Leonardo da Vinci's Impressive To-Do List

Most of our to-do lists are full of dull, everyday tasks. Some are ordinary, simple and not very interesting, so they're easy to forget. Others involve jobs we'd sometimes rather not "keep in our heads".

A to-do list Leonardo da Vinci wrote 500 years ago shows that he was no ordinary man - read the goals this great genius set for himself. We promise you'll be surprised, and maybe even inspired.

Da Vinci carried a notebook with him everywhere, in which he drew and jotted down anything he found interesting. He wrote that it is very useful to observe, take note, and reflect. One of these notebooks, dated to around 1490, contains a to-do list.

While the meaning of some of the entries can be hard to grasp, keep in mind that Da Vinci never expected this list to be read by internet users five hundred years later.

X in box symbol Calculate the size of Milan and its suburbs.

X in box symbol Find a book about Milan and its churches. The stationer on the way to Cordusio Square should have one.

X in box symbol Find out the measurements of the Corte Vecchio (the inner courtyard of the duke's palace).

X in box symbol Find out the measurements of the duke's palace.

X in box symbol Ask a master of arithmetic to teach me how to square a triangle.

X in box symbol Ask Messer Fazio (professor of medicine and law from Pavia) to teach me about proportion.

X in box symbol Ask the Brera Benedictine (at the Benedictine monastery in Milan) to show me De Ponderibus (a medieval treatise on mechanics).

X in box symbol Talk to Giannino, the artillery officer, and find out how the wall of the Ferrara tower was built without embrasures.

X in box symbol Ask Benedetto Portinari (a merchant from Florence) how people walk on ice in Flanders.

X in box symbol Draw Milan.

X in box symbol Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on a bastion by day and by night.

X in box symbol Examine Maestro Giannetto's crossbow.

X in box symbol Find a hydraulics expert and ask how locks, canals and mills are repaired in Lombardy.

X in box symbol Ask Maestro Giovanni Francese about the measurements of the sun he promised me.

X in box symbol Find Vitolone (author of a medieval text on optics), whose work is in the Pavia library, and who understands mathematics.

Even now you can sense Da Vinci's curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Notice how often he notes that someone has something to teach him.

Later to-do lists reveal Da Vinci's fascination with anatomy. In a notebook full of drawings of bones and internal organs, he adds new tasks: obtain a skull, describe a crocodile's jaw and a woodpecker's tongue, and estimate the size of a corpse using his own fingers as a unit of measure.

On the same page he lists the qualities needed to be a good anatomical draughtsman. Most important is a command of perspective and of the structure of the human body. And, of course, a strong stomach.

Above you can see a page from Da Vinci's notebook. Even if you know sixteenth-century Italian, notice that the author wrote everything in mirror script.