'Madonna Litta' by Leonardo da Vinci

I’m reading Michael Gelb‘s ‘How to think like Leonardo da Vinci’ which is an excellent book. I’m working through many of the exercises and finding them deeply inspiring. Over the weekend I did the 100 Questions exercise. It’s simple – in one sitting write down 100 questions in your journal that are signficant to you. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling, and don’t worry if they are repetitive. This was a really powerful exercise. I’ve extended the exercise a bit by getting hold of a new notebook where I am going to generate thought-pieces on each of the questions, unpacking what they mean to me.

Anyway, the reason for this post was to highlight one small fact which I came across in the Gelb book, which staggered me. There are only 17 paintings by Leonardo da Vinci which have survived – that’s an amazingly small number. We all know many of these paintings. Of these, several are not finished!

Leonardo also produced an enormous volume of notebooks and drawings. But it’s the idea that he has developed such a formidable reputation as a painter from such a small body of work.

Recently I bought an issue of ‘BBC Focus’ magazine, which is a science and technology magazine here in the UK, produced by the Public Broadcaster. It is full of fascinating facts.

There is a whole section on atoms, which includes this which I thought was really mind-warping:

“Atoms are 99.9% empty space. If all the space was sucked out of the atoms in your body, you’d shrink to the size of a grain of salt. If you did the same thing to the entire human race then all six billion of us would fit inside a single apple.”

I’m doing a series on Buddhism on this blog at the moment. This fact about atoms conjures all sorts of ideas about us being full of emptiness, and the idea that we can all fit inside an apple is a beautiful way of looking at the connectivity of us all.