To be accurate, this one is a little more of a ”Fun Speculation Friday” as we will never know for a fact whether he had ADHD. He was not diagnosed in his lifetime and no credible diagnostician would pretend that they definitively prove someone had a disorder 500 years after they died. Still to consider him as an artist with a disability makes Leonardo da Vinci even more inspiring. Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most talented artist the world has ever known. He is frequently held up as the ideal ”Renaissance man” because of his notebooks full of scientific study, observations and plans for different inventions. The thing is, he never got around to editing, organizing or publishing those notes in order to help others learn and build off of his study. He never got around to building his machines. The majority of his work went unfinished. While many great artists from history created hundreds or thousands of works, Leonardo only appears to have completed a few dozen and he was notorious for taking absurdly long to do so. It took him over a decade to complete the Mona Lisa. He spent 3 years painting The Last Supper and he only finished that work after his patron threatened to cut off his funding. That distractibility and constant thirst for knowledge on a wide range of topics likely made him frustrating to work with, but it is also what made him brilliant.

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