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In 1490, Leonardo da Vinci drew the Vitruvian Man, a figure inside a circle and square that synthesized mathematics, anatomy, and philosophy into a single image. What makes this interesting isn't the drawing itself. It's what his notebooks reveal about how he got there.

Leonardo left us 7,200 pages documenting exactly how he thought. These aren't casual sketches, they're working documents spanning 40 years, dated and detailed enough that we can track his thinking process in real-time. The Codex Atlanticus contains 2,238 pages. The Codex Leicester has 72 pages just on water and geology. Anatomical studies, engineering designs, mathematical problems, observations about light and shadow, all documented systematically.

This episode examines the specific pattern those notebooks reveal: systematic observation across multiple domains, deliberate synthesis of connections between different fields, and iterative refinement over decades. We trace how Leonardo's anatomical dissections informed his painting techniques, how his studies of water flow influenced his engineering designs, how his mathematical work on proportions changed his architectural thinking.

This wasn't scattered genius. It was disciplined practice. His notebooks show him performing 30 human dissections and creating over 240 anatomical drawings between 1507 and 1513. They show him building glass models of the heart to test blood flow patterns, then comparing those patterns to rivers. They show him returning to the same problems years later with new understanding, The Last Supper took three years of documented iteration, The Mona Lisa has four documented paint layers.

Contemporary accounts from Giorgio Vasari and Matteo Bandello confirm this was unusual for the time. Other artists didn't work this way. Leonardo developed a systematic integration practice and maintained it for four decades.

No speculation about genius or inspiration. Just the documented choices revealed in 7,200 pages of notebooks, and the practical framework those choices demonstrate.