Vinci×Feynman

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman, on On a sibling, friend, or rival they outlived.
2. 00:09
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   You know, I think often of Francesco Melzi. My student, my companion in the last years. He was with me at Amboise when the hand could no longer hold the brush steady.
3. 00:21
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   A student? That's nice, but that's not what eats at you, is it? I mean, really eats at you?
4. 00:26
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   You speak as if you know something.
5. 00:28
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   I know what it's like to have somebody right there, neck and neck with you, somebody who gets the jokes nobody else gets. For me it was my first wife, Arline. Died in '45. Tuberculosis.
6. 00:40
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Ah. I am sorry for this.
7. 00:42
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Yeah, well. But I'm guessing you're thinking about somebody else. Somebody who wasn't exactly holding your hand at the end.
8. 00:48
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Michelangelo Buonarroti. He lived to be eighty-eight. I was sixty-seven when I died. He outlived me by more than twenty years.
9. 00:59
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Wait, wait, wait. You said 'outlived'—I thought we were supposed to talk about people we outlived!
10. 01:05
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Your producer, she said 'outlived.' She did not specify the direction.
11. 01:10
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Ha! Okay, you got me on a technicality. So Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel guy. You two didn't get along?
12. 01:17
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    We did not. In Florence, in 1504, we were commissioned to paint battle scenes on opposite walls of the Palazzo Vecchio. Mine was the Battle of Anghiari, his was Cascina. It was meant to be—how do you say—a contest of the two greatest painters alive.
13. 01:39
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And? Who won?
14. 01:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Neither of us finished. I experimented with encaustic technique, wax-based, and the paint... it ran. It melted. His was never more than a cartoon, a preparation. But people remembered his more fondly, I think.
15. 01:59
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That must've killed you.
16. 02:01
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    What killed me was that he thought painting was about suffering. About forcing stone to confess the figure trapped inside. I believed it was about seeing. About the eye, the light, the way a shadow falls on a cheek. He carved; I observed.
17. 02:21
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Different languages.
18. 02:23
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. But the world preferred his language. And when I died in France, far from Florence, he was still there. Still working. Still... winning, perhaps.
19. 02:36
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    See, that's the thing that gets you. Not that they died. That they kept going. Arline, she was smarter than me in some ways. Definitely funnier. She'd write me these letters while I was at Los Alamos, and I'd write back, and we'd talk about everything—physics, life, what it all means.
20. 02:53
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You were married to her when she died?
21. 02:56
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah. Got married even though we both knew she was dying. Everybody thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. But the thing is, after she was gone, I kept finding her in my work. Little things she'd said. Ways of looking at a problem.
22. 03:10
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is not the same as rivalry.
23. 03:12
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    No, you're right. It's not. But you wanna know something? I think rivalry is just love wearing a mask. You hated Michelangelo because you saw yourself in him. Another guy who couldn't stop working, who couldn't stop asking questions.
24. 03:26
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I did not hate him. I... resented that he believed art was about force. About making the world submit. I believed art was about patience. About waiting for the bird to land so you could study how the wing folds.
25. 03:45
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah, but did the bird ever land? I mean, really? You left a lot of stuff unfinished, didn't you?
26. 03:50
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I did. Because I would see something new, something more interesting. The way water moves. The formation of the child in the womb. These things demanded attention.
27. 04:03
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Sure, sure. But Michelangelo, he finished the Sistine Chapel. He finished the Pietà. He finished David. And you—you're famous for the Mona Lisa and a bunch of notebooks full of sketches.
28. 04:14
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    The notebooks contain more truth than any ceiling.
29. 04:18
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Maybe! Probably! But here's the thing that bugs me: did you want him to see them? Did you want him to know what you were working on?
30. 04:26
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I... I do not know. Perhaps. We were not friends. In Rome, once, I encountered him in the street. He was with a group, and he mocked me. He said I had cast a bronze horse for Milan and never finished it. He said I abandoned everything.
31. 04:47
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Ouch.
32. 04:48
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. Ouch. And I wanted to tell him about the hydraulics I was studying, the way the heart pumps blood, the designs for flying machines. But I said nothing. I walked away.
33. 05:02
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like you wanted his respect. You wanted him to look at your stuff and go, 'Holy cow, this guy's onto something.'
34. 05:11
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps. Is this so shameful?
35. 05:14
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Not at all! It's human. With Arline, I wanted her to see me succeed. I wanted her to be there when I won the Nobel Prize. She never got to see that. She never got to see any of it, really. Just the beginning.
36. 05:25
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And this troubles you still.
37. 05:27
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Every day. Every single day. I'll be explaining something, quantum electrodynamics or whatever, and I'll think, 'Man, Arline would've loved this.' Or I'll crack a joke and realize she's the only one who would've really gotten it.
38. 05:40
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    For me, it is the opposite problem. Michelangelo lived, and lived, and I know what he must have thought when he heard I had died. He must have thought, 'Good. One fewer rival. One fewer voice saying there is another way to see.'
39. 05:59
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You don't know that.
40. 06:01
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    No. I do not know. But I suspect. When I was young, in Verrocchio's workshop, I painted an angel in his Baptism of Christ. Just one angel. And they say Verrocchio never painted again after seeing it. He knew I had surpassed him.
41. 06:20
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Wait, so you did to your teacher what you think Michelangelo wanted to do to you?
42. 06:24
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I... yes. I suppose this is true.
43. 06:28
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's the thing about being good at something. You're always stepping on somebody's neck, even when you don't mean to. With Arline, it was different. We weren't competing. We were just... together. And then we weren't.
44. 06:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I envy this. To have someone who sees your work and does not measure it against their own. Francesco was like this, perhaps. He inherited my notebooks, all of them. He guarded them after I died.
45. 06:56
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Did he understand them?
46. 06:57
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I do not think so. Not fully. But he preserved them. This is its own form of understanding.
47. 07:04
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah. Yeah, that's good. After Arline died, I kept all her letters. Didn't open them for years. Couldn't. But I kept them. Just knowing they were there, that was enough.
48. 07:14
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And Michelangelo, I think, kept nothing of mine. Why would he? We were not friends. We were mirrors, each showing the other what he was not.
49. 07:26
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    But that's valuable! That's really valuable! You need somebody to push against. Otherwise, you're just shadow-boxing.
50. 07:33
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. But when the mirror breaks, when one of you is gone, what remains? Only your own reflection. And it is... lonely.
51. 07:44
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah. It is. I get that. I really do.
52. 07:46
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I wonder sometimes what he thought in those twenty years after my death. If he ever looked at one of my designs, perhaps copied by another hand, and thought, 'Ah, Leonardo was right about this.' But I will never know.
53. 08:03
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And that's the real killer, isn't it? Not knowing. With Arline, I know she loved me. I know she thought I was brilliant, even when I was being an idiot. But you? You died not knowing if your rival ever respected you.
54. 08:17
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. That is the wound that does not close.
55. 08:21
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Well, for what it's worth? Five hundred years later, people still argue about which one of you was better. So I'd say you're still neck and neck.
56. 08:29
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is small comfort. But it is comfort nonetheless. Thank you, Richard.
57. 08:35
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Don't mention it. And hey—if there's an afterlife and you run into Michelangelo, maybe just show him the notebooks. See what happens.
58. 08:42
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps I will. Or perhaps I will simply ask him: Did you ever wish we had been friends instead of rivals? I think I would like to know the answer to that question.