Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago

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If you’re waiting for your big break while watching others achieve success faster, it might not be that they’re working harder or have more talent, it may just be that they are young geniuses, and you are an old master.

Economist David W. Galenson found that painters who peak early – like Raphael – tend to have a top-down or deductive approach, while painters who get better with age – like Leonardo – have a bottom-up, inductive approach. He’s found this across many fields and believes this pattern “exists not only in the arts, but in virtually all intellectual activities.”

Galenson goes into his findings in-depth in his book, Old Masters, Young Geniuses.

Other works also mentioned include Francesca Fioriani’s “The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint.”

The historian who compared Leonardo’s theory of pyramids of light was Martin Kemp.

The study that found the many layers in the Mona Lisa was “Revealing the sfumato technique of Leonardo da Vinci by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy”, by de Viguerie et al.

The study that confirmed Leonardo’s predictions about how the flaps in the aorta worked was “Flow vortices in the aortic root: in vivo 4D-MRI confirms predictions of Leonardo da Vinci”, by Bissell et al.

The observations about Leonardo’s revisions of the neck muscles in the painting of St. Jerome decades later are covered in a talk on YouTube by Martin Clayton of The Prints and Drawings Room, The Royal Library, Windsor Castle.

I’m writing a book about how bottom-up, inductive, “Leonardos” can stop beating themselves up and start making their creativity count. Follow me to have a chance of finding out about it. If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe to my emails at kdv.co