wouldn’t have worked even if they had been built. But they succeeded in stretching the minds and stimulating the imaginations of his intellectual descendants to refine those concepts and help make their concepts work.

To da Vinci, artistic perfection and technical precision were not incompatible ideas. If anything, they result from the same passion for excellence. And in both cases, real-life experimentation and direct observation became fundamental elements of his creative work. As Marinelli’s da Vinci told his listeners, “real wisdom is the daughter of experience. The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.”

“There are really three kinds of people,” he continued. “Those who see. Those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see. Unfortunately, that last type is, by far, in the majority. So those of us who see must act. Because responsibility for the others rests squarely on our shoulders.”