> Spent the morning analysing Da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist.

This is the stuff Art History skips right over.

4. The Strange Anecdote of the Rotting Dragon Shield
One of the most telling stories Vasari includes about Leonardo’s youth involves a wooden shield brought to him by his father, Ser Piero:

Vasari’s Narrative: Leonardo wanted to paint something on the shield that would terrify anyone who saw it. To do this, he brought lizards, crickets, bats, serpents, and strange creatures into his private room. He let them rot and decompose in his quarters, combining their body parts to render a horrifying, venomous monster emerging from a dark cave. When his father entered the room, he was struck with genuine horror.

The Alternate Context: Even as an origin myth, Vasari presents a teenage Leonardo voluntarily locking himself in a room full of decaying, foul-smelling animal remains to study their physical decomposition and construct an unnatural, composite entity out of death. It shows that Leonardo's comfort with physical decay, odor, and the morbid manipulation of dead tissue was not a late-life scientific development—it was a core psychological trait present from his earliest years in the studio.