"Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses"
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Common sense, in Leonardo's framing, isn’t a folksy gut instinct or a moral compass. It’s an internal editor: the faculty that sits behind sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and decides what to do with their noisy, often misleading reports. That definition quietly demotes the romantic idea of intuition and elevates something closer to disciplined perception. For an artist-engineer obsessed with how light falls, how water swirls, how bodies move, the mind’s job isn’t to invent truth but to audit it.
The line works because it smuggles a radical claim into plain language: your senses don’t deliver reality; they deliver inputs. Common sense is the adjudicator that compares, cross-checks, and corrects. In Renaissance Italy, that’s not a neutral position. Leonardo is writing in a culture where inherited authority still competed with observation, and where painting itself was fighting to be recognized as a form of knowledge, not mere decoration. By defining common sense as a judge, he argues that intelligence begins with evidence - and that the act of seeing carefully is already a kind of thinking.
There’s subtextual self-defense here, too. Artists were often treated as craftsmen; Leonardo insists the painter’s eye is investigative. His “common sense” is less village wisdom than proto-scientific method: skepticism toward first impressions, respect for measurement, and a belief that truth emerges when perception is organized rather than worshipped.
The line works because it smuggles a radical claim into plain language: your senses don’t deliver reality; they deliver inputs. Common sense is the adjudicator that compares, cross-checks, and corrects. In Renaissance Italy, that’s not a neutral position. Leonardo is writing in a culture where inherited authority still competed with observation, and where painting itself was fighting to be recognized as a form of knowledge, not mere decoration. By defining common sense as a judge, he argues that intelligence begins with evidence - and that the act of seeing carefully is already a kind of thinking.
There’s subtextual self-defense here, too. Artists were often treated as craftsmen; Leonardo insists the painter’s eye is investigative. His “common sense” is less village wisdom than proto-scientific method: skepticism toward first impressions, respect for measurement, and a belief that truth emerges when perception is organized rather than worshipped.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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