Questions to ask Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo in brief

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 near Vinci, a small town outside Florence, the son of a notary, Ser Piero, and a young woman named Caterina; his parents never married. He trained in the Florentine workshop of the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, then worked for Ludovico Sforza in Milan from about 1482 to 1499, where he painted the Last Supper. Back in Florence he began the portrait of Lisa Gherardini now called the Mona Lisa, around 1503. He spent his last years in France as a guest of King Francis I and died at Amboise on 2 May 1519.

More than 7,000 pages of his notes and drawings survive, spread across collections such as the Codex Atlanticus in Milan, the anatomical drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor, the Codex Leicester and the notebooks in Paris and London. They were left to his pupil Francesco Melzi and never published in his lifetime.

Why the notebooks make interviews easier

Unlike many figures from 500 years ago, Leonardo wrote down what he was thinking, often as notes to himself. So a good question points at a notebook topic: water, birds, light, the body, machines, painting. Questions about his private life are harder, because he wrote little about it; use Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550, revised 1568) for stories, but say they are Vasari's.

For a wax museum, pick a pose with a notebook and prepare answers about flight or mirror writing; visitors love both. To rehearse, you can speak with an AI recreation of Leonardo on Yuga, built from his notebooks and the historical record. It is not Leonardo and it can be wrong, so cite the notebooks in your project.

Growing up and training in Florence

Notebook evidence: he called himself an “omo sanza lettere”, a man without book learning, because he had not been taught Latin, and he defended learning from experience instead. Vasari tells the story that Verrocchio gave up painting after seeing the angel the young Leonardo painted in his Baptism of Christ; that is a legend, though the angel is generally accepted as Leonardo's work.

1. What did you learn in Verrocchio's workshop besides painting?
2. Why do you call yourself a disciple of experience?
3. Did it matter to you that you could not read Latin as a young man?
4. Which part of the Baptism of Christ did you paint?

Milan: the horse, the letter and the Last Supper

Notebook evidence: a draft letter to Ludovico Sforza, from about 1482, lists bridges, siege engines, cannon and armoured cars, and mentions painting and sculpture only near the end. For Ludovico he built a clay model of a huge horse for a bronze statue, but in 1494 the bronze was used for cannon, and French soldiers damaged the model after 1499. The Last Supper (about 1495 to 1498) was painted in an experimental technique on a dry wall and began flaking within decades.

1. Why did you sell yourself to Ludovico as an engineer first and a painter last?
2. How did you feel when the bronze for your horse went to make cannon?
3. Why did you paint the Last Supper in a new technique instead of fresco?
4. Which moment of the story did you choose to show in the Last Supper, and why?
5. What is the drawing of a man in a circle and a square trying to show?

Flight, water and the body

Notebook evidence: he studied birds and drew flying machines, gathering notes in the Codex on the Flight of Birds (about 1505). In the Codex Leicester he wrote about water, the Moon's glow and fossil shells in the mountains, which he argued could not have been left by the biblical Flood. He dissected human bodies, making some of the most accurate anatomical drawings of his time, including the heart and a child in the womb. A visitor in 1517, Antonio de Beatis, reported Leonardo saying he had dissected more than thirty bodies.

1. Could your flying machine really have flown?
2. What did watching birds teach you about flight?
3. How did you explain the sea shells you found high in the mountains?
4. What did you discover about the heart by dissecting it?
5. Why did you never publish your anatomy drawings?
6. Why did you write in mirror script, from right to left?

Mona Lisa, rivals and the last years

Record: Vasari names the sitter as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and a note written by Agostino Vespucci in 1503, found in a Heidelberg library book in 2005, supports this. Leonardo never delivered the painting and was still working on it in France. In 1503 to 1505 he and the younger Michelangelo were both commissioned to paint battle scenes in Florence's council hall; neither finished. A letter of 1516 by the merchant Andrea Corsali reports that Leonardo ate no meat.

1. Why did you keep the portrait of Lisa Gherardini instead of handing it over?
2. What did you think of Michelangelo, and why did you two clash?
3. Why did so many of your projects stay unfinished?
4. Is it true you would not eat meat?
5. Why did you move to France at the end of your life?
6. Is painting better than sculpture or poetry?
7. What did you want Francesco Melzi to do with your notebooks?
8. What do you wish you had finished?
9. What should a young painter study first?

For the rivalry in detail, see Leonardo vs Michelangelo.

Sample answers in Leonardo's words

Q: Why do you keep studying so many subjects?

Q: How do you feel about the unfinished horse?

Q: How do you feel about all your unfinished projects?

Q: Is book learning or experience more important? His answer, paraphrased from the Codex Atlanticus: those who only recite other men's works are reciters, not inventors, and he was a disciple of experience.

Questions that don't fit his time

He cannot tell you whether his flying machine design inspired the Wright brothers' flight of 1903, or what he thinks of helicopters and tanks; he sketched ideas, but those machines came centuries later. He never heard the word “Renaissance”, which historians began using for his era in the 19th century. He knew nothing of the Mona Lisa's theft from the Louvre in 1911, of modern disputes over paintings attributed to him, or of the novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), whose “secret codes” are fiction. Handle questions about his private life carefully: the record is thin, and modern labels don't fit it.

Read the notebooks yourself

J. P. Richter's two volume The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), translated into English and arranged by subject, is free on Project Gutenberg. The British Library has digitised the Codex Arundel, and the Royal Collection Trust shows the Windsor anatomical drawings online. Martin Kemp's Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man and Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci (2017) are reliable modern guides. For his era, see Renaissance key figures.