The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (18 page)

The problem with much of what passes for “creativity training” in corporate retreats these days is that it starts with the assumption that creativity is a free-floating skill that can be taught on its own. It cannot, any more than athletics can be taught. You can teach someone tennis. You can teach them basketball. You cannot teach them athletics.

This is where mentors such as Verrocchio enter the picture. They are an incredibly important component in creativity. Even the most brilliant minds need role models, shoulders of giants on which to stand. In an extensive study of ninety-four Nobel laureates, sociologist Harriet Zuckerman found that most attributed their success to a key mentor in their lives. When asked, though, how exactly they benefited from these relationships, scientific knowledge ranked at the very bottom. So what did they learn from their mentors?

The answer could best be described as thinking styles. Not answers but ways of formulating questions. A sort of applied creativity. Normally we think of creativity strictly in terms of problem solving. We are presented with a difficult puzzle, then we deploy our “creative skills” to solve the assigned problem. That is admirable, but what if we don’t know what the problem is we’re trying to solve?

Enter “problem finding.” Problem solvers answer questions. Problem finders discover new questions, and
then
answer them. It is these
new questions, even more than the answers, that distinguish the genius. Which is why Picasso once quipped, “Computers are stupid. They only give you answers.”

Perhaps the best example of a problem finder is Darwin. Nobody approached him and said, “Charles, please devise a theory of evolution.” He
discovered
the problem—unexplained similarities between different species—then solved it with a unifying theory. All of this took place within his chosen field of biology—not some free-floating creative-thinking exercise.

You don’t need to be Darwin to develop problem-finding skills. In a landmark study, psychologist Jacob Getzels and a colleague observed thirty-one art students performing an open-ended task: drawing from a given set of objects. That was it. They were not given any further instructions. Getzels noticed that some of the artists spent more time exploring—manipulating the objects, trying out new configurations. These artists, those engaged in deep problem finding, produced the more creative work. Following up eighteen years later, Getzels discovered that these same artists, the problem finders, enjoyed more success than the problem solvers. The problems we discover on our own are the ones that motivate us the most.

Leonardo da Vinci was a problem finder. Problems also found him. He was an “illegitimate child,” born out of wedlock to a notary named Ser Piero. A remarkably large number of Renaissance artists were illegitimate, including Alberti and Ghiberti. For them, as for Leonardo, this was both curse and blessing. Had he been born “legitimately,” Leonardo would likely have followed in his father’s footsteps and become a notary or lawyer. But those professions’ guilds refused entry to illegitimate children. Leonardo couldn’t become a doctor or a pharmacist, nor could he attend university. By age thirteen, most doors were already closed to him. Obstacles were placed, and he responded to these. Again, the Power of Constraints in action.

But Leonardo had a few things going for him. He was raised an only child, and research shows clearly that only children are statistically more likely to become geniuses. Psychologists aren’t sure why, but suspect it’s
because parents devote more resources to them and tend to treat them as adults in waiting, not helpless children.

Fortunately, too, Leonardo’s father had a few connections in Florence. One of them was Verrocchio. One day, Ser Piero showed him a few of Leonardo’s sketches, figuring he had nothing to lose. Verrocchio, the story goes, was speechless and “amazed by promising beginnings and urged Piero to have the lad study the subject,” reports Giorgio Vasari, the great biographer of Renaissance artists. And so he did.

Teenaged Leonardo, unproven and of suspect pedigree, no doubt faced his share of obstacles at Verrocchio’s workshop. As the newest hire, he was relegated to the thankless tasks of cleaning the chicken cages, sweeping the floors. He must have performed these chores well, for he soon moved up to more challenging assignments such as joining wood or mixing pigments. His climb up the
bottega
ladder didn’t stop there.

“Let me show you something,” says Eugene. We’re now sitting at a café, one of his favorites, sipping wine and enjoying enjoying. He taps on a photo on his iPad, a painting by Verrocchio called
Tobias and the Angel.
This depicts an angel (complete with halo and wings) and a boy named Tobias holding hands, with Tobias gazing admiringly at the angel.

“Very nice,” I say, and quickly realize how lame that must sound, not exactly the most nuanced bit of art criticism.

“Yes, but look at the fish.”

I hadn’t noticed it before but, sure enough, Tobias is carrying a fish, freshly caught and dangling from a string. I take a closer look, and even to my amateur eye, the virtuosity is obvious. The fish is expertly painted; each scale rendered with incredible precision.

“Wow,” I say, in another fine display of erudition. “That’s good.”

“Yes, it is. Too good for Verrocchio.”

Perhaps he was having an especially good day, I offer. It’s been known to happen. The world’s number 300 player upsets Serena Williams. A cliché-prone hack cranks out a passage of Shakespearean prose.

No, says Eugene. The fish looks too good for Verrocchio because it
is
too good. He didn’t paint it. It was done by his young assistant Leonardo da Vinci, who was, at the time, all of eighteen years old.

Let’s stop and contemplate this for a moment. Verrocchio was a businessman, but he was also an artist, and a proud one, too. Yet he agreed to allow this young, unproven child from a small village to paint an important figure in his painting. Why? Clearly, Verrocchio recognized the talent flowering in young Leonardo. So he put his ego aside and let his protégé contribute to his work—not by holding his brushes or fetching a glass of wine, but by actually putting brush to wood (canvas was still years away).

Let’s pause and consider the magnitude of this gesture. Can you imagine Hemingway letting his assistant write a few crisp sentences for
The Old Man and the Sea
? Or Mozart letting his underling compose a few bars of the
Requiem
? Yet such collaborative efforts were common in the workshops of Florence.

The Renaissance was much more of a team effort than we think. Yes, a few stars shone bright, but they were part of a much larger constellation, and a big sky. Art was a collective enterprise; it belonged to everyone. No Florentine artist, not even the self-absorbed Michelangelo, created only for himself. The artists did it for the city or the Church, or for posterity. True genius is never a completely private affair. It is always communal. It is always bigger than itself.

Leonardo and his cohorts would have drawn a blank at terms like
team building
, but that is essentially what they were doing. Unlike in a modern corporate environment, though, the process unfolding at Verrocchio’s workshop was entirely organic. Living and working on top of one another, they couldn’t help but know one another. They weren’t being creative. They were just being.

A workshop position, like a modern internship, wasn’t supposed to last forever. Typically, after a few years an apprentice ventured out on his own, assuming he was good enough. Leonardo was clearly good enough, yet he chose to stay at Verrocchio’s workshop for an additional ten years. Why? That is one of the great mysteries of the Renaissance. Was he still learning? Were he and Verrocchio lovers, as some historians maintain? Perhaps Leonardo, despite his obvious talent, was no rebel. (Leonardo’s contemporaries describe him as a “perfectly docile student.”) Perhaps he stayed simply because he was comfortable.

Eugene and I have relocated to one of those perfect trattorias we had spotted earlier, and over a carafe of the house Chianti, he reveals his own theory of why Leonardo stayed at the workshop.

“It was because he was so bright, and scattered. He was all over the place. He didn’t finish things. If he had gone off on his own, he would have starved to death. He was a lousy businessman. He didn’t know how to get a job, and if he did get a job, he didn’t know how to finish it, because he’d be painting and then suddenly he’d be off studying something else. He had Renaissance ADD.”

Leonardo’s notebooks confirm this diagnosis. They reveal a man prone to distraction and debilitating doubt. “Tell me if anything has ever been achieved; tell me . . . tell me if I have ever done anything that . . . ,” he scribbled, again and again, while testing a new pen, or whenever melancholy struck. The workshop provided Leonardo with structure and discipline, qualities he otherwise lacked. In a way, Verrocchio, not his apprentice, was the real Renaissance man. He possessed all the qualities that made the age golden: industriousness, business acumen, artistic flair. He had it all. True, he didn’t hit the same high notes as his protégé, but he provided the business skills that Leonardo sorely lacked. He and Leonardo were co-geniuses. For a while.

Important as the mentor is to creativity, it is a thankless role. The mentor is like a catalyst in a chemical reaction. Crucial, yes, but unsung, as any chemist will tell you. Once the molecules have rearranged themselves, not a trace of the catalyst can be detected. So I can’t say I was completely surprised to learn that among the thousands of pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, not once does the name Andrea del Verrocchio appear.

I’m feeling unsatisfied with my progress. Yes, I’ve made some significant headway. I’ve learned that mentors are important, as is money (preferably other people’s) and constraints. But nagging questions continue to, well, nag. What exactly made this swampy, floodprone, plague-infested city shine like no other? Was it “wealth and freedom,” the two ingredients that Voltaire deemed indispensable for any golden age? Or is there some other component, some secret sauce, that I’ve overlooked?

Eugene thinks for a moment. I can tell he’s thinking because he’s not talking. With Eugene, those are his only two modes, thinking and talking. Never both. Finally, he says,
“Sprezzatura.
Florence had lots of
sprezzatura
.”

“That’s too bad. And they didn’t have antibiotics back then.”

No, Eugene says, with a smile.
Sprezzatura
is a good thing. It means, literally, a “squirt of something extra.”
Sprezzatura
is what separates a good meal from one you will remember for the rest of your life.
Sprezzatura
is what separates the number 15–ranked player and Roger Federer. And
sprezzatura
is what separated Florence from Siena and Pisa and Flanders and every other European population center of the time. Yes, money helped, but “without that squirt of something extra the money isn’t going to get you anything,” Eugene says.

I like this
sprezzatura
. There’s something meritocratic about it. We believe geniuses are fundamentally different from the rest of us. Gods who have descended from the heavens to bestow their rare gifts upon us. But maybe that is not true. Maybe all that separates us from them is a lot of hard work, and a little
sprezzatura.
How, though, does an entire city find itself awash in the stuff? Eugene coyly hints that I will find the answers at a place called the Pitti Palace, then pours himself another glass of Chianti.

The palace is a short walk from my hotel. I had passed it several times and wondered, what is that monstrosity? While most buildings in Florence are the epitome of sophisticated understatement, the Pitti Palace is huge and garish. An architectural emoticon.

The palace was built for the banker Luca Pitti, by all accounts an arrogant boor. Pitti had nearly as much money as Cosimo de’ Medici but not nearly as much taste. Not surprisingly, the two men despised each other. Cosimo, in a terse letter to his rival, suggested they give each other a wide berth, “like two big dogs, which sniff at one another when they meet, show their teeth, and then go their separate ways.” Pitti did not heed Cosimo’s advice and continued to attempt to unseat him. Pitti did not succeed.

Yet his palace remains, a monument to excess. I walk up a set of
marble staircases, past vaulted ceilings, and step into a room nearly the size of a football field. It is carpeted and completely empty of furniture. Hanging from the ceiling are a dozen or so over-the-top chandeliers; on the walls are enormous friezes of cupids and eagles and lions, randomly intermingled with twenty-foot-high mirrors in gold frames. Walking down a corridor, ogling the
David
knockoffs, past the inlaid tiles and the ornate tapestries, I realize, finally, what Eugene meant when he said that the Renaissance was too pretty for him. He meant pretty in the sense of overwrought, too much.

I also understand what he meant by his even more blasphemous pronouncement that “there was a lot of crap produced during the Renaissance.” At the time I protested, but Eugene didn’t back down. The era we consider the apex of human creativity also produced a mother lode of bad art and bad ideas.

That’s true of many people now celebrated as geniuses. Edison held 1,093 patents, most for completely worthless inventions. Of Picasso’s twenty thousand works, most were far from masterpieces. As for literature, W. H. Auden observed, “In the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor.”

There’s a simple reason for this. The more shots you get at the target, the more likely you’ll eventually score a bull’s-eye, but the more misses you’ll accrue as well. The bull’s-eyes end up in museums and on library shelves, not the misses. Which, when you think about it, is a shame. It feeds the myth that geniuses get it right the first time, that they don’t make mistakes, when, in fact, they make more mistakes than the rest of us.

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