Category: Writing

The Quest for the Great, First Sentence

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This sentence, right here, is so difficult to write that it’s been known to cause stress, anxiety issues, depression, alcoholism, and in some prolonged cases even suicide. Why is the first sentence so important to writers? If that first sentence wasn’t intriguing or alluring in anyway, you might not be reading this sentence. The subject matter, combined with a great title, are vital to attract, developing a level of consistency will keep them coming back, but they might not read an article from the greatest writer who ever lived if their first sentence isn’t engaging enough to keep them wanting more. 

I wrote a great sentence once. After I wrote it, I couldn’t believe I wrote it. I kind of wrote it on auto-pilot, but when I was done, I took some time out of my day to stare at it and appreciate it. I was so proud. Wow, I thought, what a great sentence, and I wrote it. It can take writers hundreds to thousands of words to say what we want to say. Every once in a great while, we do it in one clear and concise sentence. When that sentence falls out of our head, no matter how hard we worked to achieve it, it almost slips out the witty womb.

The problem, I realized soon after I spent a minute appreciating it for what it was, was that that great sentence didn’t happen until I was all but done writing that article. I put in so much work into writing the article, that when the sentence arrived, I was mentally exhausted. Nearing the end of an article gives the writer as much a sense of completion as reading it does the reader. I’ve said what I wanted to say, and now…I’m…done with it. Wait a second, that was pretty good. That’s really good! 

As great as it felt to write such an incredible sentence, I felt like I was wasting it by putting it in the conclusion. Writers know that if we’re lucky enough to have a reader click on my article, most of them aren’t going read all the way through to the conclusion. With that in mind, I tried something revolutionary, for me anyway. I put that glorious sentence in the intro, and I rewrote the entire article to retrofit it. I rewrote an entire, 2,000 word article to show some sense of appreciation for whatever forces led me to create one great sentence. I also did it because great sentences don’t come along every day, and when they do, we need to build a proper shrine to them. Even though I worked my damn tail off to showcase this sentence, I’m still not sure if I paid it proper homage.  

***

Wait a second, I know what you’re saying about the difficulty of finding Great Sentences and all that, and the glory that follows, but you’re suggesting that I put a conclusion into the intro? “Is it a Great Sentence?” I understand, but don’t you agree that intros and conclusions have decidedly different feels and beats. “Is it a Great Sentence?” Yes, but certain beats and feels have a welcome mat feeling to them, some act as a quality bridge from on paragraph to another, and others just have a wrap up, parting feel to them. “Is it a Great Sentence? Just answer the question. 

“You get what I’m saying here, but your internal struggle will not permit you to put a conclusion into an intro.” It just feels like it would be breaking some kind of cardinal rule of writing to do so. “You don’t waste a Great Sentence by putting it in the back nine, and to every question you ask now, until the end of time, I’ll put, “You don’t waste a Great Sentence!” on repeat, in the manner of the refrain Chuck Palahniuk built for Fight Club: “You don’t talk about Fight Club!”    

The basic definition of a sentence is a string of words used to express a complete thought. There are only so many words an author can use in the English language an author can use to express a thought, some guess that that number is somewhere below 800,000. So, how does a writer achieve the difference between a proper sentence and a great one? It’s an impossible question to answer, as it’s so relative to the subject matter, the goal of the piece, and the manner in which we build a shrine to it after it occurs to us. The difference, in my humble opinion, is more clever than humorous. Humor is great, and it makes your article engaging and memorable, but clever, unique, insightful, and provocative are the crown of the realm. If you can achieve all that with a sharp level of brevity, the world will click a path to your door. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” as the bard once wrote. Seven words is better than eight, and if you can accomplish a profound, provocative point in fewer words all the power to you.  

Your definition of a Great Sentence you wrote is no better than mine, and vice versa. It’s not a competition. It’s an internal excavation process. As opposed to most other areas of life, I don’t view the creation of a Great Sentence in terms of competition. The best, and somewhat flawed analogy, I have for this is golf. 

I don’t know how anyone else analyses their frustratingly infrequent great shots in golf, but I don’t watch my shot thinking that, right there, was so much better than Larry’s. I just wallow in the glory of my great shot, and all of the horrible shots I took prior to that one won’t permit me to view that shot with any level of arrogance. All of the horrible shots I’ve taken in life have also beat me down to the point that it would be almost silly for me to think I might be a good, competitive golfer. I have had some really good shots though, and when they happen I might take a second to admire them, internally reward myself for finally getting one right, and I will then relive it as often as I can. 

There might be some level of competition in golf when it comes to comparing scorecards, but there are no members of a defense trying to curve that golf ball on the tee before we hit it, no one is trying to block our shot, and depending on how we golf, no one will try to tackle us to prevent us from getting to the ball. As with writing the Great Sentence, golf involves the struggle to synthesize the mind and body for the perfect hit. 

No matter how much experience, or training golfers and writers have, a great drive or putt, like a great sentence, surprises us as much as it does everyone else. We know when we hit it perfect, but if we knew how to perfect the mechanics of the shot, we’d do it every time out. 

A great sentence is a relative term, defined by the writer, as the perfect way of summarizing and synthesizing everything we want to say in a few words. It is also the payoff for all the hard work we’ve done leading up to it. When we put in all the hours of reading others’ works and writing our own, we hope that there will be some kind of payoff, or an ultimate clarification. Writing, or at least my writing, is as much about discovery as it is for readers, and the payoff for all the hard work I put into writing the article is that one Great Sentence that clarifies everything I was trying to convey, wraps it up, and puts what I consider a not too tart, not too sweet, Goldilock’s strawberry atop the pie.   

Some call the quest for the great first sentence, The Blinking Cursor Syndrome (cue the foreboding piano keys), others call it conquering the blank page and punching the plain parchment. It is a block, but I think it differs from the infamous writer’s block. I think writer’s block is more a movie contrivance, a trope if you will, than a reality. It portrays the character of the story, who happens to be a writer, as a complicated genius, or someone who’s lost it. We do have to be sympathetic to moviemakers for it wouldn’t be very interesting to watch a writer write. It’s much more dramatic, complicated and intriguing to watch a writer who lost it or can’t find it. True writers, I think, write through blocks, but the difficulty of finding that great, first sentence is real.

The quest for a great first sentence proved humbling for even the best writers. They sorted through hundreds to thousands of words to find the best combination of words before they find something they think hits it just right. Some of the most seasoned writers talked about the difficulty of writing great sentences, and how if they write one great sentence a day, it’s a good day, and most of them figure that about 1% of the sentences they write are great sentences. If that’s the case, what percentage of that percentage proved great enough to be a provocative, engaging first sentence? Some of the most famous writers have admitted that they spent so much time trying to find that perfect combination of words to start a new book that they turned to chemical enhancement as an aide. Before we condemn this for what it is, it does make sense in that they’re trying to approach the material from a fresh perspective, even if it is an altered state. By doing so, they’re also admitting that they couldn’t find it in their normal state, something with which we can all empathize, so they sought the altered state for assistance. They must have had precedent for this, or why would they continue to do it?  

Even for them, the greatest writers who have ever lived, I suspect that the Great Sentences did not arrive in the early gestation periods of the birthing process. Every writer has probably arrived at a great sentence or two in the first draft, but it happens so rarely that they can’t remember it.

Great sentences, in my experience, arrive after the framework is complete. In the beginning, we’re reporters. “Just the facts ma’am.” We’re reporting research, or just reporting our idea. There’s very little room creative writing, until we reach a point where we’re somewhat satisfied with the foundation we’ve laid for our story. This part of our process involves self-imposed stress, anxiety, and whatever we have that drives us to get it right. Once that is accomplished, and we start the cumbersome, and never-ending process of editing, revising, deleting, and rearranging, we relax into a more creative and more emotive state of mind, until we achieve a perfect conjugal symbiosis of a physical and chemical peak that  produces life.

In the final stage, we’re done with all the work, and we think, “What’s the perfect way of wrapping all this up?” That search is so much more relaxed, and when that “Aha!” moment finally arrives, and the writer writes a sentence that could be one of the best lines they’ve ever produced, it can change the theme and the entire scope of a project. It can also lead us to believe that every hour we spent writing to that point was a waste, unless we use it to help us find a better story or article than the original one we wrote.

“Was it a Great Sentence?” I know it when I see it, and yes, that was a great sentence. “Then rewrite the whole article accordingly.” I was done though, or so close to done that I felt done. Now, you’re saying I should rewrite everything? “If you write it, they might read.”

The internet is a blessing and curse for modern writers, as we now have greater access to more readers than anyone in history. The curse is that everyone else knows that same luxury. How do we separate ourselves from the pack, that overcrowded pack, and write a quality article that attracts some attention? A remedy, as opposed to the remedy, might be to take that one Great Sentence you wrote and worked your tail off achieve and put it into the most attractive spot in your article, the beginning. 

The problem arrives after we supplant that first lede with the original conclusion, and we need to create a new conclusion. What would happen if we arrived at a better sentence in that second conclusion, better than the first? Should we supplant the new lede with this second conclusion? Should we rinse and repeat, in other words, and keep repeating this cycle until we have a 2,019-word article of overlapping conclusions? I’ve yet to encounter such a problem, but if my next, edited conclusion is better than my first, I would go back and do it all over again, as often as it works. This process doesn’t always work, of course. As I wrote, some conclusions assume too much to be quality intros, but I think that in the age of hyper AD-HD, internet readers, writers have to do whatever we can to attract readers and keep their attention, and this was but one way I found to do it when I was writing an article and I created one beautiful and intoxicating Great Sentence. 

Looking for Emotions in All the Wrong Places

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“Looking for love in all the wrong places can be dramatic, exciting, and fun,” nobody said. Nobody says this, but a number of us have a number of ten minutes to midnight relationships, and while some consider come of them exciting and fun, they know they aren’t built to last. The music stops at midnight, as we all know, and the curtain closes on our carefully crafted production. We take our costumes and makeup off and prepare them for the big reveal. 

The fairy tale romance is out there, and we know it. We’ve read about it, we’ve seen it in the movies, on TV, and we’ve heard about in rock and roll songs. We’ve heard about the turmoil and tumult that occurs in some relationships … in country music songs, but who wants to live like that? We shouldn’t have to settle. We might be embarrassed to admit that lust just doesn’t do it for us anymore, and we’re done trying to play a role in Gone with the Wind. We lick our wounds, we help them lick theirs, and we set about building our Frankenstein’s monster. We want someone funny, but not mean; somewhat skinny but not lean; dramatic but not traumatic; and nice but not sappy. We search far and wide, until we find that person who wants to get to know us while quietly watching reruns of the Andy Griffith Show and Three’s Company with us, eating a turkey sandwich and a bag of Lay’s original brand of potato chips.

When those after-the-show conversations casually morph into mundane conversation, we realize that some date-worthy people are normal, and they don’t mind listening to what we have to say. They also appear to be doing so with genuine interest. Our friends might not want to hear about the nights we spend with them, discussing the unheralded comedic genius Don Knotts, and they might even remind us how exciting and sexy our exes were.

We enjoyed those relationships for what they were, but they always find a way to transfer their toxic, emotional baggage to us. They affect and infect everyone in their wake, until the dating pool becomes an emotional, as opposed to physical, manifestation of the Cantina Bar scene in Star Wars. In our search for the perfect mate, we uncovered a precious commodity we never considered before normalcy. We never put the normal bullet point in our search engine, because we spent so much time condemning the normal. “Who wants to be normal? Normal is boring, and my parents were normal, and I’m anything and everything but,” we said various strains of this joke so often that we began to believe it. After all of the whirlwind romances leave us in an undefined state, somewhere near unstable, we begin to prize normal people. We seek someone who can yin our yang that might lead to a stable foundation that we can use to build something year by year, day by day, and hour to hour. We realize that the best romance is a “Little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.”

***

Elijah Wood and Tobie McGuire are two different people. I knew this on some level, but when I searched for a movie I just finished, to recommend it to a friend, I searched for Tobie McGuire. It turned out Elijah Wood read the screenwriter’s lines for the character of that movie. I used to know my cultural touchstones so well. Am I slipping? Who cares? We do. Knowing cultural references is important to us, and in many ways we think it defines our intelligence. As I’ve written elsewhere, in Abraham Lincoln’s day, it was vital to a person’s existence that they know The Bible and Shakespeare so well that you could drop and spot all references; in the 1990’s, it was The Simpsons and Seinfeld; and now with devices and streaming, the cultural touchstones are all over the map. There are still some cultural references everyone must know, however, and if a foreigner wants to assimilate into the American culture, they would do well to learn some of our cultural references. I slipped in one of mine, and I told a friend about this. She said, “That’s great, but I don’t know who either of those people are.” As someone who knows cultural references but doesn’t care too much about them, this placed me at a fork in the road. I used to care a great deal, and I once met a person who was as knowledgeable as I was in cultural references. She even topped me in several areas, a novelty I enjoyed. I had a crush on her, based almost solely on this area of her expertise. Our relationship didn’t last long however as she personified, for me, the idea that when selecting a mate in life, cultural knowledge might be on the tail end of the top 100 most important pieces of the pie in my decision making process.

***

“I’M MAD!” I yelled.

“No one cares!” my dad yelled back. Among the many things my dad taught me, one of the primary ones that stuck is no one cares when we’re mad. No one cares when we’re happy, no one cares when we’re sad, and no one cares when we’re mad. “If you choose to sit in the corner with a mad face on, that’s fine, but remember that’s your choice,” he said.

It was all quite frustrating at the time, but I now think my dad was probably, accidentally or incidentally, onto something. I now add to my dad’s emotionally callous response, “While you’re over there, in the corner, remember that it’s up to you to teach the world how they can help you avoid such messy displays of emotion. If you’re so mad that you’re now ready to tip the apple cart, ask yourself why you didn’t do, or say, something sooner. If you’re raging mad now, chances are you’re probably mad at yourself for your inability to do, or say, something sooner, when this was nothing more than a simple disagreement. We were all rational back then, and we probably would’ve listened to your solutions. Shoot that stuff at the source, and you might not ever have to be so mad again. If you’re mad at something someone said, or did, it’s your job to tell them about it.”

“But, they won’t listen to me,” the collective ‘we’ respond.

“Yeah, you’re probably going to have to do it a lot, and you might have to do it so often that it could lead to some form of confrontation or some sort of altercation, but if you don’t, you’re going to end up like Michael.”

Some twenty years prior to the day I met Michael, bullies were laying into him. The bullies were so relentless that whatever they did to Michael affected him twenty years later, when he told his story to a group of people who never met him before. These bullies picked on Michael so often, in his high school years, that he sought the assistance from an authority figure. That authority figure offered some advice that few authority figures would today. “Pick out the toughest one of the bunch and punch him in the mouth as hard as you can,” the priest, in charge of discipline at the high school we went to in different years, said. “He’s going to punch you back, and you’ll probably get beat up, but they will all leave you alone from that point on.”

“What did you do?” I asked after a pregnant pause.

“I didn’t do anything,” Michael said. “I couldn’t believe that a priest was telling me to punch someone.”

That was the end of Michael’s story as far as Michael was concerned. For those of us who never met Michael before, it was only the beginning of our understanding of him. If Michael found a forceful way to rebuke those bullies, his life from that day forward might be different. If Michael reached a point of desperation that required him to punch the biggest bully of the bunch, and he did it, he was probably a different man from the one we met that day. As the priest said, the big bully would’ve punched him back, and it would’ve hurt. Worst-case scenario, Michael ends up in a hospital, but most bullies simply punch back one time and leave their victim on the floor. Worst-case scenario, Michael ends up in the hospital, and he has to get his jaw wired shut, but Michael walks out of that emergency room a man who believes he knows how to handle his own situations. He doesn’t have to rely on the relative ineptitude of authority figures. He can handle himself, and he’s his own man, as opposed to the man we knew some twenty years who stepped away from his fork in the road.

As the years rolled along, in our working relationship, we learned that Michael was a seething ball of hatred. He hated certain people, until they came around. He said the meanest, most awful things about them, but when they stepped near him, he didn’t know how to express himself. Most of us have issues with confrontation, but most of us find a healthy, non-confrontational way of voicing our concerns. Michael didn’t even have that, and when I witnessed it firsthand, I wondered how different he might be if he followed that priest’s advice. It’s possible that Michael’s meek nature was a result of so many instances that one such instance wouldn’t make a dent in his approach, but it might have started the ball rolling.

It’s our job in life to teach others how to treat us. We might have to do it so often that they mock us for repeating ourselves, but we can add, “If you knew how I wanted to be treated, and you did it anyway, why do you continue to do it? What did you hope to gain?” We might have to repeat ourselves with such force that it results in what everyone fears most a punch in the mouth, but what’s the alternative? Where our we now? We’re so mad now that they’re under our skin. If people treat us poorly, we should recognize that as our inability to instruct them properly. Telling everyone that we’re mad, or giving them the silent treatment, is a complete waste of everyone’s time, including ours.” 

We didn’t enter into this argument with Michael. We simply felt sorry for him, but what if we had? We can imagine that Michael would’ve been able to counterpoint our every point. We would’ve argued, and he had twenty years of justifications for his actions. At what point in an argument, do we realize we’re doing more harm than good? At what point do we reach a zero point? We argue because we want everyone to know how smart we are. We argue because we want to persuade others to our point of view. We also argue to save our friends from themselves. At what point, do we realize the other party disagrees with us so much that no matter what we say, we’re never going to persuade them to our point of view? At what point do we realize there’s no point in continuing? Even when they’re demonstrably wrong, it makes no sense to continue the argument, as we can see that they’re not going to change their mind. We can also see that we’re insulting them at some point, and we might be damaging whatever relationship we have with them. As much as it pains us, we realize that some of the times it’s just better, less frustrating, and less maddening, to walk away.

Leonardo’s Lips and Lines

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Hyper-vigilance is not a switch an artist turns on to create. It’s less about what an artist does and more about who they are. If this is true, we could say that the final products of artists, their artistic creations, are less about some supernatural gift and more about a culmination of hyper-natural observations of the minutiae that others often miss that we call hyper-vigilance. Thus, in some cases, the final product of an artist’s vision is less about an artistic vision and more about using that product as a vehicle to reveal their findings. Did Leonardo da Vinci’s obsessions drive him to be an artist, or did he become so obsessed with the small details of life that he become an artist?

What goes on in the mind of an artist? That question has plagued us since Leonardo da Vinci, and before him. Those who don’t understand the complexities and gradations of artistic creation love to think about an “aha moment”, such as an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head. Others think that brilliant artistic creation often requires one to mix the chemicals of their brain up with artificial enhancements, or that they ripped off the artists who preceded them. These theories combine some elements of truth with a measure of “There’s no way one man is that much more brilliant than I am” envy. As an aspiring artist, I can tell you that nothing informs the process more than failure, or trial and error. There are rarely “aha moments” that rip an artist out of a bathtub to lead them to type a passage half naked and dripping wet. What’s more common in my experience involves the search for an alternative, or a better way. Rather than intro a piece in the manner I’ve always done, maybe I should try introducing another way, maybe I should build to the conclusion a different way, and all of the gradual, almost imperceptible changes an artist makes along the road to their version of the “perfect” artistic creation. 

To the untrained eye, The Mona Lisa is a painting of a woman. The Last Supper is nothing more than a depiction of the apostles having a meal with Jesus. We have some evidence of da Vinci’s process in his notebooks, but we don’t have his early artistic pieces. Due to the idea that they probably weren’t great, either da Vinci trashed them, or they’ve been lost to history in one way or another. These pieces would be interesting if, for no other reason, than to see the progress that led him to his masterpieces. Of the few da Vinci paintings that remain, we see a progression from his first paintings to The Mona Lisa. His paintings became more informed throughout his artistic career. This begs the chicken or the egg question, what came first Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic vision or the science behind the paintings? Put another way, did he pursue his innovative ways of attaining scientific knowledge to enhance his paintings, or did he use the paintings as a vehicle to display the knowledge he attained?

On that note, anytime I read a brilliant line I often wonder if the inspiration for the line dropped in the course of the author’s effort, or if the brilliant line was the whole reason for the book. Was the book an elongated attempt to verbally shade that brilliant line, in the manner da Vinci did his subjects, to make the brilliant line more prominent?  

Whatever the case was, the few works of his we still have are vehicles for the innovative knowledge he attained of science, the mathematics of optics, architecture, chemistry, and the finite details of anatomy. Da Vinci might have started obsessively studying various elements, such as water flow, rock formations, and all of the other natural elements to better inform his art, but he became so obsessed with his initial findings that he pursued them for reasons beyond art. He pursued them for the sake of knowledge.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book capture an artist’s artistic process as well as Walter Isaacson’s Leonard da Vinci biography has. The thesis of the book is that da Vinci’s artistic creations were not merely the work of a gifted artist, but of an obsessive genius honing in on scientific discoveries to inform the minutiae of his process. Some reviews argue that this bio focuses too much on the minutiae involved in da Vinci’s work, and there are paragraphs, pages, and in some cases entire chapters devoted to the minutiae involved in his process. In some places, I empathize with this charge that the book can be tedious, but after finishing the book, I don’t know how any future biographer on da Vinci could capture the essence of Leonardo da Vinci without the exhaustive detail about the man’s obsessive pursuit of detail. Focusing and obsessing on the finer details is who da Vinci was, and it is what separated him from all of the brilliant artists that preceded and followed him. 

Some have alluded to the idea that da Vinci just happened to capture Lisa Gherardini, or Lisa del Giocondo, in the perfect smile for his famous painting The Mona Lisa. The inference is that da Vinci asked her to do a number of poses, and that his gift was merely in working with the woman to find that perfect pose and then capture it, in the manner a photographer might. Such theories, Isaacson illustrates, shortchange the greatest work of one of history’s greatest artists. It leaves out all of these intricate and tedious details da Vinci used to bring the otherwise one-dimensional painting to life.

Isaacson also discounts the idea that da Vinci’s finished products were the result of a divine gift, and I agree in the sense that suggesting his work was a result of a gift discounts the intense and laborious research da Vinci put into informing his works. There were other artists with similar gifts in da Vinci’s time, and there have been many more since, yet da Vinci’s work maintains a rarefied level of distinction in the art world. 

As an example of Leonardo’s obsessiveness, he dissected cadavers to understand the musculature elements involved in producing a smile. Isaacson provides exhaustive details of Leonardo’s work, but writing a couple of paragraphs about such endeavors cannot properly capture how tedious this research must have been. Writing that da Vinci spent years exploring cadavers to discover all the ways the brain and spine work in conjunction to produce expression, for example, cannot capture the trials and errors da Vinci must have experienced before finding the subtle muscular formations inherent in the famous, ambiguous smile that captured the deliberate effect he was trying to achieve. (Isaacson’s description of all the variables that inform da Vinci’s process regarding The Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile that historians suggest da Vinci used more than once, is the best paragraph in the book.) We can only guess that da Vinci spent most of his time researching for these artistic truths alone, and that even his most loyal assistants pleaded that he not put them on the insanely tedious lip detail. 

Isaacson also goes to great lengths to reveal Leonardo’s study of lights and shadows, in the sfumato technique, to provide the subjects of his paintings greater dimension and realistic and penetrating eyes. Da Vinci then spent years, sometimes decades, putting changes on his “incomplete projects”. Witnesses say that he could spend hours looking at an incomplete project only to add one little dab of paint. 

The idea that da Vinci’s works were a product of supernatural gift also implies that all an artist has to do is apply that gift to whatever canvas stands before them and that they should do it as often as possible to pay homage to that gift until they achieve a satisfactory result. As Isaacson details, this doesn’t explain what separates da Vinci from other similarly gifted artists in history. The da Vinci works we admire to this day were but a showcase of his ability, his obsessive research on matters similarly gifted artists might consider inconsequential, and the application of that knowledge he attained from the research. This, I believe, suggests da Vinci’s final products were less about anything supernatural and more about an intense obsession to achieve something hyper-natural.  

Why, for example, would one spend months, years, and decades studying the flow of water, and its connections to the flow of blood in the heart? The nature of da Vinci’s obsessive qualities belies the idea that he did it for the sole purpose of fetching a better price for his art. As Isaacson points out, da Vinci turned down more commissions than he accepted. This coupled with the idea that while he might have started an artistic creation on a commissioned basis, he often did not give the finished product to the one paying him for the finished product. As stated with some of his works, da Vinci hesitated to do this because he didn’t consider the piece finished, completed, or perfect. As anyone who experiences artistic impulses understands, the idea that an artistic piece has reached a point where it cannot be improved upon is often more difficult for the artist to achieve for the artist than starting one.

What little we know about da Vinci, suggests that he had the luxury of never having to worry about money. If that’s the case, some might suggest that achieving historical recognition drove him, but da Vinci had no problem achieving recognition in his lifetime, as most connoisseurs of art considered him one of the best painters of his era. We also know that da Vinci published little of what would’ve been revolutionary discoveries in his time, and he carried most of his artwork with him for most of his life, perfecting it, as opposed to selling it, or seeking more fame with it. Due in part to the luxuries afforded him, and the apparent early recognition of his talent, most cynical searches for his motivation do not apply. As Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonard da Vinci implies, it’s difficult to find a motivation that drove the man to create the few works of his we now have other than the pure, passionate pursuit of artistic perfection. 

After reading through all that informed da Vinci’s process, coupled with the appreciation we have for the finished product, I believe we can now officially replace the meme that uses the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album to describe an artist’s artistic peak with The Mona Lisa.