Florence, October 14, 1471
He was not yet thirty and already the most unsettling mind in any room he entered. I watched him from across Verrocchio’s workshop today, where he was bent over a drawing of a water wheel, cross-hatching shadow with his left hand in a direction no one else uses. The other apprentices glance at him and look away. I do not look away.
Leonardo does not sketch. He interrogates. Every line is a question put to the material world: what are you, really, beneath the surface I can see. The water wheel became something else on his page, something about force and counterforce that Verrocchio himself stopped to study for a moment before walking on without comment. Verrocchio knows. They all know. They do not say it aloud because saying it would make the knowing too large to carry.
I have been in Florence three years now, in the household of Bishop Rinaldo, officially a student of rhetoric and classical texts. Unofficially: everything I can find, read, question, hold up to the light. Rinaldo already eyes me with the particular suspicion of a man who recognizes an appetite he cannot control. But Lorenzo’s city does not punish appetite. It catalogs it.
I will find a way into this workshop again. There is something in da Vinci I want to be in proximity to, though I cannot yet name what it is. Not his skill. Something under the skill. The refusal to accept the visible as sufficient explanation. I know this feeling. I have been feeling it since I could read.