Leonardo da Vinci: Thinker, Researcher, and Poet

stood on the Piazza S. Firenze. He supported "four mouths": his wife, his mother, a maidservant, and Leonardo, an "illegitimate son" original: "figlio non legiptimo.". Over the years, his household grew immensely—from a third and a fourth marriage he had nine sons and two daughters—but his prosperity did not lag behind. Skillful and jovial, he knew how to stay on good terms with both secular and spiritual authorities. We soon find him as the procurator of the Monastery of the Santa Annunziata, later as a notary of the Signoria The governing body of Florence., and as a notary for the House of Medici; by the turn of the century, the most important and numerous contracts in Florence were drafted and signed by him. In any case, the documents speak more of him than of his son.

Of Leonardo's earliest development, we know nothing. Like other sons of citizens, he likely went to the master of the abacus original: "maestro dell’ abbaco." A teacher of practical commercial arithmetic and mathematics., the reckoning master, before he entered the workshop. In any case, Leonardo often calls himself "without letters" original: "senza lettere.", meaning without an education—that is, without the classical education of the Humanists which was so desired in his time. Whatever he eventually possessed of this, he acquired for himself. His Milanese notebooks show abundant traces of his Latin language studies; he declines, he conjugates, creates word lists, performs grammatical analyses, and progresses so far that he reads his Archimedes and Aristotle in Latin, quotes in Latin, and writes in Latin himself. He likely does not owe his mathematical knowledge to the school in Florence either. In his notebooks from 1480–1500, we read, for example: "have the reckoning master show you how to transform a triangle back into a square," or "learn the multiplication of roots from Master Luca" Referring to Luca Pacioli, the famous mathematician and friend of Leonardo.. According to Vasari's account Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Italian artists., he had from childhood directed his restless spirit toward too many things and, having barely begun, abandoned each one. "Nevertheless, although he occupied himself with various things, he never ceased drawing and working in...