Exploring Leonardo's Art
The Science, The Content, and The Craft — Eleven Ways Into Leonardo's Mind
Painting is a mental thing.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura
Why Another System?
We have seven major scholars who each organized Leonardo's notebooks in a different way. Richter sorted by subject — 22 neat categories. Pedretti sorted by date — page-by-page chronology. Kemp sorted by worldview — unified interpretation. Bambach sorted by biography — 2,400 pages of life-sequence.
Every system is useful. Every system is wrong.
Richter's subject classification — the one we use for the subject pages — is the most practical for looking things up. But it does exactly what Leonardo never did: it separates water from painting, flight from anatomy, architecture from philosophy. It chops a single page into fragments and files them in different drawers.
What This Is
These pages explore how Leonardo thought about, wrote about, and practiced the art of painting and drawing. Not categories to sort his notebooks into — explorations. Each page is a deep dive into a topic Leonardo returned to throughout his life, drawing from his journals, his quotes, his works, and his experiments.
They're organized into three tiers:
- The Science — How art works: the mechanics of seeing, measuring, and rendering
- The Content — What art depicts: the things, the ideas, and the world behind the figure
- The Craft — How art is made: the tools, the techniques, and the method
For Leonardo, these were never separate. Understanding light was inseparable from understanding how to paint. Studying a hand was inseparable from knowing what that hand meant in a composition. But to explore them, we have to start somewhere — and these eleven pages are the starting points. The connections between them are where it gets interesting.
The Science
How art works — the mechanics of seeing, measuring, and rendering
Perspective
Linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, the vanishing point, costruzione legittima. Leonardo inherited Brunelleschi's discovery and pushed it further — into the science of how distance changes everything: size, color, clarity, sharpness. His perspective wasn't just a drawing trick. It was a theory of space.
Explore →Proportion
The Vitruvian Man. The canons of the human figure. The golden ratio in composition. The mathematical relationships between parts and wholes. Leonardo measured obsessively — the distance from chin to hairline, the span of arms to height, the ratio of a finger joint to a palm. Proportion was his bridge between mathematics and beauty.
Explore →Perception
Painting as cosa mentale — a mental thing. The moti mentali — the motions of the mind expressed through the body. The Paragone debate: why painting surpasses sculpture, poetry, and music. Leonardo's argument that the painter must understand not just what the eye sees, but what the mind interprets. Perception is where science becomes art.
Explore →Light
Chiaroscuro. Sfumato. The science of shadow — cast shadow, body shadow, derived shadow. How light bounces, diffuses, reflects off surfaces. The difference between candlelight and daylight, between direct sun and overcast sky. Leonardo wrote volumes on light. He treated it as a physical substance with rules that could be understood and then painted.
Explore →Color
How colors change with distance — aerial perspective. How colors interact when placed next to each other. Which pigments to use and why. Leonardo had specific, sometimes wrong, sometimes brilliant ideas about color. His observations on how a red object appears in mist, or how green trees look against a blue sky, were centuries ahead of formal color theory.
Explore →Form
The rendering of volume on a flat surface. Drapery folds. The roundness of a face. The way sfumato dissolves hard edges to create the illusion of depth. How to model a sphere, a cylinder, a complex human form so it appears to occupy real space. This is Leonardo's supreme technical achievement — and the foundation of everything from the Mona Lisa's face to the Last Supper's architecture.
Explore →The Content
What art depicts — the things, the ideas, and the world behind the figure
Objects
People, animals, hands, faces, trees, water, rocks, buildings, drapery, horses, machines. The physical things Leonardo studied and rendered — the raw visual vocabulary of art. His approach: draw everything. Dissect the arm to understand how it bends. Watch a cat to understand how it moves. Study a waterfall to understand how it falls. Every object is a lesson.
Explore →Subjects
The Annunciation. The Last Supper. The Battle of Anghiari. The Madonna of the Rocks. Beyond the physical things depicted, every painting carries meaning — religious narrative, mythological symbolism, allegory, portraiture, philosophical statement. Leonardo's subjects ranged from sacred commissions to personal experiments, and he approached each as a problem to be solved.
Explore →Setting
Background. Environment. Landscape. Atmosphere. Space. Sky. The world that surrounds the subject — which for Leonardo was never just a backdrop. His backgrounds are geological, botanical, meteorological. The rocky landscape behind the Mona Lisa isn't decoration — it's a statement about deep time, erosion, and the relationship between the human figure and the ancient earth.
Explore →The Craft
How art is made — the tools, the techniques, and the method
Practice
Pigments, oils, tempera, fresco. Brushes, panels, canvas. The physical craft of making art — the materials Leonardo used, the techniques he invented, the recipes he recorded. How to prepare a panel. How to mix a color. How to apply sfumato with your fingertips. The gap between knowing how art should look and being able to make it look that way.
Explore →Process
How a painting goes from concept to completion. The stages: observation, sketching, composition, cartoon, underpainting, layering, finishing. Leonardo's advice to the student on how to train, what to practice, how to look. His own process — famously slow, famously incomplete. The commissions he accepted, abandoned, and returned to decades later. The art of making art.
Explore →How They Connect
Leonardo didn't think in categories — everything fed into everything
These eleven pages are starting points, not boxes. In Leonardo's mind — and in his notebooks — they're inseparable. Light creates Form. Perspective defines Setting. Objects require Practice. Subjects demand Perception. Every page on this site will cross-reference the others, because that's how Leonardo worked: everything connects.
| Exploration | Tier | Connects Most Strongly To |
|---|---|---|
| Perspective | Science | Light, Form, Setting, Proportion |
| Proportion | Science | Perspective, Form, Objects, Process |
| Perception | Science | Light, Color, Subjects, Process |
| Light | Science | Color, Form, Perspective, Setting, Practice |
| Color | Science | Light, Perception, Practice, Setting |
| Form | Science | Light, Proportion, Objects, Practice |
| Objects | Content | Form, Proportion, Practice, Process |
| Subjects | Content | Perception, Objects, Setting, Process |
| Setting | Content | Perspective, Light, Color, Objects |
| Practice | Craft | Color, Light, Form, Process |
| Process | Craft | Practice, Subjects, Perception, every Science page |
What Comes Next
Building out each exploration — and layering in the modern perspective
Each of these eleven pages will grow over time. The foundation is Leonardo — his words, his works, his examples. On top of that: modern context, personal commentary, and the connections that five centuries of art and science have revealed since he wrote those notebooks by candlelight.
See also:
- How the Scholars Organized Leonardo — seven different systems across 500 years
- About the Notebooks — why they resist organization in the first place
- The Art of Painting (Richter) — Leonardo's own treatise, organized by subject