Dear Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci,
It’s already unbelievable that we’re writing a letter to you in 2026 when you departed this world in 1519. However, very few people in history represent so well the spirit of craftsmanship and the practice of principled curiosity you embodied, so this first honorary lighthouse letter is addressed to you.
For those who’ve not had the chance to learn about your story, let us share a few lines about what you did with your life. In approximately 67 years, you painted the Mona Lisa (1503-1519), drew the Vitruvian Man (1490), engineered a flying machine, a rudimentary submarine or a self-supporting bridge (amongst many other inventions) and wrote more than 13,000 pages of pioneering concepts in anatomy, hydraulics, optics, geology, astronomy and mechanics. Not bad at all for someone who was the illegitimate son of a notary in Tuscany, who at the age of 14 walked into a workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, in Florence, to learn his craft as a humble apprentice.
Your observation, hands-on making, artistic judgement, scientific investigation and collaboration across disciplines are definitely an aspirational north star for many of us. Even the fact that your work was developed in collaborative environments (bottegas) where masters, assistants and apprentices contributed to commissions together is, in essence, at the heart of what we do at the Studio five centuries later. The Medicis now have different names, but the dynamics of the profession have not changed much...
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Leonardo da Vinci’s picture file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This file comes from the Wellcome Collection, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom.