Leonardo da Vinci — "Among the great things which are to be found among us, the Being of Nothingness …"
Among the great things which are to be found among us, the Being of Nothingness is the greatest.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote asserts that nothingness—the void, the absence of all things—is paradoxically the greatest entity we can encounter. Da Vinci frames emptiness not as mere absence but as a profound presence in its own right. The statement challenges intuition: among measurable, observable things, it is the unmeasurable zero-point that commands the most significance. It honors the generative power of absence and the philosophical weight of what doesn't exist.
Relevance to Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo studied negative space in painting—the empty areas that define form—and investigated vacuum and fluid dynamics in his engineering notebooks. He was captivated by mathematics including zero, a concept newly arrived in Europe from Arabic scholarship. His anatomical drawings depended on understanding hollow spaces within the body. As a scientist and inventor working with hydraulics, air pressure, and optics, the properties of emptiness were operationally essential, not merely abstract.
The era
During Leonardo's lifetime (1452–1519), Aristotle's assertion that nature abhors a vacuum still dominated scientific thought. The concept of zero had only recently entered European mathematics via Arab scholars. Renaissance thinkers were beginning to challenge ancient Greek cosmology, but empirical physics remained nascent. The Catholic Church framed creation as arising from nothingness (ex nihilo), giving void theological weight. Leonardo's meditation on nothingness placed him at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and emerging scientific inquiry.
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