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When testing a new pen, Leonardo da Vinci was in the habit of scrawling the phrase dimmi — tell me.
The doodles appear in the margins of his notebooks, those records of his ravenous, almost carnal curiosity about the natural world. Dimmi was his animating question. Dimmi, he wrote between scribbled shopping lists (eels, velvet, wine) and sketches of inventions, instructing himself: “Describe what sneezing is, what yawning is, the falling sickness, spasm.” Dimmi — tell me your secrets — he implored in his studies of the movement of water and the working of the woodpecker’s tongue.
Painter, engineer, anatomist, the designer
