Leonardo da Vinci: genius, chaos and the neurodivergent mind

I have always said that if I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be Leonardo da Vinci. Also, ideally, a very good translator, because I have questions, and I refuse to waste a once-in-history dinner opportunity nodding vaguely across five centuries of linguistic confusion.

I have never been interested in the flattened, school-poster version of Leonardo. Great painter. Inventor. Genius. Fine. True. Still nowhere near enough. Those labels are technically correct in the same way that calling the ocean “a bit wet” is technically correct. They do not get close to the scale of him.

My private theory has always been that he was a time traveller. I know that is not academically rigorous, but honestly, explain him to me any other way. How do you account for a man born in 1452 who was sketching flying machines, studying anatomy in obsessive detail, designing weapons and engineering systems, thinking about hydraulics, optics and architecture, and leaving behind notebooks that still feel as if they were written by somebody who had somehow seen several centuries ahead and was trying to jot things down before the portal closed?

When the da Vinci exhibition came to South Africa years ago, I was mesmerised. Properly mesmerised. I remember walking through it feeling less as if I were looking at the work of a historical figure and more as if I were standing inside the afterglow of a mind that simply could not keep itself inside one lane. That exhibition sealed it for me. I became a devoted Leonardo person on the spot, and I have stayed one.

What fascinates me even more now is that some researchers have suggested that the very mind we celebrate as genius may also have shown traits we would now recognise as neurodivergent, particularly ADHD, and possibly dyslexia. That does not mean we get to march backwards through history with a clipboard and hand out tidy retrospective diagnoses. We cannot. But it does open a far more interesting conversation than the old polished-genius story ever could.

Because once you look past the mythology, Leonardo starts to look not only extraordinary, but strangely familiar. Not in an ordinary sense. In the way certain minds seem to recognise each other across time.

He was brilliant, obviously. But he was not neat. He was not linear. He was not reliably productive in the sensible, box-ticking, commission-completing way that institutions usually reward. He was notorious for leaving work unfinished. He moved restlessly between subjects. His notebooks leapt across art, science, engineering, anatomy, botany, water, flight, movement and form with the kind of intensity that feels less like a career path and more like cognitive weather.

That is where the conversation becomes genuinely interesting. The world is very comfortable admiring genius after the fact. It is much less comfortable living with the conditions that often come with a mind that does not behave itself.

Leonardo is thought to have filled around 13,000 pages of notebooks and drawings, though only about 7,000 survive. Even that smaller number is dizzying. Thousands of pages. Sketches, inventions, observations, diagrams, questions, fragments, investigations. It is the paper trail of a mind that was not merely talented but voracious. And yet for all that output, he also left major works incomplete and delayed commissions so often that frustration followed him too. That combination feels deeply recognisable: enormous inner abundance paired with uneven outward completion.

A lot of neurodivergent people know that pattern intimately. The ideas are there. The brilliance may be there. The vision is often there in alarming quantities. But getting everything finished, packaged and delivered in the format the world demands is another story entirely.

That gap has broken the hearts of many bright children and many brilliant adults.

It is also why Leonardo matters as more than a historical curiosity. He gives us a way to talk about minds that are magnificent and difficult, fruitful and frustrating, expansive and hard to contain. He reminds us that there is a difference between lack of ability and difficulty with regulation, initiation, sequencing, completion or sustained follow-through. Those things are not remotely the same, but schools, workplaces and families still confuse them all the time.

A child who starts six projects and finishes one is often treated as careless. A teenager whose attention zigzags between obsession and avoidance is often treated as lazy. A gifted student who cannot always produce on demand is often judged by the missing product instead of the extraordinary mind sitting behind it. We are still, centuries later, embarrassingly skilled at misreading this kind of brain.

That is one of the reasons Leonardo feels so modern.

Some researchers have argued that his chronic procrastination, task-switching and difficulty completing work are consistent with ADHD. Others have pointed to his unusual spelling patterns and mirror writing as possible clues toward dyslexia. His famous mirror writing, of course, has attracted endless mystique, but some historians sensibly note that as a left-handed writer he may simply have found right-to-left writing easier and less smudged. Sometimes what later generations turn into mystery is simply a practical adaptation by a person whose brain or body worked a little differently.

The other thing I find compelling about Leonardo is that his mind seems to have been gloriously, inconveniently interdisciplinary long before that became a fashionable word. He did not respect the borders we like to draw between subjects. Art was not separate from science. Beauty was not separate from structure. Anatomy was not separate from movement. Engineering was not separate from imagination. He looked at wings and water and muscles and machines and faces and seemed to understand instinctively that everything touched everything else.

That kind of thinking still causes problems in formal education.

We say we want creativity, but usually within a rubric. We say we value curiosity, but preferably on-topic and assessable. We praise innovation once it has become tidy enough to print on a poster. A mind like Leonardo’s would almost certainly have dazzled some teachers and driven others quietly mad. He would have been the student with ten impossible questions, two unfinished tasks, a margin full of sketches, a completely unexpected insight and no interest whatsoever in staying in the neat little lane someone else had marked out for him.

And honestly, thank goodness for that.

It is not difficult to imagine how badly a system built around compliance, repetition and standardised output can misread a mind built around depth, pattern, visual-spatial reasoning and obsessive curiosity. We still do this now. We still confuse inconsistency with lack of depth. We still underestimate visual intelligence if it is not paired with tidy written output. We still treat unfinished brilliance as if the unfinished part cancels out the brilliance.

It does not.

He did finish some things, of course, and what he finished changed history. The Last Supper. Mona Lisa. Anatomical studies that were astonishing for their time. Designs and observations that still look startlingly advanced. But even here, what grips me is not just the finished masterpieces. It is the overspill. The notebooks. The investigations. The evidence of a person who could not stop looking more closely, asking more questions, following one more trail.

That is why the neurodivergence lens feels useful here. Not because it explains everything, but because it helps us read his life with more generosity and more accuracy. Instead of asking, in that irritated tone institutions so often use, why he could not just finish what he started, we begin to ask better questions. What kind of mind was this? What kind of friction came with it? What did the world gain because he thought so widely, and what did he probably lose because that same mind did not move in neat, obedient lines?

Those are better questions. More humane ones too. They are also more useful ones for parents, teachers and anyone raising or teaching a child who is bright, intense, scattered, visually gifted, idea-rich, inconsistent on paper and perpetually underestimated because their strengths do not arrive in conventional packaging.

Leonardo does not give us a neat moral. He does not tie himself up into a cheerful little lesson on how every struggle is secretly a superpower. I am glad of that. Real neurodivergence is not cute. It can be exhausting. It can be embarrassing. It can cost people marks, opportunities, confidence and peace. A brain that generates extraordinary ideas can still leave its owner overwhelmed, behind, misunderstood or unable to translate inner fireworks into outer order.

That is precisely why Leonardo is worth thinking about in this way. He lets us hold two truths at once: a mind can be astonishing and still struggle. A person can be ahead of their time and still frustrate everyone around them. That is not a contradiction to be smoothed away. It is the point.

And perhaps that is what makes him so magnetic to so many gifted and neurodivergent people now. He does not feel like a polished statue of perfection. He feels like evidence. Evidence that a mind can be overflowing with insight and still be difficult to organise. Evidence that unfinished does not mean empty. Evidence that looking scattered from the outside may, in some cases, mean being furiously connected on the inside.

We should be careful, of course, not to turn him into a mascot, a meme or a retroactive diagnosis with very nice cheekbones. We cannot clinically assess a Renaissance polymath across more than 500 years. We should not flatten his entire life into one label, or pretend that ADHD or dyslexia would somehow explain every dimension of his genius. They would not. Leonardo was Leonardo. Singular, excessive, unrepeatable.

But careful does not have to mean dismissive. There is room for caution and recognition to exist side by side.

We can acknowledge that one 2019 study argued that Leonardo’s lifelong difficulties with procrastination and task completion fit a plausible ADHD profile. We can note that researchers and historians have also discussed features suggestive of dyslexia. We can accept uncertainty while also admitting that, through a modern neurodivergent lens, his mind looks strikingly familiar.

And perhaps that is the real value of this conversation. It helps us see that brilliance does not always arrive in orderly forms. It does not always behave well in classrooms. It does not always produce in a steady, measurable stream. Sometimes it circles. Sometimes it wanders. Sometimes it leaves ten things half done while inventing the eleventh.

Sometimes it looks impractical until history catches up.

So yes, if I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would still be Leonardo da Vinci. I would want to ask him what it felt like to live inside that mind. Whether the flood of ideas felt exhilarating or intrusive. Whether he experienced his unfinished work as torment, or simply as the natural consequence of seeing too much at once. Whether he knew he was extraordinary, or whether it just felt normal to be interested in everything.

I would also, quite selfishly, want to know whether being that far ahead of your time is thrilling or lonely.

My guess is both.

Mostly, though, I think I would want to sit across from him and feel what it was like to be in the presence of a mind that refused every smallness offered to it.

Because long before we had language for neurodivergence, long before anyone talked about executive function, attention regulation, dyslexia, giftedness or twice-exceptionality, Leonardo da Vinci was already showing the world something we still have not fully learned.

Some minds are not built for tidy lanes. Some are built to notice what everybody else misses. Some arrive early, carrying pieces of the future, and spend a lifetime trying to sketch them fast enough for the rest of us to catch up.

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