Time Travelers Tonight: Unscripted Interviews with History’s Greatest Minds

In 1495, in the court of Milan, a suit of armor stood up and walked on its own. It could sit, wave its arms, and lift its visor, all powered by a complex system of internal pulleys and gears. It was a robot knight, and its creator is our guest tonight. He’s been called a painter, an inventor, a scientist, a genius. He’s all of those things. Please welcome, Leonardo da Vinci. It is a pleasure. And you get the mechanics of the knight correct. Most people just assume it was some kind of trick. No tricks here. It’s an honor to have you. I have to ask… a robot knight?

At the same time you’re sketching plans for The Last Supper? How did those two things exist in the same brain? Why would they not? One is the study of man’s spirit, the other the study of his mechanics. To understand the body, you must understand how the levers and pulleys of the muscles work. To understand the soul, you must see how it animates the face. It is all the same question. So art and science were never separate for you. They are two words for the same thing: observation. Looking closely. So closely that you see the pattern behind the thing itself.

Whether it’s the eddy in a river or the curl of a lip... the pattern is the truth. Your notebooks are full of this. Thousands of pages. We have them now, you know. We’ve poured over them. And right next to a perfect anatomical drawing of a human heart, there’s a grocery list. Of course! The mind that seeks to understand the heart is housed in a body that requires bread and cheese. It is all connected. You cannot have one without the other. The sublime and the simple live on the same page because they live in the same man, in the same day. Okay, but what about the Mona Lisa?

When you were painting her, did you have any sense that it would become… well, the painting? The most famous face in the world? Or was it just another commission you were working on? It was a challenge. That was all. The challenge was not to paint a woman. It was to paint a thought. To capture the moment a thought arrives in the mind before it is spoken. The smile is not the point. The smile is the result of the point. Wow. I want to push back on something, though. If you’re comfortable. I am rarely comfortable. Please, proceed. People call you the greatest genius of your age.

But you left so much unfinished. The great Sforza horse statue, countless paintings, machines that were never built. Some might look at that and say you were a perfectionist who couldn’t finish. Others might just say you were a procrastinator. And what is the difference? People mistake the artifact for the work. The painting, the statue… that is just the shell. The husk. The work is the seeing. The work is the understanding I gained trying to solve the problem of the horse, or the light, or the water. So you’re saying the finished product doesn’t matter? It matters to the patron who paid for it.

But to me? It is evidence that I asked a question. The finished piece means the questioning has stopped. I was never very good at stopping. The pursuit of knowing was always more compelling than the state of having known. So looking back from where we are now, we see this incredible legacy of art and invention. But for you, that was all just… the byproduct. The real work was internal. The real work was curiosity. I simply followed it where it led. From a paintbrush, to a chisel, to a bird’s wing. If there was one question you never got to answer, one thing you wish you’d had more time to understand, what would it be?

Water. Its flow. Its power. Its shape. It is the blood of the world, and I feel I only ever dipped my fingers in it. I never understood its heart. We look at your life and see a dozen different men—the artist, the scientist, the inventor. But you were never any of those things. You were just one man, asking a thousand questions.