If you want to see that he saw things that other people can't see, I think you will.
May 22, 2025
"One theory is that he had an abnormally 'quick eye,' capable of isolating moments in time that almost anybody else would miss."
"That might have included the subject of the Mona Lisa just beginning to break into a tentative smile, or the asynchronous beating of a dragonfly’s wings. Jesse Ausubel, a co-founder of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, said: 'We think he saw things that you and I can’t see.'"
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36 comments:
The Addams Family?
i think he just used a very fast shutter speed on his paintings..
kinda like Monet's paintings had a very low fStop
Thing T. Thing? Sorry… just waking up on teh West Coast…
Like Ted Williams seeing the rotating seams of the baseball as it speeds towards the plate. Leonardo might have made a hell of a major league hitter.
Visual processing is used by psychologists as a stand-in for a full scale IQ score as it correlates very highly with the score on a full test.
I can't read the article so I don't know if they mention this, but anyone who studies IQ both formally and informally understands that highly intelligent people take in much more at a glance than most people.
This breaks the stereotype we have of the absent minded , uncoordinated nerd. In fact, your best hand to hand fighters are going to be very smart.
Intelligence is the bright light shining from the eyes.
Compare/contrast this with the media and Biden Inc.
Likely to be an untestable hypothesis. The Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project ought to have completed their research before offering speculations to the public. Bias will be suspected.
Leo would have batted .450 in the MLB.
So intelligence has an important genetic component? (I couldn't read the article.) Not news to any thinking person, but unacceptable to the leftists who believe differences in intellect are all due to the white man's oppression of POCs.
I still don't see the Mona Lisa smiling. I guess that makes me an idiot?
there's a book out there, named:
Human Diversity
The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray
that gets into what makes people smart..
Basically, it's wise to be careful in choosing your parents.
Proust thought that great artists could perceive more than ordinary people, and, more important, convey that in their art.
OK, does that mean they'll dig up his skeleton to get his DNA? And I guess this an argument against cremation. If I want my grand-kids to investigate whether Rcocean was a genius, they'll need my skeleton. Not a urn of ashes.
Assumption is that DNA and intelligence are linked. I suppose not just "Linked" but proven and identified by now. But of course, not inherited. And if it is, we don't want to talk about that. Because "science".
Sounds like "eye"-segesis.
Likewise there are those who hear things better than we do.
I will file this in my Albert Einstein "Everybody is a genius" file.
He had a photographic memory before photography was invented.
I was good in the early 90s seeing the shark in the blurry dotted pictures
NHL goalies do eye exercises, looking from side to side in sets of reps. One of them said "The eyeball has muscles, and muscles respond to exercise." The idea being to have the power to pick up a puck a tiny fraction of a second more quickly, I suppose.
""Good friend for Jesus' sake forebear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones." –Shakespeare's epitaph
Of course his grave was disturbed and his skull stolen. There was a craze to study the skull of geniuses in the 19th century, and this is probably when it happened.
There are modern studies using medical imaging that have linked IQ to the shape of the skull—phrenology redux—it seems like some brain enclosure shapes are more efficient than others for thinking. Of course they are careful to explain that nothing that might get them cancelled should be inferred from their work.
Or, if you just wanna grift, that's why they have universities.
If Leonardo was so smart,, why didn't he take advantage of the existing technology of the day and invent the paper clip or the fountain pen instead of all those weird contraptions. If I were around back then, that's what I would have done.
William
Genius is there to satisfy its own curiosity, not yours.
RCOCEAN II said...
“If I want my grand-kids to investigate whether Rcocean was a genius, they'll need my skeleton.”
You also run the risk that millennia in the future, some anthropologist will put your skeleton on display in a museum with a plaque that reads:
Althousian Man
Mostly Harmless
Duh. “Genius” is speed of perception, full stop.
Another theory was that he was unusually perceptive with an ability to realize his discerning intelligence with a creative conscience. #AnthropogenicIntelligence (AI)
"I still don't see the Mona Lisa smiling. I guess that makes me an idiot?"
Don't look at her mouth, look at her eyes.
Leo couldn't paint hands to save his life. Had Mona Lisa not been stolen, it would have remained the second rate painting that it is.
This all makes me think of the lyrics of the song "Portrait (He Knew)" by Kansas. It was supposedly written about Albert Einstein, but Leonardo da Vinci would fit just as well.
The notion of a photographic or eidetic memory is very old. Some people indeed have more artistic talent/skill/potential than others. Some of us are good at finger painting or rolling in the mud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
Leo was the world’s greatest failure. He invented the airplane, the helicopter, the armored tank, the automobile, the robot, the submarine, and the parachute, none of which worked. If he had stuck to his true vocation, visual art, he could have produced much more than he did
"If you want to see that he saw things that other people can't see, I think you will."
Jesse Ausubel, a co-founder of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, wants to see the unseeable and for expressing that desire, he gets a writeup in the London Times. Keep that money coming into the worthless da Vinci DNA project.
not just "Linked" but proven and identified by now. But of course, not inherited.
Haha. You weren’t supposed to notice…
I've noticed that all Leonardo's faces look kind of the same. That's how I can usually tell his work. I figured it was because the Tuscan elites were basically all cousins. Then I read one art historian's theory that Leonardo wound up doing them all as self-portraits, partially because he took so long with each painting he no longer had access to the sitters.
JSM
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