Accueil - History - Leonardo da Vinci, the legend!
Date : 07 May 2025Categories : HistoryNewsScience
Leonardo da Vinci is The star for left-handed. As soon as anyone wants to name a famous left-handed person, Einstein (and there are many doubts about his left-handedness) and co. are quickly relegated to last place, and it’s the great Leo who is irrevocably put on pins, T-shirts and could have had his star in Hollywood as the ultimate left-hander. But were Leonardo and co. really left-handed? And firts of all, how can we prove it, given that there are very few direct testimonies, and that the guys back then would have made “nice” haters on today’s social networks?
Being left-handed isn’t easy every day. So in the Renaissance, as you can imagine, there’s no need to draw you a picture. Although, as the Medici’s darling, Leonardo could have become an influencer with millions of followers today, and his left-handedness would have been the must have. Whole planes would have gone for brain or hand surgery to become left-handed for less, who knows?
But I’m getting lost, so let’s get back to our Renaissance…
Jealousyor admiration, the God of the left-handed did not leave his contemporaries unmoved, and that’s good. I plunged with delight into historian Pierre-Michel Bertrand’s ‘Histoire des gauchers, des gens à l’envers’. Among other things, it tells us that Luca Pacioli, the great mathematician and friend of Leonardo da Vinci, said of him that he admired his “extraordianry left and” (ineffabile senistra mano). Others, much less symmpathetic, such as the painter Giogio Vasari, wrote: “His intelligence of art made him start many things, but finish none, because it seemed to him that the hand could not reach the dreamed perfection”, or another architect and sculptor friend, Sebastiano Serlio, said: “His hand was equal to his intelligence”. Nice, we say…
FAUUUTTTEE whistled by the referee! Let me stop you right there. Just because you’re left-handed doesn’t mean you write like a pig. I’m a perfect example of that myself. Some people say that I don’t write “like a lefty”, but rather like a schoolteacher (right-handed, of course!). I share the life of a perfect right-hander, who struggles every time he has to use a pen, and his handwriting would make any graphologist swoon… No, when I talk about handwriting with da Vinci’s friend, I’m of course talking about the bundles he left to posterity, almost all written in mirror image (Scrittura a specchio). Clearly, this was fashionable in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Many of the artists and thinkers of the time, all avowed left-handers, wrote in mirror. It’s always better than scrolling through videos of cute little cats. And it’s an established fact that most left-handers can easily write in mirror-image, which is not the case for right-handers, let alone my favorite right hander.
Numerous experts have studied the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and many other painters to verify that they were left-handed, because not everyone is left-handed, and once they have done so, to carry out their work as experts, i.e. to check whether the works they are credited with are genuine or whether they are forgeries or the work of one of their pupils. Left-handers hatch from top left to bottom right and vice versa. This is due to the angle at which the pencil grips the paper. Some “fake lefties” have tried to imitate this inclination by turning their paper, but they’re easily fooled because left-haded hatching has a slight bulge to the right due to the natural movement of the hand. Right-handers will go the other way.
Leonardo da Vinci, our icon, apart from being a true left-hander, was gifted at everything. He would indoubtedly have been considered HIP by our contemporary shrinks. He was smarter than average, gifted in mathematics, particularly in geometry, creative, creative, and no doubt many other things. Perhaps too much for one man. It’s undoubtedly thanks to him, or because of him, that left-handed people are considered to be particularly gifted in these various subjects. And that we snatch up any allegedly left-handed personality as soon as it shows any skill in one of these disciplines (back to Einstein and we’ve come full circle). Hop! A stamp from the club, a loyalty card and we’re off to grab a bite to eat. As Mr Bertrand told me: ‘Left-handers are very narcissistic about their left-handedness! But from time to time, perhaps often, there is deception and not all gifted people are left-handed, and the same goes for mirrors!