One of my New Year's Resolutions was to read one non-fiction book chapter a day. We're heading into June, and I'm just about to start Chapter 18, so not entirely on track, but better than nothing!
The Story of Art:
I'm reading EH Gombrich's "The Story of Art." It was published in 1950 and has had fifteen subsequent editions; if you read the foreword, it's pretty clear that Gombrich was humbled by the book's staying power in a field that attracts so much interest.
The cover lets the book down; it combines a sandstone backdrop with hard-to-read white lettering and doesn't leave me optimistic about its readability.
However, Gombrich manages to take the massive subject of art and the history of art as he understood it at the time and pleasantly explains it to his reader. He really does turn it into a story.
I know that I'm waffling, but there is a point. Seventeen chapters later, I read about the Egyptians, Greeks, and Gothics, and finally, I started to recognise some of the artists' names. And at the Renaissance, Gombrich discusses Leonardo da Vinci. (Queue drumroll)
And it was while I was reading Gombrich's description of da Vinci:
He would start on a painting and leave it unfinished, despite the urgent requests of his patrons, and he refused to let it out of his hands unless he was satisfied with it. His contemporaries regretted the way in which this outstanding genius seemed to fritter away his time, moving restlessly from Florence to Milan, from Milan to Florence etc.
That a thought sparked in my mind. What if this genius who travelled from town to town, tried multiple experiments to find his own answers to problems, and excelled in numerous fields of research, only to lose interest and move on to the next thing - did, in fact, have undiagnosed ADHD?
I realise that pathologising people is having a bit of a moment, but it is a genuinely fascinating idea for me. Da Vinci left an indelible impact on humanity and our societies. Individuals who are neurodiverse often face challenges such as low self-esteem and struggle to recognise the potential strength in their differences.
In this blog post, I want to explore the intriguing possibility of Leonardo da Vinci's life and work from the perspective of someone with ADHD, imagining how this condition may have influenced his creative genius and artistic endeavours.
He was a genius whose powerful mind will always remain an object of wonder and admiration to ordinary mortals. -Gombrich in The Story of Art
Da Vinci and Neurodiversity: Examining the Possibility of ADHD
After a bit of sleuthing, I realised that I was not the first to consider the possibility that Leonardo da Vinci had ADHD. In an article from 2019, ScienceDaily interviewed Professor Catani from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London.
Professor Catani was quoted as saying:
Whilst impossible to make a post-mortem diagnosis for someone who lived 500 years ago, I am confident that ADHD is the most convincing and scientifically plausible hypothesis to explain Leonardo's difficulty in finishing his works. Historical records show Leonardo spent excessive time planning projects but lacked perseverance. ADHD could explain aspects of Leonardo's temperament and his strange, mercurial genius.
Leonardo da Vinci's pursuits were incredibly diverse. This can be seen to demonstrate a common trait amongst those with ADHD—the ability to apply hyperfocus to a topic and display a curiosity towards multiple diverse interests.
Da Vinci studied the development of the embryo in the womb. He explored the secrets of the human body by dissecting more than thirty corpses. He examined the dynamics of waves and currents. He meticulously observed and analysed the flight patterns of insects and birds. He thought it was the artist's business to explore the visible world, and these observations would later contribute to his visionary concepts for a flying machine, which he firmly believed would one day come to fruition. It is even thought that Da Vinci understood the heliocentric model of our solar system, predating Copernicus, as evidenced by his writing the words, "The sun does not move" onto a scrap of paper.
Da Vinci's work patterns were characterised by inconsistency. His contemporaries regretted the way in which this outstanding genius seemed to squander his time, restlessly moving from Florence to Milan, from Milan to Florence, and even serving the notorious adventurer Cesare Borgia, then to Rome and finally to the court of King Francis I in France, where he died in 1519.
He would go through periods of intense productivity as evidenced by his many sketches and notebooks, however, da Vinci never published his writings. It is fortunate for us that many were preserved by his pupils and admirers. Thousands of pages were covered with writings and drawings, with excerpts from books Leonardo read and drafts for books he intended to write.
We can gain a limited insight into Leonardo da Vinci's working habits from Matteo Bandello, a contemporary and novelist who observed him during the creation of The Last Supper.
“I have also seen him, as the caprice or whim took him, set out at midday, […] from the Corte Vecchio, where he was at work on the clay model of the great horse, and go straight to the Grazie and there mount on the scaffolding and take up his brush and give one or two touches to one of the figures and suddenly give up and go away again.”
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