Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1517)
If Leonardo da Vinci were alive today he most likely would have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Although he possessed a rare kind of genius that comes around once in a blue moon, da Vinci was a procrastinator who had difficulty completing the projects that he started. His brilliant mind seemed to race from one topic to the next. In fact, Leonardo made it his life’s mission to know everything about everything. Talk about setting the bar low, da Vinci.
Leonardo was more than a man with a really cool beard; da Vinci was part architect, part engineer, part scientist, part master artist, part prankster, and 100% Renaissance Man. Nobody, and we mean nobody, embodied the Renaissance spirit that was sweeping across Europe in the fifteenth century better than this guy. The pages of da Vinci’s notebooks are filled with thousands of drawings and descriptions on everything from futuristic war machines, to sketches of cathedrals and domes, drawings of the human anatomy, to pages upon pages of noses. Leonardo was a watcher. He loved to sit and observe people going about their daily lives. That’s because da Vinci believed that observation was the first and most important step on the road to discovery.
Whenever he set out to paint a portrait he didn’t just pick up a brush like a normal artist. No, da Vinci believed— like the good humanist that he was— that before he could accurately portray his subject on canvas he first had to study them using good ol’ fashioned empirical observation. Today, we call this the scientific method.
When Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519 his 13,000 pages of drawings, sketches, and writings were passed down to his apprentice, Francesco Melzi. Melzi knew that the notebooks of the great Leonardo da Vinci were extraordinary. That’s why he turned down every offer to buy the collection. However, his sons didn’t see the point in keeping a bunch of dusty old notebooks in the attic and the collection was divided up and sold off. Most of the pages ended up scattered across Europe ending up in the libraries of wealthy nobles.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant girl, da Vinci was raised by his father after his mother left town.
At fifteen he was apprenticed to work for one of the leading artists, Andrea del Verrocchio, in Florence (the very heart of the Italian Renaissance). Da Vinci showed his genius early, and soon surpassed Master Verrocchio. (It's said that Verrocchio quit painting after that).
Well, young da Vinci was just getting started. His talent as an artist attracted the attention of the Church who commissioned him to paint many religious works about scenes from the Bible. When he was 30 he was given patronage (a really rich person supported him) by the Duke of Milan.
Like all Renaissance artists da Vinci painted things as they really are. People and places looked like they were alive, with shadows, and contrast. Da Vinci even dissected corpses to more accurately paint the muscles on the human body. Officially Da Vinci was breaking the law because the church saw this as desecration of the dead, not science. Doctors and scientists had to use ancient texts or guesswork which made knowledge of the human anatomy sketchy at best. By bucking tradition Da Vinci opened the door to a whole wealth of knowledge that led to new medical discoveries and understanding of how the human body worked.
When he wasn’t cutting cup cadavers or painting, the Duke kept da Vinci busy designing bridges, buildings, and weapons. Da Vinci made sketches in his notebook of flying machines, tanks, submarines, an armored "car". These inventions might have been seen as a work of science fiction but inspired generations of inventors who would later make Da Vinci’s dreams into reality. One of Da Vinci’s notebooks was bought by Bill Gates for a cool sum of $30 million.
Da Vinci's amazing other talents included being able to write with both hands, at the same time, in mirror image. Da Vinci was lefty, which was considered the devil's hand during that time. Da Vinci was a true Renaissance man, using observation to guide his drawings and sculptures. However, people today might call him a bit ADHD. He only finished six of his dozens of projects that he started over his lifetime.
Da Vinci made thousands of drawings, sketches, and notes about everything from the human body to futuristic inventions.
Click on the image above to take a virtual tour of DaVinci's notebooks and drawings.
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