Leonardo da Vinci — "It is better to imitate ancient than modern work."
It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.
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More from Leonardo da Vinci
"Learning never exhausts the mind."
"The water that you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which comes; so with present time."
"He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss."
"The eye is the first organ that comes into contact with the light."
"Truth was the only daughter of time."
Details
From his notebooks, a surprising preference for older art/knowledge.
Date: Undated, but from his lifetime (1452-1519)
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Understanding this quote
What it means
When learning a craft, studying the original masters of antiquity produces better results than copying contemporaries. Ancient works survived centuries because they achieved something essential and true. Modern work is often itself derivative, so imitating it means copying a copy — quality degrades with each step. Going directly to the source — ancient sculpture, architecture, technique — offers the clearest path to understanding what genuine excellence actually looks like.
Relevance to Leonardo da Vinci
Da Vinci lived this principle daily. He dissected corpses to understand anatomy as ancient Greek sculptors had, and his Vitruvian Man directly engaged Roman architect Vitruvius's proportional theory. He filled thousands of notebook pages studying classical forms and Roman engineering. He saw himself not as inventing a new aesthetic but recovering lost ancient mastery. Studying first principles from antiquity, rather than fashionable contemporary trends, was central to how he trained his eye and hand.
The era
Da Vinci worked at the height of the Italian Renaissance, a movement explicitly defined by recovering ancient Greek and Roman knowledge after what humanists called the medieval decline. Scholars had recently rediscovered Vitruvius, Pliny, and Aristotle. Patrons paid premiums for work resembling classical antiquity. The printing press was spreading ancient manuscripts across Europe. In this context, ancient meant proven, time-tested excellence, while modern meant the flawed, derivative attempts of recent generations.
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