Imaginary interview with Leonardo da Vinci
by Charactorium · Leonardo da Vinci (1452 — 1519) · Visual Arts · Sciences · 7 min read
We meet Leonardo da Vinci in the early winter of 1517, at the Clos Lucé — the stone manor house near Amboise that King François has placed at his disposal. He is sixty-five, his silver-white beard reaching his chest, his right hand weakened by what he describes as a certain tightening of the nerves. Around him, stacked against the walls of his study, are dozens of bundled manuscripts — the accumulated weight of fifty years of restless inquiry.
—The notebooks you keep at your belt — written right to left in a hand that requires a mirror to read — is that a deliberate cipher, or something more practical?
There was no cipher — or none I invented for that purpose. I am left-handed, and my hand moves most naturally away from the wet ink: writing from right to left, I never smear what I have just set down. The puzzle it poses to others was, I will admit, occasionally amusing. But these pages were always written first for myself — quick marks made before a thought could escape. I have carried small taccuini at my belt for as long as I can remember, replacing each one when it filled: the angle of a stranger's jaw in the Florence market, the trembling of a poplar leaf in Milan in July, a calculation for a canal lock. If I do not catch these things at the moment of seeing, they are gone. Whether a scribe could later decipher my pages was never my chief concern — I was writing to think, not to be remembered.
—Those notebooks move freely between painting, anatomy, water mechanics, military engineering — sometimes within a single page. How do you move between such different worlds without losing the thread?
Because they are not different worlds — that is the whole point. I have spent years watching water: the way a current folds around a stone, the spiral that forms when a stream meets an obstacle. That same spiral recurs in the cochlea of the ear, in the curl of hair, in the vortex of air that carries a hawk above Tuscany. When I wrote to Ludovic Sforza proposing bridges that could be assembled and dismantled at speed against an enemy, I was thinking with the same geometry I use to compose a figure in paint. I have noted in my own manuscripts: the painter must above all have a mind like that of a mirror which takes the colour of the object it has before it. But the mirror must first understand what stands before it. The eye that studies a dead man's shoulder and the eye that studies light on the Joconde are the same eye.
The eye that studies a dead man's shoulder and the eye that studies light on the Joconde are the same eye.
—When you arrived at the court of Milan in 1482, you presented yourself to Ludovic Sforza primarily as an engineer of war — only mentioning painting near the end of your letter. Was that a calculated choice?
Entirely calculated — and entirely honest. Milan was under pressure: from Venice to the east, from France beyond the Alps. A duke does not commission frescoes when his walls may be breached. So I wrote to Sforza that I could build bridges light enough to carry in pieces yet strong enough to bear an army, that I knew means to burn and demolish an enemy's crossings, that I had designs for armoured machines that could advance under fire. All of that was true — I had been drawing such machines in Florence, in the workshop of Verrocchio, long before any patron asked. The painting, the great works of those years in Milan, came after trust was earned. A court must first believe you are useful before it allows you to be beautiful.
—And yet it is the fresco on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie — La Cène — that Milan still holds as your great gift. How did the military engineer arrive at that particular scene?
I spent three years with that fresco — from 1495 to 1498 — and it taught me more than any single commission before or since. The challenge was never Christ at the center: he was always the calm point around which everything else moved. The challenge was the twelve men beside him at the moment they hear that one among them will betray. Each face had to carry a distinct shock, a distinct sorrow — and no two of the same kind. I walked through the markets and streets of Milan for months, watching faces in moments of real disturbance: an argument over a debt, a man receiving bad news at a doorway. I carried those expressions back in my taccuino the way a naturalist carries specimens. La Cène is not a pious image — or not only. It is a study of what the human face does when the world changes around it, in the span of a single sentence.
—You have, by some accounts, dissected more than thirty human bodies over the course of your career. What does a painter need from the dead that he cannot find in a living model?
Everything that matters most. A living model holds a pose and the surface tells you almost nothing useful — you see light, you see contour, but not the reasons for it. In a dissected arm, I can follow the exact path of a muscle from origin to insertion, understand which fiber contracts when the limb reaches forward, which bone carries the force. I pursued this work in earnest from 1489 onward — I know the date precisely because I wrote it myself, the night I began what I intended as a complete account of the human body, in Milan. A face in paint is convincing only when the painter understands the architecture beneath the skin. The sfumato I use to soften a cheek or blur the corner of a smile — that vaporous softness rests on exact knowledge of what lies underneath. Mystery in painting must be built on precision.
—The portrait of Lisa Giocondo that you have carried everywhere for fifteen years — no hard edges, the figure breathing into the landscape. What were you actually pursuing in that painting?
What the eye actually sees, rather than what the hand is tempted to draw. The botteghe trained us to outline figures clearly — a clean silhouette was a sign of confidence and craft. But look at a face across a room: the edge of a cheek does not announce itself. The air between you and a subject is not empty — it carries moisture, distance, the trembling of afternoon light — and it modifies every surface it touches. The sfumato is simply an attempt to paint that air honestly. As for why I have kept the portrait so long — I have never felt it finished. Each time I returned to it, in Florence, then in Milan, and here now at Amboise, I found something further to pursue: a nuance of shadow beneath the chin, a degree of blue in the mountains behind her. Some paintings reach completion. This one keeps asking questions.
—It is said you buy caged birds in the market simply to open the latch and release them. Why spend good coin to undo a merchant's work?
Because the sight of a living creature confined offends something in me that I cannot fully explain by reason — and I am a man who prefers to explain everything by reason. But watch a bird released: at the instant the latch opens, before the wings have spread, there is a stillness — a fraction of a second where the animal takes measure of the suddenly available space. I have drawn that instant many times in my taccuino, in the markets of Florence and Milan alike. The practical benefit is real: I have learned more about wing mechanics from watching birds climb and bank in free air than from studying dead specimens pinned to a board. The angle of the primary feathers on the upstroke, the slight drop of the body before the first true wingbeat carries it up — these details appear only in living flight. The merchant thinks I am eccentric. I think I am paying for a lesson.
The merchant thinks I am eccentric. I think I am paying for a lesson.
—You eat no flesh — no game, no fowl, no fish. At courts where the banquet measures the host's magnificence, this must mark you as singular. How do you explain the refusal?
I have never found a satisfying way to refuse to eat a creature I would not willingly kill myself. This seems a simple test of consistency: if the act offends you, the result should too. Beyond the personal conviction: I have opened the chest cavities of enough animals in the course of my anatomical work — cattle, horses, birds — to understand that what we call the lower creatures are not as distant from us as convenience suggests. A heart is a heart. It beats in a cow and in a Florentine merchant for the same mechanical reasons, driven by the same arrangement of chambers and valves. I have drawn both, and they are not so different. I see no clear logic in where we draw the line between what is edible and what is not. The line is drawn by habit and by hunger, not by any principle I can identify in nature.
—King François has given you this house at Amboise, the title of first painter and engineer to the crown, a pension — honours most artists never see. What do you make of such a summons, arriving at sixty-four?
I make of it a final kindness, and I accept it without false modesty. When the invitation arrived in Rome, where I had been living somewhat precariously in the orbit of the Medici, I was not in a position to refuse — and I would not have wished to. France had always regarded me with something closer to genuine curiosity than mere utility. The king visits me here at Clos Lucé, asks about the manuscripts, about the machines. He does not press me for paintings — or has not yet — and seems content simply to have me present, which is an unusual form of patronage and not an unwelcome one. I am not idle: the notebooks continue. But I am slower, and the right hand troubles me. Much of what I once would have drawn, I now describe in words — which may not be entirely a loss. There is a precision in language that the pencil line sometimes evades.
—If these crates of manuscripts were never opened after your death — if the mirror script defeated every reader — would fifty years of notes have amounted to nothing?
The question assumes that the value of an observation lies in being read by another. I am not certain this is true. I noted in the pages of what I think of as my water book that water is the driver of nature, that it obeys constant rules which man can observe and imitate for his benefit. I wrote that sentence to force myself to think it clearly — because a thought that remains loose in the mind is not yet a thought. Whether another man reads the page a century from now and carries the argument further, or whether the page rots in a chest here at Amboise, the thinking was done. The bird flew — in calculation, if not in timber. I have left instructions with Francesco Melzi to organize and preserve what he can. But if he fails, I hope at least the questions survive. Questions are more durable than answers.
A thought that remains loose in the mind is not yet a thought.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Leonardo da Vinci's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.