A bustling market in Renaissance Florence was a sensory overload of noise, color, and transaction. Amidst the chaos, a tall, elegantly dressed man with a flowing beard would frequently stop by the cages of wild birds. He would pay the sellers their full asking price, gently open the wire doors with his own hands, and watch as the captive creatures soared back into the open sky. This was Leonardo da Vinci, a man whose towering intellect shaped the artistic and scientific landscape of his era. Yet, beneath his celebrated masterpieces and visionary designs lay a deeply personal, radical philosophy that placed him centuries ahead of his contemporaries. He was a pioneer of ethical vegetarianism, refusing to participate in the consumption of sentient life.
Historical certainty can be elusive when peering into the private lives of Renaissance geniuses. Leonardo never explicitly wrote down a manifesto declaring himself a vegetarian, and his household account books even record purchases of meat. These purchases, however, were almost certainly meant to feed his numerous apprentices, guests, and domestic staff. He also sketched designs for meat-roasting jacks and stoves, reflecting his insatiable curiosity for mechanical engineering rather than his personal culinary preferences. The true window into his diet comes from those who knew him and observed his daily habits. In a letter to his patron Giuliano de’ Medici, the traveler Andrea Corsali remarked on the Guzzarati people of India, noting that they ate nothing containing blood and permitted no injury to any living thing, comparing their gentle lifestyle directly to that of Leonardo.
Biographers describe Leonardo dining simply on salads, vegetables, grains, mushrooms, and pasta, with a particular fondness for minestrone. He looked at the abundance of the natural world and wondered why humanity felt the need to slaughter. Nature produces enough simple food to satisfy us, he argued, viewing the earth as a generous provider that rendered the killing of animals entirely unnecessary. While others of his time occasionally eschewed meat for religious asceticism or physical health, Leonardo based his choices entirely on humanitarian principles. He was the first modern thinker to fuse animal ethics with a principled lifestyle, operating from a place of deep moral conviction rather than a desire to please a deity or prolong his own life.
His private notebooks reveal the torment he felt over human cruelty. Leonardo did not view animals as mere resources, but as beings capable of suffering, joy, and familial love. He wrote with agonizing empathy about the plight of bees, robbed of their honey and cruelly drowned by humans. He lamented the fate of sheep, cows, and goats, whose young were torn away to have their throats barbarously cut. When reflecting on the overworked and beaten donkeys of his day, he cried out to nature, noting that these creatures were rewarded for their lifelong labor with nothing but severe suffering and slavery. His compassion stood in stark contrast to the dominant theological views of his time, which generally relegated animals to tools for human use.
Leonardo harbored a profound despair for the destructive nature of humanity. He warned that humans would become a devastating force, laying waste to forests and bringing terror, grief, and death to every living thing. In one of his most haunting passages, he declared that he would not allow his own body to become a tomb for other animals, an inn of the dead, or a container of corruption. He viewed the human appetite for flesh as a monstrous transformation of the living body into a literal graveyard. To him, the act of eating meat was a physical manifestation of a deeper, spiritual depravity that threatened to consume the natural world.
Through this lens, Leonardo emerges not just as the ultimate Renaissance man, but as a moral prophet. His advocacy for animals was a lonely crusade in an age of exploitation. He possessed an enlightened outlook that would have made him feel perfectly at home in the animal rights movements of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. By refusing to let his body become a resting place for the slaughtered, he carved out a quiet space of resistance, leaving behind a legacy of compassion that remains as challenging and urgent today as it was five centuries ago.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Sins of the Flesh
- Subtitle: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought
- Author: Rod Preece (1939–2021)
- Publisher: UBC Press (University of British Columbia Press)
- Publication Year: 2008
- Edition: First Edition
- ISBN: 978-0-7748-1509-3 (bound); 978-0-7748-1510-9 (pbk.)
- Historical Period Covered: Prehistory to the late 20th and early 21st centuries
- Main Subject Areas: Animal Ethics, History of Vegetarianism, Intellectual History, Environmental Philosophy, Comparative Religion, History of Science and Medicine
[p. 151-153]