How Leonardo da Vinci lived: habits, interests, and daily life

May 22, 2026

Leonardo da Vinci was not only a painter, inventor, and scientist, but also a tireless observer of reality. His daily life revolved around study, drawing, experiments, notebooks, workshops, courts, and constant travels between Florence, Milan, Rome, and France.

Understanding how Leonardo da Vinci lived means entering his method of work, since the most reliable information about his everyday life comes from codices, drawings, historical accounts, and studies now preserved in libraries, museums, and international collections. His notes reveal a mind constantly in motion and interested in many different subjects, although it is difficult to find detailed information about his private life or personal habits. What can be said with greater certainty is that Leonardo built his entire life around curiosity, study, and continuous experimentation. His daily routine followed the rhythm of research and creative work among workshops, courts, and intellectual environments, where artistic commissions alternated with scientific studies and technical projects. For Leonardo, everyday experiences became opportunities for knowledge and observation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• How Leonardo da Vinci lived in everyday life
• Study, observation, and continuous curiosity
• Notebooks, codices, and mirror writing
• Workshop, pupils, and daily work
• Diet and relationship with animals
• Leonardo’s habits between truth and legends
• The Leonardo Exhibition in Rome and his working method

How Leonardo da Vinci lived in everyday life

Leonardo da Vinci’s life was not that of an artist tied to a single place or a single activity. Born in Vinci in 1452, he trained in Florence, worked for many years in Milan, stayed in Rome, and spent his final years in France at the court of Francis I. This mobility deeply influenced both his lifestyle and his work, because Leonardo came into contact with very different environments and people, including artistic workshops, noble courts, construction sites, scholars, engineers, architects, and patrons.

His daily life was therefore closely connected to the needs of patrons and to the projects he worked on. His time was divided among paintings, studies, technical projects, and the observation of nature, animals, and the human body. Leonardo was not an artist devoted to only one discipline, but a figure capable of constantly moving from one field to another, which is why it is difficult to reconstruct a typical “day in the life” of Leonardo.

What we can say is that his manuscripts reveal a constant habit of observing, taking notes, and transforming what he saw into drawings, schemes, questions, and projects. Leonardo’s daily life was therefore deeply connected to research, and every natural, technical, or human phenomenon could become material for study.

Study, observation, and continuous curiosity

One of Leonardo’s most important habits was the direct observation of reality in order to understand how natural and artificial phenomena worked. His notes contain studies on water, the flight of birds, light, perspective, botany, mechanics, anatomy, and movement.

For Leonardo, these subjects were not separate but somehow connected, and his ability to link different disciplines is one of the aspects that still makes him feel modern today.

For his studies, Leonardo used drawing, which was not intended solely for creating paintings but also for analyzing, verifying, imagining, and understanding the structure and functioning of things.

Through sketches and annotations, Leonardo gave shape to ideas still in development, many of which remained unfinished because his interest focused on the process rather than only the final result. As a consequence, every project could open new questions, and every question could lead him toward another field of research.

Notebooks, codices, and mirror writing

Leonardo’s notebooks are among the most valuable testimonies for understanding his daily life and habits because his manuscripts also contain personal notes and reflections on painting.

His notes are not organized texts but often fragmented materials that show thought taking shape while it develops. Leonardo probably worked on loose sheets that he carried with him to record observations and ideas; these materials were later collected and bound into codices. This detail helps us imagine a daily life made up of constant annotations, not always systematic but extremely productive.

Among the most important manuscripts are the Codex Atlanticus, preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Forster Codices at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Codex Arundel at the British Library, and the drawings preserved in the Royal Collection. The Royal Collection Trust preserves around 550 drawings by Leonardo, one of the most important collections in the world, documenting the breadth of his interests, from painting to anatomy and from engineering to botany.

A famous feature of his manuscripts is mirror writing, meaning writing from right to left. This characteristic contributed to the mysterious aura surrounding Leonardo, although it was probably connected to the fact that he was left-handed rather than to the use of a secret code.

Workshop, pupils, and daily work

Leonardo trained in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, an environment where art, technique, and craftsmanship coexisted. The Renaissance workshop was not merely an artist’s studio, but also a place of education and production, where people learned drawing, painting, sculpture, material preparation, and often skills related to engineering, decoration, and stage design.

From a practical point of view, Leonardo carried out manual and experimental work such as preparing colors, studying materials and supports, designing machines, building models, and testing technical solutions.

His daily activity was not always solitary, but involved collaborators, young artists, patrons, and figures connected to the courts where he worked. Among the best-known names associated with his life are Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Salaì, and Francesco Melzi, who played a fundamental role in preserving Leonardo’s manuscripts after the master’s death.

Diet and relationship with animals

Some historical accounts, especially those attributed to Giorgio Vasari and other authors, describe Leonardo as a person sensitive toward animals and attentive to living beings. From this comes the widespread idea that he was vegetarian, although there are no documents capable of proving this theory with certainty.

It is possible that Leonardo had a particular sensitivity toward animals and that this influenced his eating habits, but the modern concept of a vegetarian diet, with its ethical, health-related, or environmental motivations, does not perfectly correspond to the cultural context of the Renaissance.

What is certain is that Leonardo paid great attention to the natural world, something clearly visible in his studies of animals and plants, from which it emerges that nature was not simply a background for him, but a reality to observe and understand.

Leonardo’s habits between truth and legends

Many legends have developed around Leonardo, including the famous theory of polyphasic sleep, according to which he supposedly slept for short periods throughout the day instead of following a regular night-time sleep schedule. This claim is very popular, but there is no solid evidence supporting its accuracy.

The same is true for many quotes attributed to Leonardo for which no reliable sources exist. Leonardo was certainly an extraordinary man, and his fascination contributed to the creation of an almost mythological image of him, but his uniqueness does not depend on sensational anecdotes. Rather, it comes from the consistency with which he observed, studied, drew, and connected different phenomena.

His true documented habits were curiosity, constant note-taking, drawing as a method of thought, interest in experimentation, and the tendency to overcome the boundaries between disciplines.

The Leonardo Exhibition in Rome and his working method

Visiting the Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition in Rome is a way to understand Leonardo’s daily life by getting closer to his method and observing working machines, models, and reconstructions inspired by his codices.

The exhibition helps visitors understand the relationship between drawing, invention, and experimentation because the machines make visible the mechanisms that appear in the manuscripts as sketches, notes, and projects. This makes the experience especially useful for families, young visitors, and anyone who wants to understand Leonardo in a practical way rather than only through his biography.

Leonardo’s daily life was made of constant observation and work, but also of imagination applied to reality. His most important habits were not eccentric gestures or legendary curiosities, but rather the ability to observe carefully, ask questions, draw in order to understand, and search for connections between art, science, and technology.

You can read the Italian version of this article here >