One Thousand Mona Lisas
The variations of expression
O writer with what letters can you convey the entire figuration with such perfection as drawing gives us here?
—Leonardo Da Vinci, Notebooks On Anatomy
To paint the Mona Lisa you don’t just sit and paint it. That’s the problem with the myth of the artist. We can see the Mona Lisa but we can’t see all the sketches, drafts, studios, experiments, made by Leonardo Da Vinci previous to the final piece. And like any kind of oil painting, we can’t even see all the layers of little corrections behind the last iteration.
Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t paint one beautiful Mona Lisa. He painted a lot of uglies Mona Lisas, one of them was beautiful-the last one.
It had been believed that the Mona Lisa was painted between 1503 and 1506, but, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517.
The key here is “continued working”.
Almost nobody tells you this about writing. To write more and better you need to produce more
Let’s say, you want to produce two pages of text or ideas. Well, you may need to write ten to have eight terrible bad pages and two good ones.
