Which Famous Painter Could Write With One Hand And Draw With The Other At The Same Time?

Every bit the standout case of the "Renaissance Man" ideal, Leonardo da Vinci racked upward no small number of accomplishments in his life. He also had his eccentricities, and tried his mitt at a number of experiments that might await a fleck odd fifty-fifty to his admirers today. In the case of 1 practice he eventually mastered and with which he stuck, he tried his paw in a more than literal sense than usual: Leonardo, the prove conspicuously shows, had a habit of writing backwards, starting at the right side of the page and moving to the left.

"Only when he was writing something intended for other people did he write in the normal direction," says the Museum of Science. Why did he write backwards? That remains one of the host of so far unanswerable questions about Leonardo'south remarkable life, but "one idea is that it may have kept his hands clean. People who were contemporaries of Leonardo left records that they saw him write and pigment left handed. He also made sketches showing his own left paw at work. As a lefty, this mirrored writing way would have prevented him from smudging his ink equally he wrote."

Or Leonardo could accept adult his "mirror writing" out of fearfulness, a hypothesis acknowledged fifty-fifty by books for immature readers: "Throughout his life, he was worried near the possibility of others stealing his ideas," writesRachel A. Koestler-Grack inLeonardo Da Vinci: Artist, Inventor, and Renaissance Human."The observations in his notebooks were written in such a way that they could be read only by holding the books up to a mirror." The blog Walker's Capacity makes a representative counterargument: "Do you really think that a man equally clever as Leonardo thought it was a good way to prevent people from reading his notes? This man, this genius, if hetrulywanted to make his notes readable only to himself, he would've invented an entirely new language for this purpose. We're talking well-nigh a dude who conceptualized parachutes even earlier helicopters were a matter."

Perhaps the well-nigh widely seen piece of Leonardo's mirror writing is his notes onVitruvian Man(a piece of which appears at the acme of the post), his enormously famous drawing that fits the proportions of the homo body into the geometry of both a circle and a square (and whose elegant mathematics we featured final week). Many examples of mirror writing exist later on Leonardo, from his countryman Matteo Zaccolini'south 17th-century treatise on color to the 18th- and 19th-century calligraphy of the Ottoman Empire to the front of ambulances today. Each of those has its function, but one wonders whether as curious a listen as Leonardo's would want to write backwards just for the joy of mastering and using a skill, whatsoever skill, nevertheless much it might baffle others — or indeed, because information technology might bamboozle them.

If you're interested in all things da Vinci, make certain y'all bank check out the new bestselling biography, Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson.

Related Content:

The Elegant Mathematics of Vitruvian Homo, Leonardo da Vinci's Most Famous Drawing: An Animated Introduction

Download the Sublime Anatomy Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Available Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonardo da Vinci's Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings

Leonardo da Vinci's Visionary Notebooks Now Online: Scan 570 Digitized Pages

Leonardo da Vinci's Handwritten Resume (1482)

Leonardo Da Vinci's To Do List (Circa 1490) Is Much Cooler Than Yours

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and civilization. His projects include the bookThe Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angelesand the video seriesThe City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.