"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."

By Google Search in collaboration with Rakesh.

The gaslamp flickered against the heavy velvet curtains of the St. Petersburg study, casting long, nervous shadows across the mountains of manuscript pages. Dmitry Merezhkovsky dipped his steel-nibbed pen into the inkwell, his fingers stained dark with the ink of a dozen forgotten centuries. Outside, the cold breath of the dying Russian Empire rattled the windowpanes, but inside, Dmitry was leagues away, wandering the sun-drenched courtyards of Renaissance Florence. He was a man trapped between eras, a literary mystic who looked at the turbulent dawn of the twentieth century and saw only the terrifying echo of history’s greatest pivots. To him, the writer's craft was not merely to record the past, but to exhume it, breathing life into dead titans until their anxieties mirrored his own.

On this particular night, his mind was consumed by the ghost of Leonardo da Vinci. As Dmitry wove his historical novel, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, he did not just see a painter of frescoes; he saw a solitary prophet of the modern world, a man torn between the divine and the mechanical. With a feverish intensity, Dmitry began to pen a scene where the great master turned his back on the feasts of the Medici. To capture the absolute purity of Leonardo's radical empathy, Dmitry’s pen synthesized a voice for the artist, writing a fierce, fictional manifesto: "I have from an early age abjured the use of meat..." Through this fabricated confession, Dmitry sought to capture a deeper psychological truth about Da Vinci—that the man who engineered war machines for dukes was the very same soul who wept at the sight of caged birds in a market.

What Dmitry could not have foreseen from his candlelit desk was how seamlessly his literary invention would bleed into reality. Decades after the Russian author laid down his pen, that single, fictional line about abjuring meat would be mistaken by the world as Leonardo’s own historical testimony. Yet, the forgery endured because it touched upon a profound historical truth: Da Vinci truly was an island of non-violence in a sea of Renaissance bloodsport. By examining how Dmitry's fiction fused with Leonardo's actual, documented vegetarianism, we can begin to unravel a much older, deeper lineage of human thought—one that traces a straight line from the literary salons of 1901 St. Petersburg, back to the kitchens of 15th-century Italy, and ultimately, into the ancient roots of ethical eating.

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Leonardo had many sayings that he wrote down in a diary. Some of them survive to this day and can be retrieved by search engines. The title of this essay is one of those sayings. I can’t get into the mind of Da Vinci yet I know from personal experience the difference between learning, remembering and understanding. Many people confuse knowledge with understanding, and they only find out much later to their great detriment. In Western history, to understand has often come to mean “to understand the System and its overwhelming dominance” against which the average person has no chance. The System is a magnificent creation of God that is immutable and unforgiving in the extreme. It decides the destinies of men and nations. It only has will not ill will. And a person only argues against the System if they wish to die in extreme pain.

Dmitry knew all of this. To him this fictional biography was a work for himself, a work of passion. He didn’t care if the world ever read it. It was a way to occupy his mind and keep himself sane on those cold Russian winters. Vodka, gun and pen. Those were the choices that winter. He picked up the pen yet again…..

The ink on Merezhkovsky’s pages dried, cementing a myth that would deceive the centuries, yet the fiction succeeded precisely because it shadowed an undeniable truth. Long before the Russian novelist gave him a voice, Leonardo lived a quiet, radical rebellion at the dining tables of the Italian Renaissance…..

Leonardo was supremely aware of the status that eating meat conferred on the host. Meat symbolized wealth, power and prestige. High-society banquets featured wild game, boar and birds thereby cementing the host’s power and dominance in the minds of all the guests and revelers. Choosing to not eat meat was therefore deeply countercultural. Perhaps because of such sensibilities the gods made Leonardo design frequent court pageants and massive feasts for the nobility. With the Medici AND Sforza as his patrons, his diet created undeniable friction.

Leonardo was sick of it all. He knew it was dead food. He could smell it, it smelled exactly like the corpse he had also handled the same day. He wrote in the Codice Atlantico: “humans are nothing more than a tomb for other animals. These gluttons are coffers full of corruption and nothing can fill their void.”

Dmitry had spent a lot of time re-reading the Codice Atlantico. It was as if Leonardo was writing directly to him. The words burned in his mind. They lit a spark. He tried to drown the spark in vodka but it only grew stronger. Dmitry too had recently buried a friend. He too knew what the smell of the dead was like. When the life essence leaves, what’s left behind is meat, bones and rot. Exactly like the meat they eat, he thought.
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Leonardo had been dreaming machines. He saw a dove flying and to him it represented the magic of flight. He sketched wings that would someday be used by people to fly. His mind could create drawings in 3-dimensions. People, objects, fantastic machines… it didn’t matter. They were all possibilities… human advancement had no limits. The natural world provided both grace, inspiration and cruelty. He was very aware of the last.

Cesare Borgia had a job for Leonardo. A man of intense non-violence and often a joke of Florentine society was deliberately hired to design war machines in an hour of need. He designed terrifying scythed chariots and mortars.

The rest of Leonardo’s story will have to wait.

Dmitry put down his pen. He thought about Leonardo’s rivalry with Michelangelo. What was that about he wondered.