Interior of Brunelleschi’s dome: construction began August 7, 1420: completed April 1461. Brunelleschi’s Dome is based on an octagonal drum and is divided into eight segments or sails. It was built with a revolutionary technique, called to support the enormous weight of 25,000 tons.
In June of 2025, barring geopolitical catastrophe of some kind, I’ll be in Tuscany, Italy researching (in Florence) and teaching (in the Tuscan hills) a retreat on the social cartography of genius. As you are well aware if you are reading this substack, I’ve spent the past 30 years examining the neurophysiological foundations of flourishing and their explicit relationship to safety and connection.
We are laying the groundwork this summer for an extension of this project into the domain of communities (think The Neurobiology of Connection in groups). I’m interested in understanding how we can facilitate contexts that catalyze the emergence of collective genius.
I have some suspicions about the recipe whereby this might happen, and am going to be researching a number of case studies around it. I am interested in doing this in our own work at Hearth Science, the communities that we serve, and discerning what patterns we might elucidate from places and moments in history where this has happened.
How are we defining the emergence of collective genius? We are looking for a specific place, in a specific moment, that produces a stunning efflorescence of creative work from a large number of people who are all in some way connected (possibly loosely).
A number of case studies so far:
The Florentine Renaissance: in 80 years, in one Italian city, architecture, painting sculpture, the liberal arts, and medicine are reinvented. In each disciplinary area mentioned there is at least one work that shatters the existing paradigm of the discipline. In architecture, Brunelleschi’s dome (see above). In painting, the birth of linear perspective with its sudden profusion of mathematically altered forms, in sculpture Michaelangelo’s Pietà, and so on.
"It is significant for the visual characteristics of central [linear] perspective that it was discovered at only one time and place in man's entire history. The more elementary procedures for representing pictorial space, the two-dimensional 'Egyptian' method as well as isometric perspective [i.e., oblique projection] (fig. 6), were and are discovered independently all over the world at early levels of visual conception. Central perspective, however, is so violent and intricate a deformation of the normal shape of things that it came about only as the final result of prolonged exploration and in response to very particular cultural needs.
-Rudolf Arnheim (Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2004, 283)
Black Mountain College exists for 24 years, from 1933 to 1957. A tiny liberal arts college near Asheville led by a group of academic dissidents produces an astounding array of the enduring artistic talent of 20th century America. Alumni include the artists Robert Rauschenberg, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell. The poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Hilda Morley, John Wieners, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, and Joel Oppenheimer. As well as Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Walter Gropius, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Clement Greenberg, Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, Stefan Wolpe, Marguerite Wildenhain, and Shoji Hamada
Chelsea Hotel in New York City, in 1970s and 1980s, houses the musicians Bob Dylan, Madonna, Jimi Hendrix, Cher, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, Nico and John Cale of the Velvet Underground, the artists Andy Warhol and Walt Cassidy, the writers Jack Kerouac (who writes On the Road at the Chelsea), filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke: who dream up 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea, and Miloš Forman, who penned the screenplay for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Chelsea
Stanford University in the late 1990s: Founders of Yahoo (Jerry Yang and David Filo), Google (Sergei Brin and Larry Page), Paypal (the Paypal Mafia, including Elon Musk, Peter Theil, and Max Levchin), Jawbone (Hosain Rahman, Alex Asseily), etc.
Michaelangelo’s Pietà, created when the artist was 23, and the only piece that he signed, dramatically broke with representational convention in multiple ways, and in retrospect was seen as the moment the High Renaissance began.
Is there some discernible recipe for creating a context likely to lead to such creative efflorescence?
If you are interested in the particular case of Florence, I highly recommend The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance, by Ross King.
You can learn more about the broader project of The Social Cartography of Genius, the book that is taking shape around it, and our upcoming June 2025 retreat below.