QI The Book of the Dead

the sheer improbability of being alive. As the emphatically not-dead American writer Maya Angelou reminds us: ‘Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: “I am with you kid. Let’s go.”’
     
     
    JOHN MITCHINSON

The QI Book of the Dead
     
     

CHAPTER ONE
     

There’s Nothing like a Bad Start in Life
     
     
    Whoever has not got a good father should procure one .
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
     
    O ur early experiences shape our character and the way our lives unfold, and a poor start can, of course, blight a person’s prospects forever. But there is a more mysterious path that leads from truly dreadful beginnings to quite extraordinary achievement. As the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies put it: ‘A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.’
    Some of the most famous people in history had childhoods that were wrecked by a dead, absent or impossible father. We have chosen eight, but the list could have been twenty times as long: once you start to notice, they sprout up everywhere: Confucius, Augustus Caesar, Michelangelo, Peter the Great, John Donne, Handel, Balzac, Nietzsche, Darwin, Jung, Conan Doyle, Aleister Crowley – all of them victims of what psychologists would call ‘inappropriate parenting’.
    In the 500 years since his death, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) has become our model for the solitary genius, the ultimate Renaissance man. The common wisdom is that, like Shakespeare, we know his work in great detail but next to nothingabout his life. This is a myth. In fact, and again like Shakespeare, we know much more about Leonardo than we do about the vast majority of his contemporaries. We know he was illegitimate, the son of a notary in the small Italian hill town of Vinci, and that his mother, Caterina, was either a local peasant or an Arabic slave (recent analysis of the artist’s inky fingerprints tends to suggest the latter). His father, Piero, quickly married off Caterina to a bad-tempered local lime-burner * and the young Leonardo found himself abandoned. His father went on to marry four times and sire another fifteen children; his mother also had new children of her own and refused to treat Leonardo as her son. Worse still, as a bastard, he was prevented from going to university or entering any of the respectable professions such as medicine or law.
    Leonardo’s response was to withdraw into a private world of observation and invention. The key to understanding his genius isn’t in his paintings – extraordinary and groundbreaking though they are – but in his notebooks. In these 13,000 pages of notes, sketches, diagrams, philosophical observations and lists, we have one of the most complete records of the inner workings of a human mind ever committed to paper. Leonardo’s curiosity was relentless. He literally took apart the world around him to see how it worked and left a paper trail of the process. This was first-hand research: he had to see things for himself, whatever that meant. He personally dissected more than thirty human corpses in his life-time,even though it was a serious criminal offence. This wasn’t motivated by any medical agenda: he just wanted to improve the accuracy of his drawing and deepen his understanding of how the body worked (he ridiculed other artists’ depictions of human flesh, saying they looked like ‘sacks of nuts’). Out of the notebooks flowed a succession of inventions, some fantastical but others entirely practical: the first ‘tank’, the first parachute, a giant siege crossbow, a crane for emptying ditches, the very first mixer-tap for a bath, folding furniture, an aqualung, an automatic drum, automatically opening and closing doors, a sequin-maker and smaller devices for making spaghetti, sharpening knives, slicing eggs and pressing garlic. It was here, too, that Leonardo recorded his remarkable insights into the natural world: he was the first to notice how counting tree rings gave the age of the tree and he could explain why the sky was blue 300 years before Lord Rayleigh discovered molecular scattering.
    Each page of the notebooks looks like an excerpt from a vast handwritten visual encyclopaedia. Paper was expensive so every inch was covered in Leonardo’s neat script, all of it written back to front, which means you need a mirror to make it intelligible. No one knows why he chose to write this way. Perhaps as a lefthander he found it easier writing right to left; perhaps he didn’t want people stealing his ideas.