Imaginary interview with Leonardo da Vinci
by Charactorium · Leonardo da Vinci (1452 — 1519) · Visual Arts · Sciences · 6 min read
Two students, aged twelve, step quietly into the rooms of Clos Lucé on a spring morning. Their teacher has just told them that the man who painted La Joconde, drew flying machines, and cut open the human body to understand it all lived and died in this very house. They have brought their questions with them.
—How did you learn what's really inside the human body?
You know, the books of my time were full of mistakes. Ancient doctors had written things down, but for centuries nobody had actually looked inside a real body. So I did. I asked hospitals in Florence and Milan for permission, and I began cutting open cadavers — dead bodies — and drawing everything I found. That night of 2 April 1489, I noted in my small notebook: I had begun my book on the human body. I drew every muscle, every bone, every vessel. Imagine hundreds of pages of sketches, all made by the light of a single candle. Cold, quiet work. But nothing I had ever painted moved me as much as the extraordinary engine hidden under our skin.
Nothing I had ever painted moved me as much as the engine hidden under our skin.
—Were you scared to cut open a dead body? What did it smell like?
Ah — nobody ever asked me that so directly! Yes, the first time I hesitated at the door. There was the smell of candle wax, and something sharper, something metallic. You get used to it, the way a baker gets used to heat. And the fear disappeared quickly, because what I found inside was extraordinary. I could see exactly how a shoulder lifts, how the heart is shaped like a fist, how the eye is built like a tiny lantern. I drew it all with my plume d'oie — my quill pen — onto sheets I still carry. More than thirty bodies, between 1489 and 1513, in cities as far apart as Florence and Milan. Each one taught me more than a hundred written books ever could.
—Why did you write backwards in your notebooks? Was it a secret code?
Ha! People always assume the worst. The truth is much simpler: I am left-handed. If you write from left to right with your left hand, your palm drags right through the wet ink and smears everything. Writing from right to left — the way you read it only in a mirror — keeps the page perfectly clean. Practical! But I admit: once I realised nobody could read my notes without a mirror, I stopped worrying about people stealing my ideas. I kept dozens of little leather taccuini — notebooks — tucked at my belt at all times. People on the streets of Florence saw me scribbling and thought I was casting spells. I was just thinking out loud, in my own private direction.
—Did you ever actually build one of your flying machines? Did any of them work?
I never built a full flying machine, no. But I spent years watching birds — especially during my time in Milan, between roughly 1485 and 1490. Every evening I noted the angle of their wings, how they tilted against the wind, how a hawk folds itself to fall. I believed that a bird is an instrument governed by mathematical laws, and that a man could one day reproduce all its movements. I designed wings that could beat, mechanisms a man could drive with his feet. The wood and cloth of my time were too heavy, a single man's strength too weak. But the idea was sound. And ideas, you see, do not rot. Long after the wood crumbles, the idea waits patiently for someone with better materials.
—Was it nice working for powerful lords, or did they just boss you around?
Both, my friend! When I arrived at the court of Ludovico Sforza in Milan, I had to impress him fast. Do you know what I offered him first? Not paintings — bridges. I wrote him a letter promising I could build bridges that were light, strong and easy to carry, armoured vehicles, cannons, everything a duke at war could want. He hired me. For nearly twenty years I painted, invented, designed. A prince is generous when he wins. But when he loses, he simply vanishes. That is exactly what happened in 1499 when the French army arrived. Ludovico fled overnight, and I had no choice but to pack my notebooks and find a new road.
—Was King Francis the First really your friend, or just your boss?
Francis I was different from all the others. He was young, full of curiosity and energy. In 1516, he sent me an invitation — not a summons, a true invitation — to come to France. He gave me a beautiful house, Clos Lucé, right beside his royal château at Amboise, and named me first painter, engineer and architect of the king. He visited me often. We talked for hours. He was not frightened by my ideas. He even had an underground passage built between his castle and my house, so he could come and see me without going out into the cold. A king who digs a tunnel just to have a conversation — I call that a true friend.
—Why did you keep the Mona Lisa for so many years? Didn't someone pay for it?
Yes — a merchant of Florence named Francesco del Giocondo had ordered a portrait of his wife. I began it willingly. But you know how it is when you start drawing a face and suddenly you see a thousand small things you haven't yet captured? The smile was almost right. The light was nearly perfect. I kept adding one thin, transparent layer of paint — called a glacis — then waiting for it to dry, then looking again. I carried it all the way to France. I was still looking at it the year before I died. I think I was afraid that the moment I declared it finished, something alive inside it would simply go away.
I was afraid that the moment I declared it finished, something alive inside it would simply go away.
—What exactly is sfumato? Did you invent it yourself?
Hold your hand in front of your face and look at the edge of your fingers against the light. Is that edge a hard, sharp line — like ink drawn with a pen? No. It fades. It becomes hazy, like smoke. That is sfumato, from the Italian word for smoke or haze. I noticed that in the real world, nothing has hard outlines. So I stopped painting them. I built up dozens of thin, almost invisible layers of colour, one on top of another, each one dry before the next. On the Joconde, her smile lives somewhere between those layers. Look at it from one side — you see one expression. Look straight on — another. That is not a trick. That is patience, and very careful eyes.
—Is it really true you bought birds at the market just to let them go free?
It is completely true. I would stop at the cages — finches, sparrows, sometimes a small hawk — pay the merchant his price, then open the door. In one second: gone. Giorgio Vasari, who gathered painters' stories in his great book around 1550, remembered this habit of mine. But freeing them was also studying them. In that one burst of flight, I could see exactly how a wing opens, how a tail steers, how the body tips into the air. You learn more from one free bird than from ten dead ones pinned to a board. And besides — something in me could not bear to see a creature made for open sky locked inside a wicker cage. It felt like a crime against the natural order of things.
You learn more from one free bird than from ten dead ones pinned to a board.
—What did you eat in the morning? Was it strange that you didn't eat meat?
My mornings began early, before the full light came. Bread, fresh fruit, sometimes soft cheese from Lombardy. No meat — never, not once. People found it strange, yes. A guest at dinner once pressed me: how could I refuse a fine roast? I told him I had no wish to make my body into a graveyard. Some laughed. A few understood. In the evenings here at Clos Lucé, after my drawings and my dissections, I would often pick up my lute and play. The same ratios that governed the spacing of bones and the curves of muscles — I found them again in the intervals between musical notes. Music, anatomy, painting: to me, they were always the same thing. Different ways of listening to how the world was put together.
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.