Leonardo da Vinci

Il sole nó si muóve. The sun does not move. These words of Leonardo are written in unusually large letters on the top left of one of his notebook pages that is filled with geometric sketches, mathematical transformations, a cross section of the brain, a drawing of the male urinary tract, and doodles of his old warrior.42 Is this statement a brillia

Leonardo’s breakthroughs on heart valves were followed, however, by a failure: not discovering that the blood in the body circulates. His understanding of one-way valves should have made him realize the flaw in the Galenic theory, universally accepted during his time, that the blood is pulsed back and forth by the heart, moving to-and-fro. But Leon

“Study the anatomy of the wings of a bird together with the breast muscles that move those wings,” Leonardo wrote in his notebook. “Do the same for man to show the possibility that man could sustain himself in the air by the flapping of wings.”

Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.

Leonardo’s relationships with his half-brothers had improved since the resolution of the family’s inheritance disputes, and when he got to Rome he sought out his father’s oldest legitimate son, Giuliano da Vinci, who, not surprisingly, was a notary. Giuliano had been promised a benefice—a Church appointment that came with a stipend—but there had be

“Though human ingenuity may make various inventions,” he wrote, “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.”

When Leonardo arrived, Milan was ruled by Ludovico Sforza, who was also thirty. A dark-skinned and burly man nicknamed “Il Moro” (the Moor), he was not actually the Duke of Milan yet, though he exercised the authority and would soon grab the title. His father, Francesco Sforza, one of seven illegitimate sons of a military mercenary, had seized powe

Procrastinate. 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 mind

He is insatiable. Over and over again, year after year, Leonardo lists things he must do and learn. Some involve the type of close observation most of us rarely pause to do.

Why the obsessiveness? Why the need for reams of data? Partly, at least initially, it was to help him paint humans, or horses, in various poses and movements. But there was something grander involved. Leonardo had set for himself the most magnificent of all tasks for the mind of mankind: nothing less than knowing fully the measure of man and how he