The Monster on the Shield

  after A. Lang 

   In the middle of the 1400s, Florence was alive with art, music, and invention. Great artists didn’t think of themselves as “just painters” or “just sculptors.” They were builders, engineers, dreamers—restless minds who tried everything. Among them, none was greater than Leonardo da Vinci.

   Leonardo was born in 1452 in Vinci, a little town not far from Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero, a respected notary, and a peasant woman named Caterina. Though his beginnings were humble, his gifts showed early.

   As a toddler, Leonardo wasn’t drawn to toys the way other children were. He loved mud puddles. He would squat for hours by the water, shaping the soft earth into animals or tiny figures. If anyone interrupted his work, he would scream in frustration. The only thing that could calm him was his mother’s lute. She would play, and he would sit still, listening. That early love of music never left him.

   By the time he was ten, Leonardo’s father had begun to realize that his son saw the world differently. Where others saw a lizard in the grass, Leonardo saw the elegant shape of its spine, the delicate movement of its legs, the gleam in its eyes. He sketched birds, flowers, insects, and even the patterns of water swirling in a stream. His curiosity seemed endless.

   Recognizing his unusual talent, Ser Piero brought him to Florence, to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the city’s most famous artists. Verrocchio taught many young apprentices, but Leonardo soon stood apart.

   One day, Verrocchio was painting a scene of the baptism of Christ. He asked Leonardo to add one of the angels in the corner. When the work was finished, Verrocchio looked at it and shook his head—not in disappointment, but in awe. Leonardo’s angel was so delicate, so full of life, that it outshone the rest of the painting. According to legend, Verrocchio put down his brush after that day, declaring that his student had already surpassed him.

   But the most famous story from Leonardo’s youth did not happen in Florence at all. It happened in the countryside, at his father’s villa, and it involved an old fig tree, a wooden shield, and a monster.

   A farmer who worked Ser Piero’s land had cut down a fig tree. From its wood, he carved a round shield, rough but sturdy. Thinking it might look finer if decorated, he carried it to Ser Piero and asked if something could be painted on it—perhaps a simple design to hang in his home.

   Ser Piero agreed and handed the shield to his son. “See what you can do with this,” he said lightly.

   Leonardo examined it carefully. First, he straightened and smoothed the wood, preparing the surface as if it were an important commission. Then, as he often did, he began to imagine.

   Why paint a coat of arms or a harmless pattern? Why not create something unforgettable?

   He went into the fields and began collecting creatures—lizards, snakes, frogs, bats, grasshoppers. He kept them alive in jars and boxes in his room, studying each one in detail. Then, sketch by sketch, he began to combine them: the claws of one, the eyes of another, the wings of a bat, the coils of a serpent. Slowly, he invented a beast that had never lived in nature, yet looked as if it could leap off the wood and breathe fire.

   When the painting was done, the monster glared from the shield as if from the mouth of a cave, eyes burning, nostrils smoking, jaws open in a terrible roar.

   When Ser Piero came to look, Leonardo placed the shield in a shadowy corner and pulled away a cloth. His father gasped and staggered back, convinced for a moment that some living horror crouched in the room.

   Leonardo only smiled. “It works, then,” he said.

   Ser Piero was proud but also unsettled. He wrapped the shield and carried it away. But he did not give it back to the farmer. Instead, he bought another shield, painted with a simple heart pierced by an arrow, and presented that as if it were the same one. The monstrous shield he quietly sold to a Florentine merchant, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan for a high price.

   For Leonardo, it was never about the money. The shield had been a game, an experiment in seeing how far his imagination—and his brush—could go.

   And yet, it revealed everything about him. He had the discipline to prepare carefully, the curiosity to study nature closely, and the daring to combine what he saw into something the world had never imagined before.

   Even as a boy, Leonardo da Vinci was already what he would always be: not a copyist of nature, but its transformer.

Moral

   A true imagination does not stop at what is, but dares to dream of what might be. In studying the world carefully, Leonardo learned not only to see—but to create.