Leonardo da Vinci
1452 – 1519 · The genius who saw the cosmos in every thing
Leonardo da Vinci self-portrait · Royal Library of Turin · Public domain
Some people paint. Some people invent. Some people philosophise, dissect, calculate. Leonardo da Vinci did all of these simultaneously — and better than almost anyone in any single domain taken alone. He is probably the most curious human being who ever lived. And his curiosity was not scattered: it was always searching for the same thing.
What he was looking for was the unifying principle. The law that makes water spiral like smoke, muscles work like levers, light diffract like sound. He saw the cosmos in every detail, and in the cosmos he saw art.
Who was Leonardo da Vinci?
Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, a village in Tuscany. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, Ser Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman named Caterina. This birth outside marriage denied him inheritance rights — but paradoxically gave him an unusual intellectual freedom: barred from his father's profession, he was free to be something else entirely.
At fourteen he entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence — then the finest studio in Europe, where painting, sculpture, goldsmithing, mechanics and music coexisted naturally. The young Leonardo excelled so rapidly that Verrocchio is said to have given up painting upon seeing his pupil's work.
He served successively in Florence; in Milan (for Ludovico Sforza, whom he served as engineer, musician, organiser of spectacles and painter); in Venice; in Florence again; in Rome; and finally in France, where Francis I offered him a château at Amboise. He died there in 1519, aged 67, in the arms — according to legend — of the King of France.
Sacred geometry in his work
This is not a metaphor: Leonardo knew and used the principles of sacred geometry as compositional tools. His decisive encounter in this domain was with Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk and mathematician, whose work De Divina Proportione (1509) Leonardo illustrated — the book that popularised the golden ratio in Renaissance art.
The golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618) structures several of his compositions: the proportions in the Virgin of the Rocks, the arrangement of figures in The Last Supper, the construction of the face in the Mona Lisa. This was not a mechanical obsession — it was the conviction that certain proportions are inherently beautiful because they reflect the natural order of the cosmos.
The most famous example remains the Vitruvian Man, which we examine in detail below — but one must also mention his studies of the Fibonacci spiral in shells and whirlpools, his work on circles and squares in geometry, and his dozens of pages on regular forms in his notebooks.
The mysteries of the painting
Leonardo is perhaps the most analysed artist in history — and yet his paintings continue to resist full analysis. The Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1519) is the most famous example: the smile that no one can quite describe, the gaze that follows the viewer, the dreamlike landscape that shifts depending on the angle of observation.
The technique behind this magic is called sfumato — from the Italian fumo, smoke. Leonardo applied dozens of layers of glaze so thin that no sharp contour is perceptible: forms emerge and dissolve as in a dream. X-rays have revealed up to thirty layers in certain areas of the Mona Lisa, each only a few microns thick.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting
In The Last Supper (1495–1498), the composition is a demonstration of sacred geometry in action: Christ sits at the centre of a window that forms a triangle of light around him, the twelve apostles are arranged in four groups of three (echoing the Pythagorean Tetractys), and the perspective vanishing point converges exactly on Christ's right temple.
Visionary inventions
In his notebooks — more than 7,000 surviving pages — Leonardo sketches machines that the world would not build for four or five centuries. These are not fantasies: they are rigorously engineered designs, complete with calculations of forces and materials.
Among them: an aerial screw helicopter (1489), designed to rise by spinning a helical surface — the exact principle of a modern helicopter. A pyramid-shaped parachute in linen, tested conceptually in 2000 by a British stuntman who actually jumped from a hot-air balloon and survived. A circular armoured tank driven by internal cranks. And what can only be called a robot: an articulated knight actuated by cables and gear wheels, whose plans have allowed modern engineers to build a functional replica.
His anatomical work may be even more impressive: he dissected corpses secretly (an illegal activity at the time), producing illustrations so accurate that they are still used in some medical textbooks. He was the first to correctly represent the tilt of the uterus, the structure of the cardiac valves, and the exact shape of the cervical vertebrae.
His philosophy: observing as spiritual practice
"Saper vedere" — knowing how to see
Leonardo repeats this phrase throughout his notebooks: saper vedere, knowing how to see. For him, most people look without seeing — they perceive surfaces but not structures, appearances but not laws. Rigorous observation was not, for him, a preliminary to knowledge: it was knowledge itself, in its purest form.
His notebooks are a spiritual practice as much as a working tool. He notes observations on the physics of water, machine sketches, lists of things to observe, philosophical remarks — often on the same page, without hierarchy. Everything is connected. The way a bird adjusts the curve of its wing to the wind speed obeys the same principle as the way drapery follows the body. The same law expresses itself at every scale.
— Leonardo da Vinci
This conviction — that the universe is governed by unified laws, that the particular reveals the universal — is at the heart of his entire work. He was not religious in the conventional sense, but he had a form of devotion toward nature itself, which he considered the only book that never lies.
The Vitruvian Man: body, cosmos and divine proportion
Around 1490, Leonardo draws in pen and ink on a large sheet an image that would become perhaps the most recognised in all of Western art history: a man with arms and legs extended in two superimposed positions, inscribed simultaneously within a circle and a square.
Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) · Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice · Public domain
The title comes from Vitruvius, a first-century BC Roman architect who had described in his treatise De Architectura the ideal proportions of the human body. Leonardo starts from these propositions and verifies them experimentally, taking measurements from many models — and finds that when the proportions are ideal, the navel coincides with the centre of the circle, and the centre of the square coincides with the genitals.
This is not a trivial observation. For Leonardo, it means that the human body is the link between two fundamental geometric forms: the circle (symbol of the cosmos, eternity, spirit) and the square (symbol of the earth, matter, contingency). Man is literally the junction point between heaven and earth — an idea that would have pleased Hermes Trismegistus as much as Vitruvius.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks
His legacy
Leonardo da Vinci founded no school and left no published treatise during his lifetime. His notebooks, distributed among his pupils and scattered across Europe, only became accessible to the world gradually over centuries — the Codex Leicester was not fully studied until the 20th century, and Bill Gates purchased it in 1994 for $30 million.
And yet his influence is everywhere. In art: Raphael, Michelangelo, and all the artists of the High Renaissance grew up in his shadow. In science: his studies of hydraulics, anatomy and fluid mechanics anticipate discoveries formalised centuries later. In popular culture: the Mona Lisa is the most visited artwork in the world, and the Vitruvian Man is the most reproduced image in human history.
But perhaps his deepest legacy is philosophical: the idea that art and science are not opposites but complements, that beauty is a truth, and that patient observation of the world is the highest form of devotion.
Frequently asked questions
What geometry shapes your life?
Da Vinci saw sacred patterns everywhere. Your own life follows a mathematical blueprint — your Destiny Matrix.
✦ Calculate my Destiny Matrix →Was Leonardo da Vinci left-handed?
Yes — Leonardo was left-handed, and he wrote in mirror script (right to left, readable in a mirror). It was long thought he did this to conceal his ideas; in reality, it was probably simply more comfortable for a left-hander to write in that direction without smudging fresh ink. His anatomical and mechanical drawings, however, are traced in both directions depending on the needs of the composition.
Why is the Mona Lisa so famous?
The Mona Lisa was already admired in his lifetime, but its worldwide celebrity dates mainly from its theft from the Louvre in 1911 — two years of searching, an international investigation, and a triumphant return that made it the most publicised artwork in the world. The technique is revolutionary (sfumato, the gaze that follows the viewer, the symbolic landscape), but it is as much the story surrounding it as the painting itself that explains its reputation.
Did Leonardo have prophetic visions?
Not in the literal sense. But his notebooks contain many descriptions of natural catastrophes (storms, floods, earthquakes) of visionary precision — passages often quoted out of context as "prophecies." In reality, these are exercises in imagination and visualisation: Leonardo trained himself to imagine extreme events in order to better understand the forces at work. The confusion comes from a literal reading of texts that are exercises in thought.
What is the golden ratio and what role does it play in his work?
The golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618…) is the proportion between two lengths such that the ratio of the larger to the smaller equals the ratio of the sum to the larger. It appears in shells, flowers, galaxies — and in the proportions considered most beautiful by the human eye. Leonardo used it consciously in his compositions, especially after his collaboration with Pacioli. How many of his works contain it intentionally remains debated among art historians.
Why did Leonardo leave so many works unfinished?
This is one of the most fascinating mysteries of his biography. He left unfinished the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome, several portraits. The reasons are multiple: his curiosity always pushed him to begin new projects; his patrons died or went bankrupt; he refined indefinitely rather than "finishing"; and he may have considered the completed work dead — what matters is the process of discovery.