Leonardo Da Vinci: The Man Beyond The Mona Lisa

When people hear Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa usually appears first. That is understandable — it is one of the most recognized paintings in the world, displayed behind bullet-proof glass in the Louvre to crowds that number in the tens of thousands daily. But the painting is a narrow window into a much larger life. Leonardo spent more hours filling notebooks with observations and designs than he did holding a paintbrush.

The notebooks

Leonardo left behind approximately 7,000 surviving pages of notes and drawings. These are organized into codices — bound collections that have been held in libraries and private collections across Europe for centuries. The Codex Atlanticus in Milan contains mechanical designs and scientific observations. The Codex Leicester, currently owned by Bill Gates, covers geology, water, and the moon. The Royal Collection in Windsor holds his anatomical drawings.

Reading descriptions of these notebooks, even without seeing the originals, is striking. Leonardo wrote in mirror script, from right to left, in Italian. The text and drawings on a single page might cover fluid dynamics, the mechanism of a bird’s wing, a proposed fortification design, and a note about a grocery errand. He did not organize his thinking into categories the way a modern researcher would.

The anatomical drawings deserve specific attention. Leonardo performed dissections — possibly as many as thirty — at a time when human dissection was legally restricted and practically difficult. The drawings he produced of muscles, bones, and organs were more accurate than anything in medical texts of the period. He understood the structure of the heart, drew cross-sections of the human skull, and illustrated the position of the fetus in the womb with a precision that would not be surpassed for over a century.

The inventions that were not built

Many of Leonardo’s mechanical designs were not feasible with the materials available in fifteenth-century Italy. His ornithopter — a human-powered flying machine with wings that flapped like a bird’s — could not have generated sufficient lift with any material a craftsman of his time could have manufactured. His armored vehicle, drawn around 1487, anticipated the concept of a tank but had a mechanical design flaw that would have caused the wheels to turn in opposing directions.

This has led some commentators to describe Leonardo as a visionary ahead of his time. I find that framing somewhat misleading. Leonardo was not primarily trying to invent the future. He was trying to understand how things worked — flight, force, water, the human body — and the drawings were his way of working through that understanding. Whether the designs could be built was often a secondary concern.

The Vitruvian Man, drawn around 1490, illustrates this well. It is simultaneously a study of human proportion, a response to the Roman architect Vitruvius’s text on the ideal human body, and a geometric problem about circles and squares. It is art, engineering, and mathematics occupying the same page.

Why he feels contemporary

In the years since Walter Isaacson published his 2017 biography of Leonardo — drawing from the notebooks more systematically than most previous accounts — there has been renewed interest in Leonardo as a model for interdisciplinary thinking. The argument is that he succeeded precisely because he did not separate observation from design, art from anatomy, engineering from painting.

I think this is correct, but worth making precise. Leonardo did not combine disciplines as a method he had chosen consciously. He combined them because he was genuinely curious about everything he observed, and observation for him led naturally to understanding, which led naturally to representation. His anatomical drawings improved because he wanted to understand the body. His paintings of water and fabric improved because he studied fluid dynamics. The connections were not strategic — they were the natural consequence of persistent attention.

The institutions of today are different from those of Renaissance Florence, and I would not want to overstate the lesson. But there is something genuine in the observation that a difficult problem often does not respect the boundaries we have drawn around academic disciplines. Leonardo’s notebooks are one of the best arguments ever made for looking carefully at something before deciding what category it belongs to.