Mike Lankford

“I think the truth is there are potential Leonardos everywhere in the world but they rarely survive or succeed in our regimented social order, and they don’t do at all well on tests. A kid growing up wild in the country today, fifteen years old and unable to properly write or even sign his name, is what social welfare workers would call “a problem.” And what’s complicated about all this is that the social worker would be right, usually. Rescuing isolated, handicapped kids is what a civilized society must do, and yet in this case what seems to have made the difference was Leonardo having to figure it out for himself. What accounts for Leonardo is an act of self-discovery, and the tenacity to make it, over and over. Imagine Leonardo as a young boy growing up in Vinci those last few months and weeks before he discovered he could draw. Little “Lionardo,” as he was before he found a way to make sense of the world. Learning to read was incredibly difficult, writing “correctly” even more so. Everything seemed wrong to him, backward somehow, and he couldn’t figure out why. He felt so stupid. And then, somehow—perhaps it was his uncle Francesco—the idea was inserted into his confused little brain, “Do it your own way, even if it is different. You are not stupid! Find how it works for you.”
― Mike Lankford, Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci

“Aside from the occasional task at court, it’s his free time that matters. In a sonnet written by Ludovico’s court poet, Guidotto Prestinari, Leonardo is accused of spending his days hunting in the woods and hills around Bergamo for “various monsters and a thousand strange worms.” He also explored caves and climbed mountains to study the fossils and geology and to glimpse the view up high, making him one of the very first European alpinists. We also know from his later inventories that around this time he began buying more books as well. And he began contemplating the creation of his own books on various subjects, beginning with painting, which he preferred to treat as a science, while at the same time analyzing and treating machine design and hydraulics more as creative arts.”
― Mike Lankford, Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci