Meet Leonardo da Vinci: The Notebooks of a Man Who Could Not Stop Looking

Apprentice, not scholar

Born in 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, illegitimate and largely denied a formal classical education, he was apprenticed in Florence to Andrea del Verrocchio — a workshop where painting, sculpture, metalwork and engineering sat side by side. He described himself as a man without letters. He learned by taking things apart.

That absence of a scholar's training may be the most important fact about him. He had no received authority to defer to, so he went and looked.

Seven thousand surviving pages

The notebooks are the real body of work: roughly 7,000 pages survive, and they are thought to be a fraction of what he produced. Anatomical dissections. Water in motion. The flight of birds, studied because he wanted to build a machine that did it. Optics, geology, the way a face changes when it laughs. Most of it written right-to-left in mirror script, and almost none of it published in his lifetime — so its influence on science was close to nil, which is its own kind of tragedy.

What he actually finished

Very little. Perhaps twenty paintings, some unfinished, and at least one great failure: the Last Supper in Milan (1495–98) was painted in an experimental technique on a dry wall instead of true fresco, and began deteriorating within his own lifetime. A colossal bronze horse he worked on for years was never cast; the metal went to make cannon.

He spent his last years in France, at Amboise, under the patronage of Francis I, and died there in 1519. The Mona Lisa was with him.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when your curiosity is being called a distraction. He is the patron saint of the unfinished and the endlessly interested — and he will want to know what you have actually observed, not what you have been told.