Essay: Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci

Scope and Aim

Paul Valery presents Leonardo da Vinci not as a biographical subject or anthology of marvels, but as a pattern of thought. The essay seeks in Leonardo a discipline, a way of proceeding that unites the powers of seeing, calculating, and making. Valery extracts from the scattered traces of a universal mind a rule of conduct for intelligence: cultivate exactness without losing mobility, and let curiosity submit to order. Leonardo becomes a model of lucid attention, a figure through whom the modern mind discovers its obligations to precision and experiment.

Leonardo as Method

At the center stands the sovereignty of the eye. For Valery, Leonardo’s gaze is an instrument that measures, compares, and transforms sensation into problem. The visible is never accepted; it is interrogated through variation, extremes, and limits. Words are distrusted unless anchored to operations. Measure, number, and figure carry authority because they force the mind to check itself against things. This discipline refuses the charms of rhetoric and the complacency of opinion. The method proceeds by analysis and recomposition: break the phenomenon into conditions, vary one at a time, and reassemble it under control. Leonardo’s genius is not a privilege of inspiration but a habit of rigorous attention.

The Eye, the Hand, and the Notebook

Valery emphasizes the alliance of eye and hand. To see well is to make; to make well is to see anew. Drawing is an instrument of knowledge, forcing the observer to register relations, distances, and continuous transitions. The notebooks form a laboratory where hypotheses are sketched, compared, and corrected. They organize surprise, conserve questions, and convert dazzlement into tasks. Revision is principled, not anxious. The page becomes a machine that compels the mind to return, verify, and enlarge; it substitutes a method for memory and a schedule for caprice.

Art, Science, and the Refusal of Closure

Painting, in this view, is a science whose propositions are shadows, lines, and tones submitted to laws. Perspective, anatomy, optics, hydraulics, these are not decorations of art but its internal grammar. Sfumato names more than a pictorial effect: it is the intelligence of the continuous, the sense that forms pass through gradations and that nature abhors edges as much as it obeys proportions. Hence Leonardo’s notorious reluctance to finish. Valery reads this not as weakness, but as fidelity to the infinite approach that rigorous thought demands. Completion is often a lie; the true work is the progressive mastery of causes. The world’s essential motions, water, air, growth, call for studies without finality.

Ethics of Economy and Exactitude

From Leonardo’s practice, Valery distills an ethic: seek the greatest effect from the least cause; prefer invariants to impressions; submit invention to control. The imagination is not suppressed but disciplined by number and construction. Universality means not dispersion, but the power to translate procedures from one domain to another: a hydraulic insight informs hair and drapery; a geometric law organizes a composition. The method advances by tests, symmetries, and deliberate detours that illuminate essentials. Precision, patience, and variation form the triad of work.

A Figure Constructed to Instruct

Valery acknowledges that every Leonardo is a creation. His own is an ideal, but one that obliges. By proposing a mind that mistrusts empty words, keeps contact with phenomena, and converts curiosity into controlled experiment, he sketches a regimen for contemporary intelligence. The essay offers not a portrait to admire, but a standard to practice: vigilance of the senses, impersonal criteria, continuous correction, and the courage to leave off when truth requires further approach. To think in the manner of Leonardo is to couple freedom of invention with the dry light of method.