I offered the Lord Ludovico ten engines of war and only then a painting. Here is what I promised, what I drew, what was never built, and what I refused to write down.
Leonardo's letter to Ludovico Sforza, the giant crossbow of 42 braccia, the armoured car and its gearing, and why he called war a most bestial madness.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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30 min
A man who said he was a hundred died beside me at Santa Maria Nuova. I opened him to see the cause of so sweet a death, and found it in his vessels.
Leonardo's centenarian dissection of 1507 to 1508: thickened, snake-like vessels, the child of two years, the oranges, and why narrow vessels carry so little blood.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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29 min
I draw each muscle as a thread from its beginning to its end, weigh the elbow as the pole of a balance, and find the cord that turns the hand palm up.
Leonardo's arm studies of 1510 to 1511: muscles drawn as threads, the elbow as a lever, why the biceps pulls nine times the weight, and how it turns the hand.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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32 min
Vitruvius gave the circle and the square one centre. I gave the circle the navel and the square the groin, measured living men, and made the foot a seventh.
Leonardo's Vitruvian Man: the circle on the navel, the square on the groin, the text on the sheet translated, and the measures he took from living men.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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31 min
A painted room can be true from one point only, and the friars sit along sixty braccia of floor. I drive a nail into the head of Christ and snap the strings.
How Leonardo set the Last Supper's vanishing point high above the friars, drew its room with a nail and strings, and why his dry-wall paint began to fail.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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28 min
The glass, the pyramid of lines and the point of diminution, from Brunelleschi's panel to my own first rule, which was wrong.
Leonardo on linear perspective: the pyramid of sight and the pane of glass, why twice the distance looks half as tall, and the error in his first rule.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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31 min
Why my left hand runs from right to left, what I put in my small books and long lists, and what I fear will become of them when I am gone.
How Leonardo kept his notebooks: mirror writing and the left hand, his to-do lists and word lists, and how the codices were scattered after Melzi.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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33 min
Use Florentine portraits and a museum textile to build a costume reference card.
Research Renaissance costume with three museum references, a copyable character design card, and a worked example set in 1540s Florence.
Eternal Gardens
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November 6, 2026
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4 min
by Marie Curie 