Our search for knowledge and unders

Our search for knowledge and understanding evokes concern: ‘it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain readiness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervour to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and essential.’42 We intend to argue that Foucault’s phrase about breaking up familiarities is at the very core of the Leonardo approach. He would use his notebooks, filled with spontaneous sketches, as an immediate and direct method of exploring his world. Foraging for new knowledge then testing and owning it, questioning assumptions, generating and developing his ideas through these drawings, ‘many of which, cannot be connected with a particular project: he used drawing to develop his eye and hand’.43 He was never addicted to, or even interested in, consensus,