Did Leonardo da Vinci suffer from ADHD?
AS AN artist, inventor, scientist and anatomist, Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate Renaissance man.
But his insatiable curiosity about the world as he darted between ideas may have been a symptom of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. That is the claim of a leading neuroscientist who has diagnosed da Vinci 500 years after his death.
Professor Marco Catani of King’s College London also believes ADHD may be the reason that he rarely finished his projects.
Da Vinci was working on the Mona Lisa for nearly 16 years, still tweaking it right up to his death, and was far ahead of his time in sketching out gliders, submarines and cars, but never built them.
Professor Catani, from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s, said: ‘I am confident that ADHD is the most convincing and scientifically plausible hypothesis to explain Leonardo’s difficulty in finishing his works.’
In an article published in the journal Brain, Professor Catani and his co-author state: ‘Like many of those with ADHD, he slept very little and worked continuously night and day by alternating rapid cycles of short naps and waking.’
Da Vinci’s first biographer, Giorgio Vasari, wrote in the 1550s that the genius ‘set himself many things and then, after having begun them, abandoned them’. History is filled with accounts of his unreliability as he became distracted from projects by his own curiosity.
He had a stroke at 65 and other studies suggest he did not finish the Mona Lisa because he developed a condition called claw hand after damaging the nerve which controls hand movements.