da Vinci Was Literally A Lunatic

I don't think people truly understand just how good Da Vinci was. His understanding of anatomy was miles beyond any medical experts of his day. He made inventions that were centuries ahead of his time. And he remains the most famous artist in the world, over 500 years after his death. So let's deconstruct one of the most incredible minds humanity has ever produced, starting off with the way Da Vinci approached art like a science. To paint the world around him, Da Vinci sought to understand it. He spent page after page in his notebooks, making detailed studies on light theory, geology, botany. And of course, since he wanted to paint the human body to utter perfection, he had to study anatomy like a maniac. So in 1510, through some connections that Da Vinci had in the medical world, he was able to gain access to human bodies for anatomical study. Now in the years gone by, Da Vinci had conducted a lot of animal dissections, but he also dabbled lightly in human dissections even before this. But now, since he could do it kinda legally through his medical connections, in the next few years Da Vinci carried out dozens of dissections, studying the nerves, the skeleton, the organs, studying how muscles pull on tendons to create movement, hypothesizing functions of different organs, especially like the heart, breaking body parts down into their muscular and skeletal forms to understand them in and out, and just in general creating really detailed and accurate drawings and sketches on his findings. This entire period gave him really deep insights into how the human body worked. And it was actually accurate, because back in these days, anatomical knowledge was very questionable. It was heavily influenced by this Greek physician from the 2nd century named Galen, whose anatomical depictions were interesting to say the least, but this is the kind of thing that was in textbooks. And nobody, not even the anatomy professors, ever questioned Galen's teachings because it was so ingrained in them that Galen is correct. So since Da Vinci didn't have this bias, since he wasn't in the medical world or something like that, he was able to see human anatomy for what it really was. It's crazy how Da Vinci's private notebooks were more accurate than medical school textbooks and stuff. That's kinda funny. It wasn't just anatomy though, that Da Vinci studied with this level of thoroughness. He did this with everything that he felt he needed to understand to make his art as accurate to reality as possible. And the observations that he would make as he went around studying the world would lead him to ideas that he would just write down in his private notebooks that were quite literally centuries ahead of their time. For example, he studied mountains and rock formations and things like these, and he realized that these structures had to have formed in layers very slowly over time. Now you probably learned that kind of thing in high school, but back then, it was not common knowledge. The little fossils that he'd occasionally find as he was walking around. Back then, people used to think that fossils were remains of mythological creatures like dragons and stuff like that, but Da Vinci was one of the first to realize that fossils are just creatures that died a very long time ago. Since they were like these little seashell-looking things, those were pretty common. He realized that the area he was in had to have been the seafloor at some point in the past, and the combination of this led him to reason that the earth was significantly older than what it was said to be by the church frogs and stuff like that, which is an idea that would be formalized in the 1800s. His studies on birds and how they flew led him to design flying objects like this parachute and this helicopter-looking thing, inventions that would obviously come centuries later, and his versions, if designed today, actually work. And that's the thing with Da Vinci. It wasn't just, ooh, the human body looks this way, so I'll draw it this way, or mountains look this way, so I'm going to draw them this way. It was, no, why do mountains and rocks form in this manner? Why do branches and leaves form in very specific patterns? Why does light and shadow interact in these particular ways? Because he probably figured that if he could understand the why, then he could utilize that concept. He could then paint pretty much whatever he wanted and have it still be accurate to reality. And his methodical approach to this whole thing ended up paying off. I mean, geologists today recognize that the complex, rocky backgrounds and formations that we see in a lot of Da Vinci's work are accurate representations of what these things would look like if they were actually real places, so that's kind of cool. So when it comes to the actual painting, Da Vinci likes to try out new methods and techniques of communicating his artistic vision, which is obviously a good thing, but sometimes this inclination of his to experiment with paint didn't really fully work out. In 1504, Da Vinci was commissioned to paint a massive wall of the town hall, and this commission came with a little bit of spice because Florence had a very vibrant art culture and sometimes they'd like to pit artists against each other to see who would win. And at this point in time, there were two artists who were at the top of the food chain, so to speak. Da Vinci, who at this point was gaining fame in these circles because his Last Supper kind of went viral back then, but he had a little bit of competition. Some guy who just finished creating one of the grandest sculptures in all of history, Michelangelo. And the two artists were commissioned to do war scenes, you know, battle scenes on opposite end walls of the town hall. And to add a bit of fuel to the fire, these two guys absolutely despised each other. Like, they would throw verbal insults at each other all the time, there's even reports that they once got into a physical fight in the middle of the street. There was a lot of animosity here. So, each equipped with a desire to defeat the other. They both got to work creating the grand sketches and plans and drafts for this final work. And Florence was excited, like, geez bro, Da Vinci or Michelangelo, who's gonna come out on top? Unfortunately, it soon enough became clear that this battle would never come to fruition, because our boy Da Vinci had a bit of a problem. See, typically works like these that are done on these massive sections of walls are done in fresco. Fresco is a method of painting that involves applying a wet plaster to the wall, transferring your drawing onto that, and then painting directly on that wet plaster, and essentially allowing the paint to dry in with the plaster and become part of the wall, essentially. It's a method of painting that could be trusted to create works that would last for a very long time. It was the standard, right? But Da Vinci didn't like this. This is because he was a slow artist, right? He liked to take his time. He liked to think about things and make changes to his work as he moved along. And this isn't something he could do with fresco, because you have to be quick. You have to paint before the whole thing dries in. So you have to kind of work in little sections if you're doing a massive wall, for example. And if you want to go back and change something, well, good luck, because it's incredibly difficult to do that with fresco. And so since the established way didn't really fit Da Vinci, he decided to try something that was different to the norm, which was encaustics. Encaustics is a method of painting that involves mixing the pigments with hot molten wax, using that as your paint, you know, and then apply it to the wall. It's a method of painting that was mainly done by the ancient Egyptians and had created work that lasted for thousands of years now. So it can be a really reliable method of painting. But when Da Vinci tried it out, it didn't really work. He probably made the mixture way too hot because, you know, the paints ended up dripping down and melting and just ruining the entire thing. So he kind of just abandoned it. And when Michelangelo heard about this, he abandoned his work, too. And he ended up eventually being called to Rome by the pope. So talk about anticlimactic, bro. All we have today are some surviving studies that were done by younger artists of the time. So you can see Da Vinci planned to do a gruesome scene of the soldiers just in the middle of battle, just duking it out on horseback. Even the horses are getting in on the action. It's just this tangle of violence. And Michelangelo planned to depict the moment when the soldiers are just bathing in a river, just relaxing, and then the enemy attacks. So everyone is scrambling to get ready, getting prepared to go and fight. So Michelangelo's scene is really chaotic. We also have some preparatory sketches that were done by the artists themselves. And it's always really cool to compare an artist's sketches to their final work. That's kind of cool. It would have been really incredible to see what the final results of this battle would have been. But alas, Da Vinci. Instead of just painting in fresco, which is the established proper method, reliable method, he ended up trying to do something different to the norm. Trying to find ways to adapt the entire situation to him and his own personal workflow. And even though it didn't work out this time, I find that to be a really admirable trait to have. Because sometimes his proclivity to try out new ways of painting that he wanted to do ended up really, really, really, really paying off. Da Vinci, in his art, wanted to capture reality as he saw it. And this led him to pretty much invent an entirely new mode of painting, sfumato. Works on sfumato are characterized by really soft and hazy edges and a seamless blending of colors and tones. Da Vinci himself writes, Light and shade should blend without lines or borders in the manner of smoke. To really understand sfumato, here's a common comparison. On the left, you have a head done by the early Renaissance master Botticelli. And as you can see, there's a bunch of linework in here. The eyes, the nose, the jaw, a bit in the hair, a bit just everywhere, right? Whereas Da Vinci's work features none of that. Which makes sense because reality doesn't have any outlines or linework. Now, this is not me bashing the homie Botticelli. I'm just making a point. Now, sfumato is really, really difficult. To achieve the softness that we see in Da Vinci's work, he had to apply multiple, extremely thin layers to obscure the edges. Layers that are just a few microns thick. And he'd blend everything with such precision that even today under a microscope, we can't make out the brushwork in a lot of Da Vinci's work. Which is kind of crazy when you think about it. So over time, Da Vinci developed his sfumato, painting in a mode that wasn't really common at the time. I mean, he was literally the guy who invented it. And so this willingness of his to go against the established, you know, the painting status quo, so to speak, whether it succeeded with sfumato or whether it failed with encaustics, is a really super admirable trait. Because for Da Vinci, the reason he was so fixated on not painting in fresco, the reason he was so fixated on studying anatomy like a madman, studying geology and plants like a madman, is because there is one thing he desired more than anything else. And it's the singular thing that eluded him for the rest of his life. Today we only have a handful, less than 15 or 20 kind of finished paintings that we can say with confidence are Leonardo's, which when compared to other masters of this era, really isn't that many. And this is majorly because Da Vinci's process was extremely slow, like we've said before. In The Last Supper, for example, it took him about three or four years to complete this work. And he wasn't working continuously. He would sometimes spend days just sat there, thinking about where to apply the next brushstroke. But the prior, who's the head of the church, kind of where the painting was being made, was getting impatient and he started nagging Leonardo to actually get to work instead of just sitting around and thinking. Da Vinci found this guy annoying, but ah, so convenient because you can always just use this annoying guy for the head of Judas. Ah, perfect. Da Vinci's slowness in his working process and his obsession with the tiniest details on the next brushstroke really speak to just how much of a perfectionist he was, even with something like the Mona Lisa. Now, I could make an entire video on just the Mona Lisa. I see a lot of people saying that it's overrated and things of that nature, which I mean, I get it. You know, I too used to speak those blasphemous words. But regardless, the Mona Lisa is technically an unfinished portrait. I mean, it was commissioned in the early 1500s, but Da Vinci ended up carrying it around with him for the rest of his life, making changes to it here and there over the years. He probably was never satisfied with how it turned out. At the age of 67 in France, in this very house, in fact, in this very room, likely due to a stroke, Leonardo Da Vinci died in the arms of the king of France, who was his friend and patron. Da Vinci spent his final years living in France. On his deathbed, he uttered his final words, which encapsulates who he is as a person. So perfectly, I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality that it should have.