Leonardo da Vinci’s passion for perfume making

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, musician, physician, engineer, anatomist, inventor, and natural philosopher. However, Leonardo also had a little-known passion: perfume. According to Dr. Caro Verbeek, an art and fragrance historian who works at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, perfume was an essential part of daily life during da Vinci’s lifetime.

For a Renaissance polymath like da Vinci, perfume making would have been a natural extension of his other studies. “Da Vinci was fascinated by all forms of life, including animals and plants. He studied them meticulously, not only drawing them but also recording their scents. He also owned a device for extracting perfumes. Being a natural experimenter, he certainly began to create his own scents,” explains Verbeek.

Like many other studies, da Vinci’s exploration of perfume was synthetic and creative. He mastered techniques for extracting scents such as distillation in liquid alcohol, a type of brewing that uses liquid to absorb the scents in plants. He also knew the then-modern technique of cold extraction, in which delicate flowers are placed in animal fat to absorb the aromatic oils.

According to Verbeek, da Vinci was not the only painter who also produced perfumes in his time. Renaissance artists often brought their own materials for their paintings and oil paints. Some of the materials used in painting, such as resins, were also used in perfumes. This made da Vinci more familiar with and accessible to these products. Recent analysis has shown that Donna Nuda, a painting completed by da Vinci’s students under his supervision, smells like “a forest after rain.” Similarly, da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine also smells like a history museum, especially walnut, according to Tomasz Sawoszczuk, head of the research team at Kraków University of Economics.

However, very few people know about da Vinci’s passion for perfume because according to the Western concept of the past, sight and hearing are the senses that can help people become wise and accumulate knowledge. Meanwhile, the sense of smell is considered an inferior sense, associated with children, animals, primitive and not intellectual. As a result, da Vinci’s passion for perfume is underestimated compared to his artistic talent and scientific achievements.