Leonardo da Vinci was a great thinker, he was not just a Painter but a Scientist. Leonardo’s accomplishments are so extraordinary that it’s easy to put an unbridgeable gap between him and us.
You may think you’ve heard all there is to know about the famed Renaissance man who painted the “Mona Lisa” and awed the world with sketches of flying machines. But chances are, there are a few little-known facts about Leonardo da Vinci’s life that may surprise you.
When da Vinci died in 1519, he left behind more than 6,000 journal pages filled with his personal musings, grocery lists, and bawdy jokes. He also detailed his sources of inspiration, his desire for lasting fame, and his deeply felt heartaches.
Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
Don’t let things outside of your control impact your potential
His father was a notary and landlord named Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci. His mother, Caterina, is commonly believed to have been a local peasant. However, some experts believe that Caterina was actually a slave owned by Messer Piero.
Da Vinci’s parents never married each other. The young da Vinci lived with his mother until he was 5 years old and later moved into the home of his father, who had married another woman. His father never legally accepted him as his son, so he wasn’t allowed to be trained in his father’s profession as a notary.
Despite, lack of formal education and having no schooling, it never bothered him to satisfy his generous curiosity. Leonardo didn’t rely on the status of his family or a top-notch education to define his potential. Instead, he fostered an insatiable curiosity to catapult himself to the man he would become.
Be constantly curious and dig deep into that curiosity.
“How to describe the tongue of the woodpecker”? We might not be very interested in this question, but Leonardo was. He liked to delve deeply into problems and find connections between seemingly unrelated things.
Leonardo was a genius. No, not a genius painter, or scientist, or engineer. Sure, he was world-class at all things. But when you look at why Leonardo was world-class at those things, it’s because of one thing: his curiosity. He had a genius curiosity and made it his life’s work to dig deep into those curiosities.
Leonardo’s to-do list gives us a glimpse into his daily pondering and the level of curiosity we’re dealing with. Things like “calculate the measurement of Milan and Suburbs”, “get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock”, and “ask about the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese.”
You don’t have to be an expert in just one thing. Learn new skills.
Leonardo was a weapons designer and a map builder. He was a painter, draftsman, hydraulic engineer, and inventor. He was also an early impresario, arranging coronations and royal weddings.
While most of us recognize Leonardo da Vinci as, “A painter or artist, right?”
Perhaps, he never called himself a painter.
Throughout his life, da Vinci explored a wide range of studies, including “anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, optics, botany, geology, water flows, and weaponry.” Isaacson classifies him as the “archetype of the Renaissance Man” and I couldn’t agree more.
How can we put this into practice? If you’re in college, try to study across multiple disciplines. Pair that biology major with a business major. Studying engineering? Why not expand your learnings to the arts. Out of college? Don’t limit your learnings to that in your immediate field. Always be on the lookout for new skills to learn.
Learn from everyone.
The people around Leonardo served as both a stoker to the fire of Leonardo’s curiosities and a way to satiate those burning questions. Leonardo maximized his ability to learn by associating with fellow deep-thinkers and finding a way to learn from every encounter.
“Unlike Michelangelo and some other anguished artists, Leonardo enjoyed being surrounded by friends, companions, students, assistants, fellow courtiers, and thinkers. In his notebooks, we find scores of people with whom he wanted to discuss ideas. His closest friendships were intellectual ones,” describes Isaacson.
But da Vinci wasn’t satisfied with learning from only his close friends. “He would grill people from all walks of life, from cobblers to university scholars, to learn their secrets,” says Isaacson.
Always be on the lookout for people you can learn from.
Don’t be afraid to be your true self
Leonardo wasn’t “normal” by societal standards and it never bothered him.
Leonardo was ”…illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical,” explains Isaacson. You might think someone like this would keep a low profile in the 15th century. Not Leonardo… He “liked to wear rose-colored tunics that reached only to his knees even though others wore long garments.”
While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally, make one small stroke, and then leave. He told Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel.
“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he explained “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
Keep a note of everything
Da Vinci wrote it all down. His thoughts, sketches, and observations were recorded in his now-famous notebooks of which 7,200 pages still survive today. It’s easy to think that since much of what we do today is recorded digitally it will exist indefinitely into the future. Writing Steve Jobs’s biography, Walter Isaacson has a unique perspective on this false assumption:
“The more than 7,200 pages now extant probably represent about one-quarter of what Leonardo actually wrote, but that is a higher percentage after five hundred years than the percentage of Steve Jobs’s emails and digital documents from the 1990’s that he and I were able to retrieve.”
Learn from Nature
“Though human ingenuity may make various inventions, it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
Da Vinci spent most of his life dreaming up incredible feats of human ingenuity: flying machines, armored vehicles, and the ideal city design to name a few. Yet he found true inspiration from nature’s simplicity. In fact, many passages in his notebooks draw parallels between man and nature. “Man is the image of the world”, he wrote.
But simply saying that da Vinci found inspiration is a poor description of how he viewed man and its place amongst nature. Leonardo did not simply classify nature and man as separate entities loosely impacting each other — they were deeply intertwined. Nature was the foundation of man.
Nothing is ever finished. Continually improve upon the old.
Leonardo was notorious for never quite finishing the ideas and artwork that began in his notebook. To call him a perfectionist would oversimplify his approach. The early Leonardo biographer Lomazzo explained, “[Leonardo] never finished any of the works he began because so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.”
This was extremely frustrating to both the Renaissance patrons who paid for finished pieces of da Vinci art and the modern-day historians who dream to see his notebook pages come to life. It would be easy to see this as a negative in today’s world of “ship it and “don’t let perfect get in the way of good.” Most of the time I agree with these modern principles.
As da Vinci’s curiosities were satiated, he learned new techniques that could be applied to old ideas. It was common for his notebook pages to have scribbled in the margins years later with updated thoughts and modifications.
Don’t worry about what you’ve accomplished so far.
It’s easy to look back 500+ years at da Vinci’s body of work and assume he always had life by the horns. But combing through the details of his life paints a different picture. Isaacson explains:
“As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly.”
Da Vinci struggled through most of his life to find patrons to fund his life
Solitude is essential for creativity
Although charming and attractive, commanding everyone’s affection, Leonardo valued his time alone saying:
Alone you are all yourself, with a companion you are half yourself.
But it was during his many hours spent in solitude, generating ideas and drawing in his sketchbook, that da Vinci was most creative.
Perfectionism sabotages even the greatest artists
Leonardo was a restless artist who struggled to finish paintings. His perfectionism meant that he would lose his passion for the work at hand and turn his genius towards something completely different. His mind needed constant stimulation away from his art. Da Vinci focussed upon a variety of diverse major projects during his lifetime ranging from human anatomy, geology, town planning, even man-powered flight.
This recurring trait caused great frustration for kings and paymasters at the time. In the centuries after his death, few have ventured to doubt his abilities — but quite a few have criticized the fragmentary nature of much of his work.
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