The Unfinished Portrait: On Leonardo's Codices as a Collection of Questions
We often speak of building a 'second brain' or curating a 'personal knowledge base' as if the goal is a polished, final product. We imagine a digital library of definitive answers, a fortress of certainty against the relentless tide of information. But what if the most valuable intellectual companion isn't a compendium of conclusions, but a gallery of open-ended inquiries? For a historical counterpoint, we need only look to the chaotic, beautiful, and profoundly unfinished notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo’s codices are not what we would today call a 'well-organized' system. They are a sprawling mess of brilliance. A sketch of a flying machine tumbles into a grocery list; an intricate study of facial muscles shares a page with the design for a portable bridge. There is no clear taxonomy, no rigid categories, no hyperlinked index. The organization is often associative, a stream of consciousness captured in ink and wash. It is the very opposite of the pristine, searchable digital databases we are encouraged to build. And that, I would argue, is precisely their enduring power.
What Leonardo curated was not a collection of answers, but a living record of a mind at play. The core unit of his knowledge management was the question. He would observe a phenomenon—why is the sky blue? how does a woodpecker’s tongue work?—and then pursue it across disciplines. His notes are filled with phrases like ‘find out…’, ‘inquire…’, ‘ask so-and-so about…’. He was not archiving established facts; he was mapping the terrain of his own ignorance. His notebooks were the engine of his curiosity, not merely its repository.
This stands in stark contrast to the modern temptation to simply 'save' an article or 'clip' a highlight into a note-taking app. The act of preservation can feel like an accomplishment in itself, a cognitive offloading that mistakenly signals understanding. Leonardo’s method required active engagement. To pose a question, he first had to observe deeply. To seek an answer, he had to draw, diagram, and describe. The process of notation was inseparable from the process of thinking. It was a slow, manual, and deeply personal synthesis.
So, what would it mean to adopt a more Leonardian approach to our own feeds and notes? Perhaps it would mean shifting the emphasis from capturing conclusions to formulating better questions. Instead of clipping a full article about the physics of flight, we might write a short note asking how the principle of lift applies to an unrelated problem we’re pondering. Instead of organizing notes by topic, we might tag them by the open questions they relate to, allowing unexpected connections to form between, say, a political essay and a scientific paper.
Leonardo left much of his work unfinished because his curiosity always raced ahead of completion. His true masterpiece was not the handful of paintings he finished, but the thousands of pages of questions he left behind. In our own digital curation, perhaps we should worry less about building a perfect, polished library and more about cultivating a vibrant, questioning garden—a space not for storing what we know, but for nurturing what we yearn to understand. The most dynamic knowledge system is one that remains, gloriously, a work in progress.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: