from the notebooks of leonardo da vinci · ~7,200 surviving pages · paintings completed: about twenty

The greatest portfolio in history is a pile of unfinished work.

// he wrote to himself in mirror script. tap the backwards line to read it his way, then yours.

Below is his actual to-do list — real entries from the notebooks, alongside the works he famously never finished. You are welcome to try checking things off. The list has been open for five centuries. It has opinions about closure.

to do — milan, thereabouts, 1490s0 of 8 done
// checking things off is a modern superstition. he kept the list anyway. the keeping was the work.

In defense of the open item

He finished perhaps twenty paintings in sixty-seven years, and the world calls him the most complete genius who ever lived. The arithmetic only works if finished was never the unit of account. The unit was attention: seven thousand pages of water studies, anatomy, jokes, grocery lists, and machines that were four centuries early. Every page an open item. Every open item a door he left unlocked for whoever came next.

// your list, for comparison, is younger and better rested. the unfinished items on it are not debts. they are drawings of doors.

Finished is a place. Working is a direction.

The list stays open. His did, and it built the Renaissance a nervous system. Keep the notebook — the rest of the items will find their century.

The woodpecker's tongue, measuring Milan, and the master of arithmetic are entries from his actual lists (the woodpecker famously so). The Gran Cavallo's clay model was destroyed by French troops c. 1499; a cast from his plans was unveiled in 1999. The Adoration of the Magi was abandoned circa 1482. The Mona Lisa remained with him until his death in 1519. Roughly 7,200 notebook pages survive, an estimated quarter of what he wrote. Woodpecker tongue anatomy was comprehensively described in modern literature; the 2020 paper made the coincidence famous.