Before the printing press (1440), becoming a polymath - individual with knowledge in diverse disciplines - required deep study.
Information was scarce and preserved in a few core texts and a scholar who studied deeply and completed them could claim true mastery in a field.
Take Johannes Regiomontanus, a European astrologer, mathematician, and astronomer.
He viewed Ptolemy’s books not only as the source of his knowledge and skills in geometry but a gateway that others had to follow.
"Whoever wishes to know the great things of the stars... must read the Almagest of Ptolemy. For there is no other path to the stars than through the gate of his geometry. One must first become a Ptolemy before one can hope to surpass him." Johannes said in Regiomontanus.
If you couldn’t access the few books, you entered into an apprenticeship under a master between 2 to 7 years. It was a slow process, one where you submitted to your master to direct your every move.
Leonardo da Vinci apprenticed under Andrea del Verrocchio, learning how to grind colors, mix glues, and prepare panels before he could ever be allowed to “paint a minor angel in the corner of a great commission” as Walter Isaacson wrote.
Despite the slow pace, the path to a polymath in early history, was guided by an underlying structure and switching fields was more of a natural process.
Scholars of the medieval education system were taught how to learn through mastery of rhetoric, grammar, and logic. They applied these meta-skills to master music, arithmetic, or geometry.
For da Vinci, it was easy to switch between painting and engineering because he knew how to cross-pollinate ideas across the fields.
Leonardo spent years designing war machines and engineering structures such as bridges and used his ‘engineer’s eye’ when perfecting the Last Supper.
He knew something about mathematical perspective and ported this insight to his painting work.
"To create the perspective, Leonardo hammered a nail into the wall at the center of the scene—Jesus’s right temple—and ran strings from it to mark the lines of the rafters, the tapestries, and the floor tiles. This wasn't just artistry; it was the application of linear perspective as a rigid grid. He was calculating the 'vanishing point' with the same precision an engineer uses to ensure a bridge meets in the middle."
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo’s work in anatomy dissecting bodies, made him paint figures with perfect equilibrium that his peers were unable to replicate.
What are we seeing here?
If we zoom out a bit, we see that the path to the historical polymath was based on a strong foundation.
You read everything available about a field and spent years with a master before you claimed ‘mastery of the field.’ By learning how to learn, you could apply it to any field you wanted.
This was the trunk from which different branches grew. Subsequently, your primary domain gave you the stability to cross-pollinate ideas from different fields.
Fast forward to today where knowledge is no longer the constraint. In fact, you might be drowning in it, with an entire library in your pocket.
