He wrote backwards. Every notebook, every sketch annotation, every private thought — mirror script, right to left, legible only when held up to a mirror. Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed, and writing in reverse was natural for him. But it also meant that for five hundred years, his private voice has been literally reversed.
The Notebooks
Leonardo left roughly 7,000 pages of notebooks, and they are the closest thing we have to hearing him think. The entries jump from anatomy to hydraulics to the mechanics of bird flight to shopping lists to reminders to collect a skull from a butcher. The voice in those notebooks is restless, curious to the point of compulsion, and startlingly conversational. He addresses himself in the second person: “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.” “You must show how feathers are joined together.” He gives himself orders the way a teacher instructs a student who happens to be a genius.
Contemporary accounts describe Leonardo as charming, witty, and — this surprises people — a gifted musician and singer. Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550, revised 1568) is the primary biographical source, wrote that Leonardo “sang divinely without any preparation” and that he was “so pleasing in conversation that he attracted to himself the hearts of men.” The Anonimo Gaddiano, an anonymous Florentine manuscript from around 1540, confirms that Leonardo “sang beautifully to his own accompaniment on the lira da braccio.” He improvised both music and lyrics. The Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, first invited Leonardo to court not as a painter or engineer but as a musician.
The Evidentiary Record
No recordings exist. Leonardo died in 1519 at Amboise, France, in the arms (according to legend, probably false) of King Francis I. The evidentiary record is entirely textual: Vasari’s biography, the Anonimo Gaddiano, Leonardo’s own notebooks, and scattered references in Milanese and Florentine court records.
Vasari’s testimony is both invaluable and problematic. Writing thirty years after Leonardo’s death, Vasari had access to people who knew Leonardo personally, but he was also crafting a narrative — Leonardo as the divine artist, the culmination of artistic progress. Still, the specific details about Leonardo’s musical ability and conversational charm appear in multiple independent sources, which gives them credibility.
The notebooks, held primarily at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the British Library (Codex Arundel), the Institut de France, and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, provide the most intimate record. They reveal a mind that could not stop asking questions. Leonardo’s handwriting analysis by scholars including Martin Kemp (Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, Oxford University Press, 2006) suggests that the mirror script was natural left-handed writing rather than a deliberate code. He wrote the way his hand moved.
Tuscan in a Lombard Court
Leonardo spoke a Tuscan dialect of Italian, specifically the variety spoken in and around Vinci and Florence in the late fifteenth century. This is significant because Tuscan Italian became the foundation of standard modern Italian — the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In linguistic terms, Leonardo spoke something close to the ancestor of modern standard Italian, but with regional features that would mark him as rural Tuscan to a Milanese or Venetian ear.
When Leonardo moved to Milan in 1482, he entered a court that spoke a Lombard dialect significantly different from Tuscan. Court documents show that Leonardo adopted some Lombard vocabulary and spelling conventions in his notebooks over time, but his underlying syntax and phonology remained Tuscan. He spent his last years in France, where he communicated with the French court in Italian — Francis I spoke it — but would have acquired at least basic conversational French.
His written Italian is not literary. It lacks the polish of Petrarch or the rhetorical structure of Machiavelli. Leonardo’s prose is direct, sometimes clumsy, always energetic. He was self-taught in Latin and never mastered it, which made him an outsider in the humanist intellectual world of his time. He called himself “omo sanza lettere” — a man without letters. The phrase is both self-deprecating and defiant.
Notes to Himself
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” This is quintessential Leonardo — the impatience of a man who saw more possibilities than any single lifetime could execute. He left more projects unfinished than most artists begin. The Codex Atlanticus alone contains designs for flying machines, armored vehicles, solar concentrators, and an underwater breathing apparatus. He sketched them all. He built almost none.
“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.” From the notebooks. Not the joy of creating, not the joy of completing — the joy of understanding. Leonardo was a man who would spend months dissecting cadavers to understand how a tendon connects muscle to bone, then abandon the anatomical treatise to study the flow of water in rivers. The understanding was the destination. Everything else was a side effect.
“Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.” A note to himself in the Codex Atlanticus. No context. No explanation for why he needed to know this. Just the instruction, sitting between sketches of fortification designs. This is the voice of Leonardo’s curiosity at its most unfiltered — a mind that treated every phenomenon in the natural world as equally worthy of investigation.
Milan, 1482
It is 1482, and Leonardo da Vinci has just arrived in Milan carrying a silver lyre shaped like a horse’s skull. He made it himself. He is thirty years old, tall, strikingly handsome by all contemporary accounts, wearing the short tunics and bright colors that Vasari describes as unconventional for the period. He has come to the court of Ludovico Sforza not to paint — though he will paint The Last Supper on a refectory wall — but to perform. He picks up the lyre and improvises. The singing voice is clear, confident, unschooled in formal musical training but naturally gifted. The Tuscan accent marks him as Florentine in a Milanese court. He speaks quickly when excited, and he is almost always excited. Between songs, he talks — about a flying machine he has designed, about the way water moves, about a new kind of fortification that could withstand cannon fire. The courtiers are charmed. They will remain charmed for seventeen years. He will leave The Last Supper unfinished for so long that the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie will complain to the Duke. Leonardo will explain that he has been searching the streets of Milan for a face wicked enough to serve as the model for Judas, and suggests that if the prior is impatient, he could always use the prior’s own face.
Sources
- Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. 1550/1568. Multiple translations available.
- Kemp, Martin. Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Nicholl, Charles. Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind. Penguin, 2005.
- Bambach, Carmen C. Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered. Yale University Press, 2019.
- Anonimo Gaddiano (Anonymous Florentine manuscript), ca. 1540. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.