Mastery

by Robert Greene

  His progress at drawing was so astounding that his father thought of finding him a position as an apprentice in one of the various studios in Florence. Working in the arts was one of the few professions open to illegitimate sons. In 1466, using his influence as a respected notary in Florence, he managed to secure a position for his fourteen-year-old son in the workshop of the great artist Verrocchio. For Leonardo, this was a perfect fit. Verrocchio was deeply influenced by the enlightened spirit of the times, and his apprentices were taught to approach their work with the seriousness of scientists. For instance, plaster casts of human figures would be placed about the studio with various pieces of fabric draped over them. The apprentices had to learn to concentrate deeply, and recognize the different creases and shadows that would form. They had to learn how to reproduce them realistically. Leonardo loved learning in this way, and soon it became apparent to Verrocchio that his young apprentice had developed an exceptional eye for detail.

  By 1472 Leonardo was one of Verrocchio’s top assistants, helping him on his large-scale paintings and taking on a fair amount of responsibility. In Verrocchio’s The Baptism of Christ, Leonardo was given the task of painting one of the two angels off to the side, and this work is now the oldest example we have of his painting. When Verrocchio saw the results of Leonardo’s work he was astounded. The face of the angel had a quality he had never seen before—it seemed to literally glow from within. The look on the angel’s face seemed uncannily real and expressive.

  Although it might have seemed like magic to Verrocchio, recent X-rays have revealed some of the secrets to Leonardo’s early technique. The layers of paint he applied were exceptionally thin, his brush strokes invisible. He had gradually added more layers, each ever so slightly darker than the last. Operating in this way, and experimenting with different pigments, he had taught himself how to capture the delicate contours of human flesh. Because of the thin layers, any light hitting the painting seemed to pass through the angel’s face and illuminate it from within.

  What this revealed was that in the six years that he had been working in the studio, he must have applied himself to an elaborate study of the various paints and perfected a style of layering that made everything seem delicate and lifelike, with a feeling of texture and depth. He must have also spent a great deal of time studying the composition of human flesh itself. What this also revealed was the incredible patience of Leonardo, who must have felt a great deal of love for such detailed work.

  Over the years, after he left Verrocchio’s studio and established a name for himself as an artist, Leonardo da Vinci developed a philosophy that would guide his artwork and, later, his scientific work as well. He noticed that other artists generally started with an overall image they planned to depict, one that would create a startling or spiritual effect. His mind operated differently. He would find himself beginning with a keen focus on details—the various shapes of noses, the possible turnings of the mouth to indicate a mood, the veins in a hand, the intricate knots of trees. These details fascinated him. He had come to believe that by focusing on and understanding such details he was actually getting closer to the secret of life itself, to the work of the Creator who infused his presence into every living thing and every form of matter. The bones of the hand or the contours of human lips were as inspiring to him as any religious image. For him, painting was a quest to get at the life force that animates all things. In the process of doing so, he believed he could create work that was much more emotional and visceral. And to realize this quest, he invented a series of exercises that he followed with incredible rigor.

  During the day he would take endless walks through the city and countryside, his eyes taking in all of the details of the visible world. He would make himself notice something new in every familiar object that he saw. At night, before falling asleep, he would review all of these various objects and details, fixing them in his memory. He was obsessed with capturing the essence of the human face in all of its glorious diversity. For this purpose, he would visit every conceivable place where he could find different types of people—brothels, public houses, prisons, hospitals, prayer corners in churches, country festivals. With his notebook always at hand, he would sketch grimacing, laughing, pained, beatific, leering expressions on an incredible variety of faces. He would follow people in the streets who had a type of face he had never seen before, or some kind of physical deformity, and would sketch them as he walked. He would fill single sheets of paper with dozens of different noses in profile. He seemed particularly interested in lips, finding them just as expressive as eyes. He would repeat all of these exercises at different times of the day, to make sure he could capture the different effects that changing light would have on the human face.

  For his great painting The Last Supper, his patron, the duke of Milan, grew increasingly angry with Leonardo for the time he was taking to finish it. It seemed that all that remained was to fill in the face of Judas, but Leonardo could not find an adequate model. He had taken to visiting the worst parts of Milan to find the most perfectly villainous expression to translate onto Judas, but was having no luck. The duke accepted his explanation, and soon enough Leonardo had found the model he wanted.

  He applied this same rigor to capturing bodies in motion. Part of his philosophy was that life is defined by continual movement and constant change. The artist must be able to render the sensation of dynamic movement in a still image. Ever since he was a young man he had been obsessed with currents of water, and had become quite proficient at capturing the look of waterfalls, cascades, and rushing water. With people, he would spend hours seated on the side of a street, watching pedestrians as they moved by. He would hurriedly sketch the outlines of their figures, capturing their various movements in a stop-action sequence. (He had reached the point where he could sketch with incredible rapidity.) At home, he would fill in the outlines. To develop his eye for following movement in general, he invented a whole series of different exercises. For instance, one day in his notebook he wrote, “Tomorrow make some silhouettes out of cardboard in various forms and throw them from the top of the terrace through the air; then draw the movements each makes at different stages of descent.”

  His hunger to get at the core of life by exploring its details drove him into elaborate research on human and animal anatomy. He wanted to be able to draw a human or a cat from the inside out. He personally dissected cadavers, sawing through bones and skulls, and he religiously attended autopsies so that he could see as closely as possible the structure of muscles and nerves. His anatomical drawings were far in advance of anything of his time for their realism and accuracy.

  To other artists, Leonardo seemed insane for all of this attention to detail, but in the few paintings that he actually completed, the results of such rigorous practice can be seen and felt. More than the work of any other artist of his time, the landscapes in the backgrounds of his paintings seemed infused with life. Every flower, branch, leaf or stone was rendered in intense detail. But these backgrounds were not simply there to decorate. In an effect known as sfumato, and one that was peculiar to his work, he would soften parts of these backgrounds to the point at which they would melt into the figure in the foreground, giving a dreamlike effect. It was part of his idea that all of life is deeply interconnected and fused on some level.

  The faces of the women he painted had a pronounced effect on people, and particularly on men, who often fell in love with the female figures he depicted in religious scenes. It wasn’t any obvious sensual quality in their expression, but in their ambiguous smiles and their beautifully rendered flesh the men would recognize a powerfully seductive quality. Leonard heard many stories of them finding their way to his paintings in various houses and secretly fondling the women in the images and kissing their lips.

  Much of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has been damaged by attempts to clean and restore it in the past, making it hard to imagine it as it originally appeared, and how its startling qualities shocked the public. Fortun
ately, we have the critic Vasari’s description of it, before it became hopelessly altered: “The eyebrows, growing thickly in one place and thinly in another, following the pores of the skin, could not have been more lifelike. The nose, with its ravishingly delicate pink nostrils, was life itself. The shaping of the mouth, where the red of the lips merged with the skin tones of the face, seemed not to be made from colors but from living flesh. In the hollow of the throat, the observant onlooker could see the pulsing of the veins.”

  Long after Leonardo’s death, his paintings continue to have haunting and disturbing effects on viewers. Numerous security guards in museums around the world have been fired for their weird, obsessive relationships to his work, and Leonardo’s paintings remain the most vandalized in the history of art, all of this attesting to the power of his work to stir up the most visceral emotions.

  The primary problem for artists in Leonardo da Vinci’s day was the constant pressure to produce more and more work. They had to produce at a relatively high rate in order to keep the commissions coming and remain in the public eye. This influenced the quality of their work. A style had developed in which artists could quickly create effects in their painting that would superficially excite viewers. To create such effects they would depend on bright colors, unusual juxtapositions and compositions, and dramatic scenes. In the process, they would inevitably gloss over the details in the background and even in the people they portrayed. They did not pay much attention to the flowers or trees or the hands of figures in the foreground. They had to dazzle on the surface. Leonardo recognized this fact early in his career and it distressed him. It went against his grain in two ways—he hated the feeling of having to hurry with anything, and he loved immersing himself in details for their own sake. He was not interested in creating surface effects. He was animated by a hunger to understand life forms from the inside out and to grasp the force that makes them dynamic, and to somehow express all of this on a flat surface. And so, not fitting in, he went on his own peculiar path, mixing science and art.

  To complete his quest, Leonardo had to become what he termed “universal”—for each object he had to be able to render all of its details, and he had to extend this knowledge as far as possible, to as many objects in the world as he could study. Through sheer accumulation of such details, the essence of life itself became visible to him, and his understanding of this life force became visible in his artwork.

  In your own work you must follow the Leonardo path. Most people don’t have the patience to absorb their minds in the fine points and minutiae that are intrinsically part of their work. They are in a hurry to create effects and make a splash; they think in large brush strokes. Their work inevitably reveals their lack of attention to detail—it doesn’t connect deeply with the public, and it feels flimsy. If it gets attention, the attention is momentary. You must see whatever you produce as something that has a life and presence of its own. This presence can be vibrant and visceral, or it can be weak and lifeless. A character in a novel, for instance, will come to life for the reader if the writer has put great effort into imagining the details of that character. The writer does not need to literally lay out these details; readers will feel it in the work and will intuit the level of research that went into the creation of it. All living things are an amalgam of intricate levels of details, animated by the dynamic that connects them. Seeing your work as something alive, your path to mastery is to study and absorb these details in a universal fashion, to the point at which you feel the life force and can express it effortlessly in your work.

  5. Widen your vision—the Global Perspective

  Early in his career as a boxing trainer, Freddie Roach felt like he knew the business well enough to become highly successful at it. (For more information on Roach see chapter 1, here, and chapter 3, here.) He had fought for years as a professional; he had a boxer’s feel for the game. His own trainer had been the legendary Eddie Futch, who had trained Joe Frazier, among others. When Roach’s career as a boxer had ended in the mid-1980s, he had served as an apprentice trainer for several years under Futch himself. On his own, Roach had created a novel training technique based on the use of sparring mitts. Wearing these large mitts, he could spar with and teach his fighters in the ring, in real time. This added another dimension to his instruction. He worked hard at building a personal rapport with his fighters. And finally, he developed the practice of poring over videos of opposing fighters, studying their styles in depth, and devising an effective counter-strategy based on this study.

  And yet despite all of this work, he sensed that something was missing. Everything would go well in practice, but in actual fights he would often watch from the corner with a helpless feeling as his boxers would go their own way, or would enact only a part of the strategy he had devised. Sometimes he and his fighters would be on the same page, sometimes not. All of this was reflected in the winning percentage of his boxers—good but not great. He could remember back to his own days as a fighter under Futch. He too had done well in practice, but in actual fights and in the heat of the moment, all strategy and preparation would go out the window and he would try to punch his way to a victory. He had always missed something from Futch’s training. Futch had trained him well in all of the separate components of a fight (like offense, defense, and footwork), but Roach never had had a sense of the whole picture or the overall strategy. The connection between himself and Futch had never been that great, and so under pressure in the ring, he would suddenly just revert to his own natural way of fighting. And he now seemed to be having a similar problem with his own fighters.

  Trying to feel his way through to a process that would bring better results, Roach decided he needed to do for his fighters what had never been done for himself in his own career—namely, to give them a feel for the complete picture of the fight. He wanted them to enact this script over all the rounds, and to deepen the connection between fighter and trainer. He began by expanding the mitt work, making it not just a component in the training process, but the focal point. Now he would spend hours sparring with his fighters over several rounds. Day after day, feeling their punches and getting a sense of the rhythm of their footwork, he could almost get inside their skin. He could feel their moods, the level of their focus, and the degree to which they were open to instruction. Without ever having to say a word, he could alter their moods and focus by the intensity of the mitt work he did with them.

  Having trained as a fighter since he was six years old, Roach had a feel for every square inch of the ring. With his eyes closed he could gauge exactly where he stood in the ring at any moment. Training his fighters for hours with the mitt work, he could imprint into them his own sixth sense for the space itself, deliberately maneuvering them into bad positions so they could feel in advance how they were approaching such a dangerous space. In the same way, he would impart to them several ways to avoid such dead positions.

  One day, as he was studying a video of an opposing fighter, he had an epiphany—his way of watching videos was all wrong. In general, he would focus on a fighter’s style, which is something boxers can control and alter for strategic purposes. This suddenly seemed like a superficial way of studying the opponent. A far better strategy would be to look for their habits or tics, the things they couldn’t control no matter how hard they tried. Every fighter has such tics—they are signs of something deeply wired into their rhythms—and they translate into potential weaknesses. Discovering these tics and habits would give Roach a much deeper read on the opponent, cutting to his psyche and to his heart.

  He began to look for signs of this in the tapes he watched, and in the beginning it would take him several days to see anything. But in the course of watching so many hours on the opposing fighter, he would get a feel for his ways of moving and thinking. Eventually, he would find the habit he was looking for—for instance, a slight motion of the head that always foreshadowed a particular punch. Now that he had found it, he would see it everywhere on the tapes. After doi
ng this for many different fights over several years, he developed a feel for identifying such tics much more quickly.

  Based on these discoveries, he would craft a complete strategy that had built-in flexibility. Depending on what the opponent showed in the first round, Roach would have ready several options for his own fighter that would surprise and upset the opponent, keeping him on his heels and in react mode. His strategy would encompass the entire fight. If necessary, his own fighter could sacrifice a round or two without ever losing control of the overall dynamic. Now, in the mitt work, he would go over the strategy endlessly. Carefully mimicking the tics and rhythms of the opponent he had come to know so well, he could show his fighters how to mercilessly take advantage of their habits and weaknesses; he would go over the various options to adopt, depending on what the opponent revealed in the first round. By the time the fight itself approached, his fighters would feel as if they had already fought and destroyed this opponent, having faced Roach so many times in preparation.

  During the progress of the fights themselves, Roach now had a completely different feeling than in the years before. The connection with his fighters was absolute. His vision of the whole picture—the spirit of the opponent, the way to dominate the ring space within each round, the overall strategy to win the fight—was now deeply imprinted into the footwork, punching, and thinking of his own fighter. He could almost feel himself in the ring exchanging punches, but now he had the ultimate satisfaction of controlling both the mind of his own fighter and that of the opponent’s. He would watch with mounting excitement as his fighters would slowly wear down their opponents, exploiting their habits and getting inside their heads just as he had taught them to.