I. The Illegitimate Son

Leonardo da Vinci was born illegitimate.

1452. He was born in the town of Vinci, near Florence. His father was a notary; his mother was a peasant woman. They were not married. In fifteenth-century Italy, an illegitimate son could not attend university, could not become a notary (his father's profession), could not enter most guilds.

He had no surname. "Da Vinci" means "from Vinci" — not a family name, but a label of origin.

An illegitimate son with no surname. Barred from the academic path. Barred from the legal path. Barred from his father's path.

He had one option: apprenticeship. At around fourteen, he entered the workshop of Verrocchio in Florence — one of the finest in the city. There he learned painting, sculpture, metalwork, and the principles of engineering.

Li Bai's origins were unclear; rootlessness was his freedom. Da Vinci's were the same — his illegitimacy locked him out of every orthodox path. But being locked out meant he was bound to none. He could learn anything. Try anything. Touch anything.

Du Fu's identity anchored his direction (to guide his sovereign above Yao and Shun), and then that direction was blocked, and suffering followed.
Da Vinci had no anchor. No direction was blocked. His suffering was not "being stopped" — it was "wanting to do everything but life is too short."

II. The Notebooks

Da Vinci left behind approximately seven thousand pages of notebooks.

What is in them?

Anatomy — he dissected over thirty corpses and drew detailed illustrations of bones, muscles, blood vessels, and organs. His drawings of heart valves were confirmed as accurate by modern medicine five hundred years later.

Hydraulics — he studied how water flows, drawing vortices, turbulence, and wave patterns. He was among the first to systematically study fluid mechanics.

Flying machines — he designed ornithopters, a helical aerial screw (a precursor to the helicopter), and a parachute. None were ever built. But the design principles were proven viable centuries later.

Military engineering — he designed giant crossbows, an armored vehicle (a precursor to the tank), and a diving suit. In a letter of self-recommendation to Ludovico Sforza of Milan, he listed ten things he could do — the first nine were military engineering. Painting was mentioned last.

Optics — he studied the physics of light, shadow, and color.
Geology — he inferred from fossils that mountaintops had once been seabeds.
Botany — he drew the branching patterns of trees.
Architecture — he designed churches, bridges, and urban drainage systems.
Music — he played the lira da braccio, reportedly very well.

Seven thousand pages. Covering nearly everything from the human body to the cosmos.

But these notebooks were not published in his lifetime. He wrote in mirror script (right to left, readable only with a mirror) — some say because he was left-handed and it was easier, some say for secrecy. Regardless, after his death the notebooks were scattered, many lost, and the surviving ones took centuries to be compiled.

Seven thousand pages of construction. Scattered. Lost. No system. No publication. No synthesis.

He is the person in this series who produced the most and finished the least.

III. Unfinished

Da Vinci's defining characteristic is not genius. It is not finishing.

He painted astonishingly few paintings in his lifetime — only about fifteen to twenty oils can be securely attributed to him. For a painter who lived to sixty-seven, this is remarkably few. Michelangelo and Raphael, his contemporaries, produced far more.

His most famous paintings:

The Last Supper — painted over three years (1495–1498). He used an experimental dry-wall technique instead of traditional fresco. The paint began flaking almost immediately. In his own lifetime, the painting was already deteriorating. An experimental construction that began to disintegrate the moment it was finished.

The Mona Lisa — begun around 1503, carried with him and reworked for years, possibly still unfinished when he died in 1519. A painting painted for sixteen years. He was not painting — he was conducting an endless experiment using this painting as his medium.

The Battle of Anghiari — a mural commission for the Florence city hall. He began, used an experimental technique, it failed. Unfinished.

The Sforza Horse — a commission for a colossal bronze equestrian statue in Milan. He built an enormous clay model. Then the French invaded. French soldiers used his clay model for target practice. The bronze was melted for cannons. Unfinished.

His flying machines — never built. His armored vehicle — never built. His diving suit — never built. His anatomy treatise — never published. His hydraulics research — never published.

Seven thousand pages of notebooks. Fifteen paintings. Countless unfinished projects.

Everything begun. Nothing finished.

IV. Why He Did Not Finish

Why?

The standard answer: he was too easily distracted. Everything interested him, and every new field pulled him away from the last. Halfway through a painting, he went to study anatomy. Halfway through anatomy, he went to study water flow. Halfway through water flow, he went to design a flying machine.

This answer is fair but not deep enough.

The deeper answer: he was not doing projects. He was carving.

Each field was not a task to be completed — it was a door to be opened. He opened the door, saw what was inside, drew a few pages of notes, then went to open the next door. He did not need to live behind any door. He needed to open.

Opening is carving. He carved open the door of anatomy (discovering how heart valves work), carved open the door of hydraulics (discovering the patterns of turbulence), carved open the door of optics (discovering the principles of atmospheric perspective), carved open the door of flight (discovering the fundamentals of aerodynamics).

Every carving was real — what he saw was correct. But he did not construct. He did not assemble what he had carved into a system. He did not write treatises. He did not publish. He wrote it in a notebook, in mirror script, and turned to the next page.

Newton carved one question (why does the apple fall?) and then spent twenty years constructing a complete system.
Da Vinci carved a hundred questions, then went to carve the hundred and first.

Newton: one carving, a hundred constructions.
Da Vinci: a hundred carvings, zero constructions.

V. Da Vinci and Everyone Else

This series has written two kinds of people: those who carve and those who construct.

Socrates only carved, never constructed.
Plato constructed on Socrates' clearing.
Aristotle turned the construction into a system.
Newton turned the system into a universe.
Bach turned the system into a musical universe.
Qin Shi Huang pushed construction to its limit.
Kant carved and then constructed.

Da Vinci fits neither category. He carved — but he carved too many things. He did not construct — but not because he chose not to, the way Socrates did. He was pulled away by his own curiosity. He was not saying "I should not construct." He was saying "there is another door over there I have not opened yet."

Socrates' non-construction was a principle.
Da Vinci's non-construction was an inability to stop.

He is the person in this series who most resembles what Darwin described as "variation" — natural selection requires vast quantities of random variation, most of which is useless, but occasionally one turns out to be exactly what the environment needs. Da Vinci was a variation machine — he generated enormous quantities of carvings, scattered in a hundred directions. Most could not be "selected" in his era (the technology to build a flying machine did not exist). But centuries later, his variations were proven correct, one by one.

He was a man who arrived too early. His carvings were right, but his era lacked the capacity to turn them into constructions. His flying machine designs had to wait for the Wright brothers. His anatomical drawings had to wait for modern medicine. His fluid mechanics had to wait for the Navier-Stokes equations.

VI. Those Few Paintings

But he did finish a few paintings.

The Last Supper. The Mona Lisa. The Virgin of the Rocks. Lady with an Ermine. Few. But each one changed the history of painting.

Why is the Mona Lisa great? Not because she is smiling. Because you do not know whether she is smiling. The curve at the corner of her mouth — Da Vinci used a technique he developed called sfumato (literally "smoked") — colors and lines have no sharp boundaries; everything melts, transitions, blurs. You look at her mouth and think she is smiling. You look at her eyes and think she is not. You look at the whole face and think she is again.

This is the visual version of remainder. The smile is not on her mouth, not in her eyes, not at any definite point on her face — it is between these things. It is in the blur at the boundary. It is something you see but cannot grasp.

Zhuangzi said Hundun had no openings. Da Vinci painted a face with no definite boundaries. You cannot carve the Mona Lisa's smile — because you cannot locate where it is. It occupies no fixed position. It is the smile of Hundun.

His seven thousand pages of notebooks are full of unfinished things. But the Mona Lisa's smile is finished — or rather, its "unfinishedness" is itself the finished form. That forever-ungraspable smile is the final shape. It needs nothing more. Its uncertainty is its perfection.

Gödel said no system can close. The Mona Lisa's smile is a visually unclosable construction — you can never determine whether she is smiling. That is its power.

VII. Mirror

Da Vinci wrote his notebooks in mirror script. Right to left. Readable only with a mirror.

This habit is itself a metaphor.

Everything about him was mirrored. The world he saw was the reverse of what others saw. Others saw a tree; he saw the branching laws. Others saw flowing water; he saw the mathematical structure of turbulence. Others saw a human body; he saw the mechanical system of muscles and bones. Others saw a painting; he saw the physics of light and shadow.

He was not looking at the world. He was looking at the world's mirror image — the structure behind the world.

This forms an interesting correspondence with Kant's "thing-in-itself." Kant said: we can only see phenomena, not the thing-in-itself. Da Vinci seemed to say: I can see it. He cut open bodies with a scalpel and saw what was inside. He analyzed light with a prism and saw what was inside. He studied water and saw the fluid mechanics inside.

But after seeing, he did not construct. He saw, drew it, wrote it in his notebook, and went to see the next thing.

Kant could not see the thing-in-itself but constructed three Critiques to describe why we cannot.
Da Vinci saw the thing-in-itself (at least nature's thing-in-itself) but did not construct anything to describe what he saw.

One could not see but constructed. One saw but did not construct.

VIII. Everything Begun

One more at the bridgehead.

His hands are stained with paint. Also with traces left by the dissection knife. Also with rust — from the machines he designed. Also with ink — from his seven thousand pages. His hands have touched everything.

He is the busiest person at the bridgehead. The others — Socrates is standing, Laozi has vanished, Confucius is waiting, Du Fu is weeping, Li Bai is flying, Bach is listening, Beethoven is clenching his fist, Sima Qian is carrying books on his back, Rumi is whirling.

Da Vinci is looking around. He is looking at the bridge's structure (he wants to draw it), at the water below (he wants to study it), at the crowd (he wants to dissect them), at the sky (he wants to fly up there).

He does not stand in one place. He walks everywhere. Every step he pauses to look at something new. Every time he sees something new, he pulls out a notebook and sketches a few lines. Then he keeps walking.

He is the only person at the bridgehead who does not stop — but not like Rumi, who whirls in one spot. Da Vinci walks everywhere. Each step is a new carving.

Everything begun. Nothing finished.

But every beginning was real. Every notebook page was correct. Every carving struck truth.

He simply did not live long enough. Or rather, no one could live long enough to finish everything Da Vinci began. One lifetime is not enough. He needed five hundred years.

He did not have five hundred years. He had sixty-seven. In sixty-seven years he opened a hundred doors. Behind each door was a universe.

He stands at the bridgehead, his hands stained with the traces of a hundred universes. He touched everything. He finished nothing.

But the Mona Lisa is smiling. That smile is finished.

That forever-ungraspable smile — that is Da Vinci.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives