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Starvard University · Leonardo da Vinci
You get to look over the shoulder of the most curious person who ever lived, page by page through his notebooks, and then see him again through the eyes of Walter Pater.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Leonardo da Vinci could paint like an angel, draw a river, design a flying machine, and take a body apart to see how it worked, all in the same notebook, all in the same week. This course reads his notes beside you, watches him chase light, water, and flight, and finishes with the writer who turned the Mona Lisa into poetry.
Leonardo lived from 1452 to 1519, in the Italy of the Renaissance, when artists were also engineers and a good workshop was part school, part laboratory. He left almost no finished books. What he left was thousands of notebook pages, written in mirror script, filled with drawings of faces, rivers, muscles, birds, and machines. Jean Paul Richter gathered and translated those notes in 1883, and that is the Leonardo we read here, in his own working words.
Then we change lenses. Walter Pater, an Oxford writer, published The Renaissance in 1873 and included a portrait of Leonardo and the Mona Lisa so musical that readers have been quoting it ever since. Pater gives us Leonardo as a mood and a mystery. Between the notebooks and Pater you get both the man and the myth, and this course is careful to tell you which is which as you go.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
Leonardo was born in 1452 in Vinci, a hill town in Tuscany, and grew up within reach of Florence, the most exciting city in Europe. Florence was rich on wool and banking, ruled in practice by the Medici family, and crowded with builders, goldsmiths, painters, and sculptors competing for work. Great churches and palaces were rising, scholars were recovering the books of ancient Greece and Rome, and artists were learning to draw the world as the eye actually sees it. Historians call the age the Renaissance, the rebirth, and Florence was its workshop.
Leonardo arrived with disadvantages. He was the illegitimate son of a successful notary, Ser Piero, and a peasant girl named Caterina, and illegitimate children were barred from the professions and from much formal schooling. He had little Latin, the language of learning, and teased himself in later life as a man without letters. What he had instead was eyes. Around 1466 his father placed him as an apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading sculptor and painter in Florence, and that workshop became his university.
An apprentice began with chores: sweeping, grinding pigments, preparing wooden panels, stretching and priming, copying drawings, and only slowly being trusted with real paint on real commissions. The workshop was also a small factory that made whatever patrons wanted, from altarpieces to pageant decorations and mechanical devices for festivals. The painter Giorgio Vasari tells a famous story that the young Leonardo painted one angel in his master picture of the Baptism of Christ so beautifully that Verrocchio gave up painting altogether. It is a good story and may even hold a grain of truth, but treat it as Vasari polished it: an anecdote, not a record.
Florence rewarded exactly this kind of training. The city was a building site and a stage: Brunelleschi's great dome had lately crowned the cathedral, the Medici were spending fortunes on churches, tombs, and festivals, and workshops bid against each other for every commission. A boy who could draw, carve, cast bronze, mix paint, and rig a hoist was employable for life, and a master with ideas could rise from craftsman to courtier. Leonardo absorbed the lesson completely. For the rest of his career he would sell himself to dukes and kings as a man who could do everything.
Lesson 2
Leonardo never published a book in his lifetime. What he left was paper: more than seven thousand notebook pages survive today, and scholars think at least as many again have been lost. The pages passed at his death to his beloved pupil Francesco Melzi, were treasured, scattered, cut up, and rebound over the centuries, and ended in libraries across Europe. In 1883 Jean Paul Richter gathered the scattered writings, translated them into English, and arranged them by subject, painting, anatomy, flight, water, fables, and philosophy, so that readers could finally meet Leonardo whole.
The first thing everyone notices is the handwriting. Leonardo wrote in mirror script, from right to left, in a quick left handed cursive that you read most easily in a mirror. Theories abound, but the simplest explanation is probably right: he was left handed, and pulling the pen right to left kept his hand out of the wet ink and let the nib glide. There was likely no great secret to hide. The pages themselves are cheerfully mixed: studies of muscles sit beside shopping lists, jokes, fables, sums owed, designs for pumps, and sketches of a face seen in the street.
His method is the real lesson. He asks questions in lists, then goes out and looks. He draws the same river eddy, wing, or shoulder again and again, because for him drawing was not decoration, it was thinking on paper. He also set the standard for himself in words Richter preserved: the painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without reason, he wrote, "is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence." Copying was not enough. He wanted to know why things looked as they did, and the notebooks are the record of that wanting.
Late in life he tried to bring order to the flood. He speaks in the pages of arranging his notes into treatises: on painting, on anatomy, on water, on the flight of birds. Pupils copied some of them, and a version of his painting notes was indeed stitched together after his death from his sheets. But the treatises as he dreamed them never appeared, and perhaps they could not have. The notebooks are not a book that failed to happen. They are a mind at work, and their disorder is the price of their life.
Lesson 3
If one word opens Leonardo's art, it is perspective: the geometry that lets a flat panel hold real space. He opens his notes on painting with a declaration Richter translated plainly: "Perspective is the guide and the gateway; and without this nothing can be done well in the matter of drawing." The Florentines before him, Brunelleschi the architect and Alberti the writer, had worked out the rules of linear perspective, the vanishing point where parallel lines seem to meet. Leonardo took the system and asked what the eye adds to the geometry.
His answer fills hundreds of notes on light and shadow. A shadow, he saw, is never simply black: shadows have degrees, edges soften with distance from the object, and light bounces from wall to face and tints what it touches. In his own painting this became the smoky softness later called sfumato, outlines melted rather than drawn, so that a smile can hover at the corner of a mouth. He studied drapery by lamplight, faces at dusk, and the way a white wall colors the shadow beside it, and wrote it all down as rules for his students.
Then he went further, to what he called the perspective of disappearance, what we now call aerial perspective. Distant mountains are not merely smaller; they are bluer, paler, and less distinct, because the air itself lies between us and them like a veil of light. Paint the air, he taught, and the distance paints itself. This is why his landscapes breathe. He treated seeing as a science that could be tested: cover one eye, move the candle, compare the sketch with the thing at dawn. Light, for Leonardo, was knowledge arriving.
His teaching notes are full of exercises a student can still do today. Draw the folds of cloth draped over a model, first in lamplight, then in daylight, until the shadows explain the form. Study heads in the evening on the street, when the light is soft and faces lose their hard edges. Compare a white object against dark ground and a dark object against light, and watch the edges change. He wanted no rule taken on trust, his own included. Every claim in the notes comes with an experiment attached, which is why painters and scientists both claim him.
Lesson 4
Leonardo wanted to paint people from the inside out. Richter's collection opens his anatomy notes with a demand every art student should hear: "The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it." A raised arm, in other words, is not a shape to copy. It is a machine of levers, cords, and swelling muscle, and the painter who knows the machine can invent poses nature never showed him.
So he dissected. Working at night in hospital rooms in Florence, Pavia, and Rome, by his own account on more than thirty human bodies, he cut, drew, and described layer by layer: the bones of the skull, the muscles of the face, the valves of the heart, a child in the womb drawn with a tenderness that still stops viewers today. With the scholar Marcantonio della Torre he planned a great illustrated book of anatomy that could have changed medicine. Della Torre died of plague in 1511, the book was never finished, and the drawings slept unpublished for centuries.
Honesty requires the darker page. Those bodies came from the hospitals and the gallows: the corpses of executed criminals and of the poor who died unclaimed, in an age when dissection sat at the edge of the law and corpses were sometimes obtained through channels nobody recorded. Leonardo worked with permissions that came and went, and a pope eventually barred him from one hospital. His early anatomy also carried errors inherited from ancient writers and from dissecting animals, mistakes he corrected only when his own knife and eye overruled the books. Admire the drawings, and remember the dead.
The drawings themselves outlived the scandal of their making. His studies of the skull, the spine, the hand, and the unborn child are now kept chiefly at Windsor Castle, and anatomists who examine them find observation so exact that some of his discoveries were not matched in print for centuries. When Vesalius published his great anatomy atlas in 1543, a generation after Leonardo's death, the published science of the body finally caught up with what one artist had drawn in private. Knowledge kept in a drawer, Leonardo's fate warns us, helps no one until it is shared.
Lesson 5
No subject filled more notebook pages than flight and water, the two elements that would not sit still. For flight he began, as always, by looking: at birds over the Arno, at seeds spinning down, at the bat, whose wing he trusted most. His instruction to himself survives in Richter: "Remember that your flying machine must imitate no other than the bat, because the web is what by its union gives the armour, or strength to the wings." Around that insight cluster his famous drawings: flapping wing machines, a giant aerial screw, gliders with shifting weights.
Here the course must be honest, because legend has run far ahead of fact. Leonardo built none of these flying machines as working craft, and the human powered designs could never have flown: arms and legs simply cannot beat big wings fast enough to lift a body, a limit of muscle and weight he could not have known. Calling him the inventor of the helicopter or the tank goes too far. These were sketches, brilliant questions on paper, some of them centuries ahead of the materials and engines an answer would need.
What he truly mastered was studying how flight and flow work, and water brought him paying work besides. Rivers flooded Florence and fed its mills, and Leonardo designed canals, locks, and river diversions, including a wartime scheme to turn the Arno away from enemy Pisa, and drew maps for Cesare Borgia that look startlingly modern. For princes he staged pageant machines and devised fortifications. Stand back and the pattern is one: watch the moving world, eddy, wing, wheel, and ask what rule it obeys.
His most revealing machine document is not a drawing but a letter. Around 1482, seeking work in Milan, the thirty year old Leonardo wrote to its ruler, Ludovico Sforza, offering his services, and nine tenths of the letter lists military engineering: portable bridges, cannons, armored vehicles, methods for draining siege moats. Only at the end, almost as an afterthought, does he mention that he can also paint and sculpt as well as any man alive. The artist the world worships introduced himself as an engineer of war, and the duke hired him.
Lesson 6
In 1873 an Oxford scholar named Walter Pater published The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, and changed Leonardo's afterlife. Pater was not an archive man. His method was the cultivated impression: stand before a work of art, attend to exactly what it makes you feel, and write that feeling in prose as careful as poetry. In an age of factories and certainties, he taught readers to treat beauty as a serious way of knowing, and his book became a kind of breviary for young artists.
His Leonardo essay climbs to the most famous paragraph ever written about a painting, his meditation on the Mona Lisa. Pater imagines all of human history gathered into her face and writes of her: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits." On he sweeps, through Greek myth, Rome, the middle ages, and the Borgias, as if her smile had witnessed everything and kept the secret. The passage is incantation more than argument. Decades later the poet W. B. Yeats admired it so much that he printed its sentences rearranged as lines of verse, as if Pater had written a poem without knowing.
Read it with pleasure, and also with clear eyes, because this course promised honesty. The real sitter was in all likelihood Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, a real woman of Leonardo's own city and century, and there is no evidence she had been a diver in deep seas or kept company with vampires. Pater's passage is famous partly because it is poetic invention more than fact, a portrait of Pater's own imagination wearing Leonardo's lady as a mask. Elsewhere he gives his creed in one clean line: "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." Enjoy the music. Count the facts separately.
The essay around the famous paragraph matters too. Pater walks through Leonardo's life as a series of pictures: the boy in Verrocchio's workshop, the engineer at Milanese courts, the old man in France, always a little strange, always following some curious beauty others had missed. The book's young readers, Oscar Wilde among them, treated The Renaissance as a sacred text of the aesthetic life, and Wilde called it his golden book. That is Pater's real legacy: he made looking at art feel like a way to live, and Leonardo was his supreme example.
Lesson 7
The best way to finish this course is to borrow his habits for one month. Get a plain notebook you can carry everywhere, the way he carried his at his belt, and date every page. Rule one: questions before answers. Keep a running list of things you want to find out, in his spirit, why the sky is blue at noon and grey at dusk, how a lock of hair falls, what your own hand looks like holding a cup. Rule two: draw first, write second. A two minute sketch of anything, a leaf, a shoe, a stranger profile, teaches the eye more than a paragraph of description.
Give each week a theme, as his pages naturally fall into themes. Week one is light: sketch the same window or street corner at three hours of the day and note how the shadows change. Week two is the body: draw hands, yours and others, in as many positions as you can, and look at how the fingers bend. Week three is water and machines: watch a tap, a stream, a bicycle, a kitchen gadget, and diagram how it works. Week four is faces and flight: copy expressions, watch birds or falling leaves, and let yourself design one impossible machine, honestly labeled as a sketch.
Finish each Sunday by reading the week back, the way his pupil Melzi treasured and ordered the pages after him. Star the questions still unanswered, copy the best drawing fresh, and write one sentence on what your eyes learned. You will not become Leonardo in a month, and anyone who promises that is selling something. But you will notice more of the world than you did, and noticing, patiently, on paper, was the whole secret of the most curious person who ever lived.
A few practical mercies before you begin. Ten honest minutes beat an ambitious hour abandoned by Thursday. Bad drawings count double, because they show you exactly what you failed to see, and his own pages are full of false starts and corrections. Keep your question list on the last page so it is always growing, and try his mirror writing once, for the pleasure of feeling your hand think differently. The notebook is not homework and nobody will grade it. It is a workshop you carry, and a month from now it will know things about your attention that you do not.
Sources
This course is taught from two books, the notebooks of Leonardo himself and Walter Pater on the Renaissance, both free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg.
Graduation
You have stood in the Florence workshop, read the mirror writing, followed light across a wall and water through a lock, faced the hard truth about the anatomy room and the flying sketches, and heard Pater turn it all into music. Your notebook month starts whenever you pick up a pencil. Congratulations, and may your questions always outnumber your answers.
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