List No. 051

LEONDARDO’S TO-DO LIST

Leonardo da Vinci

1510

Leonardo da Vinci remains one of history’s most recognisable polymaths – a genius who excelled as a sculptor, painter, engineer, inventor, musician, mathematician, cartographer, writer, architect, scientist and geologist. He was also an expert anatomist, and in approximately 1510 he travelled to the University of Pavia’s medical school to dissect and then draw some corpses. Sometime before he left, on a page of his notebook thick with notes and sketches of the brain, nerves and veins, Leonardo wrote a list, both of things to do and take.

Have Avicenna translated. ‘On the Utilities’.

Spectacles with case, firestick, fork, bistoury, charcoal, boards, sheets of paper, chalk, white, wax, forceps, pane of glass, fine-tooth bone saw, scalpel, inkhorn, pen-knife. Zerbi, and Angnolo Benedetti. Get hold of a skull. Nutmeg.

Observe the holes in the substance of the brain, where there are more or less of them.

Describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of a crocodile.

Give the measurement of the dead using his finger.

The book ‘On Mechanical Science’ precedes that ‘On the Utilities’. Get your books on anatomy bound. Boots, stockings, comb, towel, shirts, shoe-laces, shoes, pen-knife, pens, a skin for the chest, gloves, wrapping paper, charcoal.

Mental matters that have not passed through the senso comune are vain and they beget nothing but the prejudiced truth. And because such discourses arise from poverty of wit, such reasoners are always poor, and if they are born rich they will die poor in old age because it seems that Nature revenges herself on those who want to work miracles, so that they have less than quieter men. And those who want to grow rich in a day live for a long time in great poverty, as happens, and will happen to eternity – the alchemists, searchers after the creation of gold and silver, and those engineers who want dead water to give itself moving life with perpetual motion, and the supreme fool, the necromancer and enchanter.