Leonardo da Vinci in Defense of Your Procrastination
“Respond to every call that excites your spirit,” said Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. Or at least that’s what the translation says he said.
Today, we’ll talk about Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian polymath who answered more calls of spirit than probably anyone else in history.
Most of us remember Leonardo da Vinci as the artist behind the Mona Lisa, often regarded as the most famous painting in the world. Leonardo also holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold in a public auction: In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo, was sold for 450.3-million USD.
But Leonardo was far more than a painter and an artist. He was also an anatomist, architect, astronomer, botanist, cartographer, geologist, inventor, scientist, and much more. The eminent art historian Kenneth Clark has called Leonardo “the most relentlessly curious man in history.”
As a young painter in Florence, Leonardo pursued his various scientific enquires primarily to improve his art — he dissected dead bodies in order to draw human figures that looked real. Although, over time, Leonardo would obsess over his scientific interests out of pure curiosity.
“His curiosity impelled him to know all there was to know about everything that could be known,” writes Walter Isaacson in his biography of Leonardo.
Isaacson also argues that while one might be tempted to label Leonardo’s talents as otherworldly, it would be unfair to do so. According to Isaacson, Leonardo’s genius was every bit human, “wrought by his own will and ambition.” Leonardo had almost no schooling. Instead, he was self-taught. “He was also a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.”
Moreover, Leonardo was infamous for his proclivity to procrastinate.
Throughout his life, Leonardo was accused of procrastination and not finishing his commissions in time, and even abandoning his artworks.
But creativity demanded freedom, as Leonardo once explained to the Duke of Milan, “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterward give form.”
Imagine telling it to your clients, or worse, your boss.
It’s worth a shot.
Nevertheless, “there was a poignant and inspiring aspect to Leonardo’s unwillingness to declare a painting done and relinquish it,” explains Isaacson. “He knew that there was always more he might learn, new techniques he might master, and further inspirations that might strike him. Relinquishing a work, declaring it finished, froze its evolution. Leonardo did not like to do that.”
Just consider the Mona Lisa. Leonardo began working on it in 1503, carried it around, and continued refining it until fourteen years later in 1517. It would be in his studio there when he died. Similarly, he updated Saint Jerome in the Wilderness after thirty years, “when his anatomy experiments taught him something new about neck muscles.”
Admittingly, most of us don’t go around life painting masterpieces to be hung inside the Louvre. Or anywhere near it. Or far. And, in our everyday lives, we ought to finish projects when improvements could still be made. But there are times, when we care so deeply about something, that the pursuit of perfection becomes an endless struggle.
And, to that extent, I want this anecdote from Leonardo’s life to serve as a grand consolation — that even a genius like Leonardo da Vinci would succumb to a realization such as: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
For the record, Leonardo was a compulsive note-taker who left behind tens of thousands of pages of notes and drawings as part of his daily journals. Most of these pages have somehow survived to this day — now spread across museums worldwide. In 1994, Bill Gates paid 30.8 million USD to own a small collection of these notes.
While I’d love to dig into the translations of these notes someday, right now, I’m content with my learnings from Walter Isaacson’s wonderful biography of Leonardo da Vinci. It’s an excellent book and one I suggest you add to your reading list.
I read and discussed this article with my mum while we waited for movie to begin at the theatre, and we genuinely wanted to keep discussing about it. Maybe we shared the chronic procrastination and hunt for perfection and found comfort in these words you wrote.