What Is a Renaissance Man?
Where the Idea Comes From, and How to Become One Today

“Renaissance man” is praise for someone who is good at many things. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “a man who has broad intellectual interests and is accomplished in areas of both the arts and the sciences”.

The idea behind the phrase is real history. But it is younger than the Renaissance, and the people it was built on were less tidy than the legend.

This page follows the idea back to its sources and meets many-sided people from other times and places. It looks at popular claims about breadth, then ends with practices that fit the research. The quick verdicts are in the summary table; the evidence for each is below.

Where the idea comes from

Burckhardt and the “all-sided man”

The idea as we know it was shaped by one book. The historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy), published in Basel in 1860.

S. G. C. Middlemore’s English translation was made from the book’s third edition. In it, Burckhardt writes that in Renaissance Italy “then arose the ‘all-sided man’—‘l’uomo universale’—who belonged to Italy alone”.

He drew a distinction worth keeping. The fifteenth century, he wrote, was above all the age of many-sided men, and only some of them could truly be called all-sided.

He also granted that there were men of encyclopaedic knowledge in many countries during the Middle Ages. He added that this knowledge was confined within narrow limits. So even the book that made the idea famous did not say breadth began in Italy. It said a particular kind of all-round brilliance did.

His main example was the architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti. The Italian national biographical dictionary says Alberti was born in Genoa on 14 February 1404 and died in Rome in April 1472.

Leonardo da Vinci comes in only at the end of the passage: “Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante”.

Alberti’s famous line, and what it was about

Burckhardt says of Alberti that, “like all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’” Quoted on its own, often as “a man can do all things if he will”, it sounds like a motto for mastering every field.

The line comes from a Latin life of Alberti, the Vita. There it is about willpower over small things.

In the 1843 edition by Anicio Bonucci, the Italian translation says he loathed garlic and especially honey through some fault of nature (our translation). He overcame this by making himself look at and handle them.

The Latin then says he “gave an example that people can do anything with themselves, if they will” (our translation of posse homines de se omnia, ut velint). Bonucci’s Italian says this shows that willing and being able are one thing in a man (our translation).

The same passage says that by nature his head could not bear the slightest breeze, and that he got used to it little by little.

Who wrote the Vita has been argued since the nineteenth century. The evidence we read leans towards Alberti himself:

• The Italian biographical dictionary’s 1960 entry says some held it to be an autobiography (our translation). Its bibliography lists the studies on the question.

• Burckhardt’s own footnote cites an edition that argues the Vita is probably by Alberti himself.

• More recent work treats it as his. A project by Martin McLaughlin, described by Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, calls it one of the first autobiographies of modern times, written in 1438–43. It also calls the Vita the main source for Burckhardt’s famous portrayal.

The same project says the full text shows how Burckhardt’s “‘sunny’ portrait omitted the darker sides of Alberti’s personality”.

Alberti’s own book on the family says something related but different. Its prologue reads “Solo è sanza virtù chi nolla vuole”: only he is without virtue who does not want it (our translation). That is a claim about character, not about skill in every field.

When “Renaissance man” entered English

The English phrase is much younger than the period. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for it is from 1906, in the writing of W. H. Woodward.

That is Woodward’s book Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance. In a complete scan of the book, we found the phrase only once. It says the Frenchmen in their king’s train were “profoundly impressed with the Renaissance man as they found him declared in Rodrigo Borgia”.

That is probably the passage the dictionary means. It is about the kind of man the French met among Italy’s rulers, not an all-round genius.

The Online Etymology Dictionary finds earlier dates for related senses. It has the phrase by 1885 in the literal sense of a man alive during the Renaissance, and by 1898 for the idealised man of the Renaissance. For living people it is attested by 1949, and it sometimes means merely well-rounded.

The two dictionaries record the earliest uses each one found. So the safe statement is that the phrase appears in English around 1900.

The older word is “polymath”. The OED’s earliest evidence for it is from 1624, in the writing of Robert Burton. It comes from the Greek polymathēs, “having learned much, knowing much”.

The OED records the Italian uomo universale as an English borrowing only from 1963, in The Times. English translations of Burckhardt had long printed the Italian words, as in the passage quoted above.

Castiglione and the art of making it look easy

The other Renaissance text behind the ideal is Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, a set of dialogues about the perfect courtier. The notes to Leonard Eckstein Opdycke’s 1901 translation say it was written at Urbino and Rome between 1508 and 1516. It was first printed at the Aldine Press in Venice in April 1528.

Castiglione’s courtier is many-sided by design. In Opdycke’s translation, his principal and true profession ought to be arms. But he should also know Latin and Greek, read music, play several instruments, and know how to draw and something of the art of painting itself.

Then comes the famous instruction. In Book I the speaker says the courtier should “usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte”. That is: use in everything a certain sprezzatura that hides the art (our translation).

Opdycke rendered the word “a certain nonchalance”. Thomas Hoby’s English of 1561 rendered it “a certain Reckelesness”. Opdycke’s note says the word could hardly have been new in its older meaning of contempt. What Castiglione did was use it for studied unconcern.

So the original all-rounder was meant to look effortless, and the effort was hidden on purpose. That is worth remembering when a modern Renaissance man seems to do everything easily.

Leonardo: the range, and the unfinished work

Leonardo was born in Vinci in 1452 and died at Amboise in 1519, as the Uffizi gives his dates. The Royal Collection holds about 550 of his drawings. It calls him “the archetypal ‘Renaissance man’, accomplished in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, anatomy, engineering, cartography, geology and botany”.

The British Library’s Codex Arundel is one of his notebooks, one of about 20 that survive. It runs from 1478, when he was 26, until his death in 1519.

His range is not in doubt. Three things complicate the legend.

He had little formal schooling. The British Library says he didn’t have a formal education. He did not learn Latin in his youth, but sought to learn it by himself later in life.

In a note translated by Jean Paul Richter, he answered his critics directly. Some presumptuous people, he wrote, would think they could reasonably blame him for not being a literary man. His answer: “my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words”.

His most famous list of skills was a job application. It is a draft letter to Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan. He writes after considering all those who claim to be skilled makers of instruments of war. He promises extremely light and strong bridges, and methods for destroying every rock or other fortress.

Art comes near the end: “I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze or clay, and also in painting whatever may be done, and as well as any other”. Richter notes that its many corrections and the absence of a signature show it is merely the rough draft. It is a list of promises, not of finished work.

He left a great deal unfinished. Giorgio Vasari, an early biographer, said so plainly. In Gaston du C. de Vere’s translation of his Lives of the Artists, Leonardo “began many things and never finished one of them”. Vasari explains that it seemed to Leonardo his hand could not reach the perfection of art in carrying out what he imagined.

Of his schooling, Vasari adds that he set out to learn many things, then dropped them after starting. The record bears this out:

• The Adoration of the Magi, now in the Uffizi, is recorded in a document of July 1481 as a commission from Augustinian monks for a church outside Florence. The Uffizi says he was still working on it in September 1481 before he left for Milan. The friars, it says, waited in vain for him to come back and finish it.

• Vasari says the bronze horse he proposed to the Duke of Milan was begun on so vast a scale that it could never be completed. In an undated draft letter to Ludovico, Leonardo wrote, “Of the horse I will say nothing because I know the times”.

  The full-size clay model, Vasari says, survived until the French came to Milan with King Louis of France and broke it to pieces.

• The Battle of Anghiari mural in Florence. Vasari says Leonardo tried an oil method on the wall. It began to peel off, and in a short time he abandoned it.

• His anatomy. The Royal Collection says he planned an illustrated treatise. His perfectionism, his trouble reconciling what he saw with traditional beliefs, and simple bad luck stopped him finishing it. The drawings were not published until the late 19th century.

Few paintings survive, and the count differs slightly between reports. A 2019 report on PBS NewsHour said fewer than 20 paintings by him are known to exist. An AFP report on the same Louvre exhibition counted 20 paintings definitively attributed to him. Both reports mention the Salvator Mundi, whose attribution some experts dispute.

No book of his was printed in his lifetime. The first, his Treatise on Painting, was published in 1651, a century after his death.

None of this makes him less remarkable. It makes him more like a person: someone with enormous curiosity, an engineer’s job to win, and far more ideas than time.

Many-sided people from other times and places

Many-sided people long predate Renaissance Italy and turn up far beyond it. Here are a few, with what the sources support.

Zhang Heng (AD 78–139), China. He was a writer first. MacTutor’s history of mathematics says he was thirty before his interests turned from literature to science. MacTutor dates his best-known invention, an instrument for earthquakes, to 132.

The History of the Later Han tells a story about it. Once, when one of its dragons released its ball, “the other seven heads did not move; following its direction one knew where the quake was” (our translation).

No tremor had been felt, and the scholars in the capital all wondered at the lack of evidence (our translation). Days later a courier brought news of an earthquake in Longxi.

The account describes an instrument that showed a quake’s direction; it says nothing about recording the shaking.

Hypatia (born between about 355 and 370, died 415), Alexandria. A teacher of mathematics and philosophy, whose known work was in mathematics and astronomy.

MacTutor says she became head of the Platonist school at Alexandria in about 400 AD. She helped her father, Theon of Alexandria, write his eleven-part commentary on Ptolemy’s Almagest. Letters from her student Synesius ask her advice on building an astrolabe and a hydroscope.

MacTutor adds: “There is no evidence that Hypatia undertook original mathematical research”. She was murdered in Alexandria in March 415. Her birth year is a range: MacTutor gives about 370, and a 1995 study by Maria Dzielska argued for about 355.

Ibn Sina, or Avicenna (born in the 970s, perhaps as early as 964; died 1037). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls him the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world.

His major philosophical work, The Cure, runs to twenty-two large volumes in the Cairo edition. The Latin translation of his medical Canon formed the basis of medical teaching in European universities until the 17th century.

Al-Biruni (973 – 1048 or later), Khwarazm and Ghazna. MacTutor says he contributed to astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine and history, and cites an estimate that he wrote around 146 works. His book on India, completed in 1030, drew on his knowledge of Sanskrit and of Indian philosophy and science.

When he died is uncertain. MacTutor gives 13 December 1048, scholars in Tashkent 11 December 1048, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica an unknown date after 442/1050.

Shen Kuo (1031–1095), China. A government official whose topics, MacTutor says, included mathematics, music, astronomy, calendars, cartography, geology, optics and medicine. He was made Director of the Astronomy Bureau in 1072.

An article in Education About Asia says his Dream Pool Essays, published in 1088, give a clear description of the magnetic compass. They also contain the first known reference to magnetic declination.

In his own words, a needle rubbed with a lodestone “can point south; yet it often deviates slightly to the east and does not point fully south” (our translation).

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), the Rhineland. A Benedictine abbess. The Vatican’s 2012 letter naming her a Doctor of the Church says her works deal mainly with music, medicine and the natural sciences. One work uses an unknown language of her own invention. The letter calls her body of writing unmatched by any other female author of the Middle Ages.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Philadelphia. A printer and writer who, the Library of Congress says, promoted a host of Philadelphia educational and benevolent societies. In 1753 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his contributions to the knowledge of lightning and electricity. The Franklin Institute says he never patented a single one of his inventions.

Our summary of his Autobiography covers the man in more detail, including what the memoir leaves out.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Germany. The poet of Faust also wrote The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790). On 27 March 1784, a medical-history paper records, he found the intermaxillary bone in the human skull. He was not the first. An anatomy paper notes that Broussonet (1779) and Vicq d’Azyr (1780) came to the same result with different methods.

His Theory of Colours (1810) was harshly criticised by Hermann von Helmholtz. A 2019 review says the theory resisted testing by experiment, which set it apart from science. The same review says his ideas about colour resonated intuitively with generations of artists.

Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749), France. A writer on physics and philosophy. She published her Institutions de physique in 1740. Her translation of Newton’s Principia, with commentary, remained unpublished until 1759. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it is still the leading French translation of Newton’s book.

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717). A German artist, scientific illustrator and naturalist. London’s Natural History Museum says she was one of the first to closely observe and record the process of insect metamorphosis.

In 1699, aged 52 and accompanied only by her daughter Dorothea, she set off for Suriname. The museum calls the trip the first-ever purely scientific expedition to the colony.

One way to read these lives: what they share is less a type of person than a situation. A field was young enough for one person to reach its edge in several directions.

The site’s page on the Islamic Golden Age looks at the scholars of that period in more detail.

The gendered term

The phrase is masculine, and the dictionaries treat it that way. The American Heritage Dictionary has a separate entry for “Renaissance woman”, with the same definition.

The OED also has both. Its earliest evidence for “Renaissance woman” is from 1900, in a translation by G. H. Ely. We could not see the quotation, so we cannot say whether that early use meant an all-rounder or simply a woman of the period. A search of the OED for “Renaissance person” returned no entry.

Burckhardt claimed that upper-class Renaissance women “stood on a footing of perfect equality with men”. He said their education was essentially the same as that given to men.

Historians have argued about that picture since. Joan Kelly-Gadol’s 1977 essay put the question in its title, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Whether they did is a question of interpretation, and we leave it there.

Castiglione’s book shows how the ideal was split. In Book III, the speaker wants the court lady to know letters, music and painting, and to know how to dance and make merry. But he says “it does not befit women to handle weapons, to ride, to play tennis, to wrestle”.

Another speaker objects at once: “And in my time I have seen women play tennis, handle weapons, ride, go hunting”.

Women of the period with wide learning or skill include:

• Christine de Pizan, born in Venice in 1364 or 1365 (the British Library gives 1365). She moved to Paris as a young child. The British Library says she is widely regarded as one of Europe’s earliest female professional authors. Her writing career began at the age of 24, it says, after her husband, a royal secretary, died suddenly.

• Isotta Nogarola of Verona, renowned in her day for her scholarship and eloquence, as the University of Chicago Press describes her in its edition of her writings. It gives her dates as 1418–66.

• Laura Cereta. Her letters were widely circulated in Italy in the fifteenth century, a scholarly review of their 1997 English edition says. Their only other appearance in print was an edition of 1640. The same review notes her early widowhood at sixteen years of age.

• Sofonisba Anguissola (1532 or 1535 – 1625), a painter from Cremona. In 1559 Philip II of Spain invited her to court. There, the National Museum of Women in the Arts says, she painted portraits of the royal family, gave the queen drawing lessons, and cared for the infantas (the princesses). The museum’s 1995 exhibition about her was titled A Renaissance Woman.

• Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia of Venice, later than the others. The University of Padua calls her the world’s first female graduate, with a degree in philosophy in 1678. She also studied Spanish, French, Arabic and Aramaic, and her request for a doctorate in theology was refused.

• Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), in England, described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer and playwright.

The popular claims, in more detail

“Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one”

This saying is often shared with a story: that the long version is the original, and that it was a compliment until the second line was cut off. The long version does read as praise. But the early uses we found point the other way.

An early, Latin-flavoured form of the idea is in a 1592 pamphlet. It sneers at an actor turned playwright, generally taken to be Shakespeare, as “an absolute Iohannes fac totum”.

The pamphlet was published under Robert Greene’s name. But the Folger Shakespeare Library notes that scholars agree the author was more likely the playwright Henry Chettle, who printed the work, or Thomas Nashe. The Folger glosses the phrase as “Johnny-do-all,” the base of the phrase “Jack of all trades”.

The English phrase is in print by 1618, in Geffray Mynshul’s essays on prisons. It describes a prison porter who “hath plaid Jack-of-all-trades”. A proverb collection of 1732 has “Jack of all Trades is of no Trade”.

“Master of none” is in print by 1741, in a Dublin pamphlet on the abuses of apothecaries. It complains that the druggist there is at once physician, surgeon and apothecary, “a Jack of all trades, and in truth, master of none”. Every early use we found is a put-down.

The second line, “though oftentimes better than master of one”, is harder to trace. In the Internet Archive’s full-text search of scanned books, the earliest book containing it is from 2007. That search does not cover newspapers or every library, so the line may be older. But we found no early source for it.

Where “T-shaped” comes from

The Word Spy dictionary defines “T-shaped” as having skills and knowledge that are both deep and broad. The stem of the T is depth; the crossbar is breadth. The term is often said to have been coined by David Guest in 1991.

Guest did use it, in an article in The Independent on 17 September 1991, as quoted in the Word Spy dictionary. But his words present it as an existing term: a theory “which prizes individuals known as T-shaped People”. He called them a variation on Renaissance Man.

The term is older. A 1978 article in an engineering-management journal is titled “Scientists Become Managers-The ‘T’-Shaped Man”. It was printed there as a reprint, so it may first have appeared elsewhere. We could not find who first used the term in the dictionary and journal records we could open.

Design took up the idea later, through Tim Brown, then IDEO’s chief executive. In a 2010 interview he said the vertical stroke of the T is a depth of skill that lets people contribute to the creative process. The horizontal stroke, he said, “is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines”.

In his version, the crossbar is as much about working with other people as about knowing other fields.

“Polymaths are more creative”

There is a real correlation here; what causes it is not known. The studies usually behind this claim come from Robert Root-Bernstein and colleagues.

A 2008 study of eminent scientists is quoted in a 2010 peer-reviewed article. It found Nobel laureates almost three times as likely to have arts and crafts hobbies as Sigma Xi members and the U.S. public. The authors’ own later write-ups give larger multiples for single art forms. We stick to the overall figure from the study itself.

The researchers state the limits themselves. In a 2022 paper, Michèle and Robert Root-Bernstein write that “the resulting correlations remain in need of causal explanations”. They also say they cannot rule out that Nobel laureates are smarter and more talented than the typical professional.

They add that earlier studies found “no evidence that Nobel laureates are more intelligent than the average professional”. Socioeconomic factors and educational opportunities, they say, almost certainly play some role.

A 2019 follow-up surveyed a convenience sample of 225 STEMM professionals. Samples like that are typically not representative of a wider population. In web, Europe PMC and Crossref searches we found no independent replication using different data. The other studies we found were the authors’ own.

“You need 10,000 hours to master a field”

Practice matters, but how much it explains differs a lot from field to field. Our Outliers summary covers this in full, and our Range summary uses the same figures.

The short version: the number comes from a 1993 study of violin students in Berlin. Its lead author, Anders Ericsson, later wrote that there is “nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours”.

For anyone learning several fields, the useful part is how much practice explains in different kinds of field. A meta-analysis pools the results of many studies.

A 2014 meta-analysis, as corrected by its authors in 2018, measured how much of the difference in performance deliberate practice explained. It was 24% in games, 23% in music and 20% in sports, but 5% in education and 1% in professions.

Ericsson replied that it defined deliberate practice much more broadly than he had. Either way, the measured share was smallest in education and the professions.

“Generalists beat specialists”

It depends on the setting, and the studies say so:

• Forecasting. In Philip Tetlock’s studies, as our Range summary explains, the fox draws on many ideas and the hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox is more successful in predicting the future. That is a thinking style, not a career in several fields.

• Pace of change. A natural experiment on mathematicians after the Soviet Union’s collapse found that generalists did best when their field changed slowly. Specialists gained the advantage when change sped up.

• Career stage. In Hollywood animation, the authors predicted, and found support for, the pattern that depth helps creativity more early in a career. Breadth helps more later, when flexibility is most needed.

• Pay is not performance. A study of the résumés of chief executives of S&P 1,500 firms from 1993 through 2007 estimated an annual pay premium of 19% for generalist CEOs. But in their working paper the authors found no significant link between firm performance and their general ability index.

So neither side wins in general. Breadth helps in some conditions and depth in others.

“There are no polymaths any more, because knowledge is too big”

Breadth has become harder, and there is real evidence for that. But it has not gone.

The economist Benjamin Jones argued in a paper published in 2009 that as knowledge grows, innovators can cope in their education by seeking narrower expertise. But narrower expertise reduces what each of them can do alone. He called this a “death of the Renaissance Man” effect.

In US patent data from 1975 to 1999, he found the age at first invention rising by about 0.6 years per decade and team size rising 17% per decade.

A 2007 study of millions of papers and patents found that teams increasingly dominate solo authors in producing knowledge. And a 2025 study in Nature found “a pervasive ‘pivot penalty’”. The further researchers move from their previous work, the more steeply the impact of their new research declines. That penalty has grown over the past five decades.

But the many-sided person has not vanished. The historian Peter Burke wrote The Polymath, which ends with an appendix of “500 Western Polymaths”. As the ICI Berlin summary of his lecture there puts it, “the species of the polymath has continued to exist; and it still does today – despite an undeniable decline”.

A review in Commentary describes his division of polymathic careers into passive, clustered and serial kinds. And a 2019 study of physicists found that researchers now switch between topics more often than those in the early days. But the same study found that switching went with fewer citations per paper at every career stage.

The two sides measure different things. The decline studies measure frontier research, where depth requirements bite hardest. The survival evidence is about breadth of interests and careers that move. The all-fields genius making discoveries everywhere is much rarer, while breadth now tends to live in teams and in careers that change direction.

What the learning research says about breadth

Skills rarely carry over on their own

A common hope is that training one skill, such as chess or music, makes you sharper in general. The evidence we read leans against this, though it is still argued.

In 2017 Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet presented three meta-analyses, on chess and music instruction for children and on working-memory training. They found small to moderate effects, but the better the experimental design, the smaller the effect. They “conclude that far transfer of learning rarely occurs”. Far transfer means a skill carrying over to something quite different.

A 2019 meta-analysis of meta-analyses by the same group went further. It found that once placebo effects and publication bias were controlled for, the overall effect size and true variance equaled zero.

The main evidence on the other side is about action video games. A 2018 meta-analysis of intervention studies found an average effect of a third of a standard deviation (g = 0.34). It concluded that action video game play robustly enhances top-down attention and spatial cognition. It also noted that published effects were estimated to be 30% larger than in the full literature.

The two groups read overlapping evidence differently.

Music is argued over too. Emmanuel Bigand and Barbara Tillmann reanalysed the data from Sala and Gobet’s 2020 meta-analysis of music training. They found “a significant effect size (g = .234)”. They concluded that music “may be special in allowing for small but statistically significant far-transfer effects”. Our music myths page covers that dispute.

The weight of the evidence we read leans towards far transfer being rare, with action games and music training the main exceptions claimed.

Analogies help, when someone notices them

Breadth can still pay through analogy: seeing that a problem in one field has the shape of a problem in another. The catch is noticing it.

Psychologists have studied this with a classic puzzle in which a doctor must destroy a tumour with rays without harming healthy tissue. The studies are Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak’s, as Holyoak’s lab later summarised them. With no help, only about 10% of the participants found the convergence solution.

After reading a story with the same structure (a general using converging troops to capture a fortress), about 30% found it on their own. With a hint to use the story, the total reached roughly 80%.

The lesson the researchers drew is that people can use a distant analogy but often fail to notice it. In a later study, people who read two stories with the same structure found the solution more often than those who read one such story and an unrelated one.

Switching has a cost, measured in seconds

Switching tasks has a real cost, but it has been measured over seconds, not seasons. In lab studies, people respond much more slowly, and usually make more mistakes, right after a switch. This “switch cost” is reduced, but not eliminated, by an opportunity for preparation. Those tasks are simple, and the switches happen within a single session.

In the task-switching and multitasking studies we read, and in Europe PMC and Crossref searches, we found no study that tests switching between whole fields over weeks or months.

The nearest evidence points both ways. Across whole careers, physicists who switched topics more often had fewer citations per paper. But within one school subject, mixing different kinds of problems over three months raised test scores, compared with practising one kind at a time.

So the lab results do not show that studying several subjects wastes effort. For switching within a working day, our Deep Work summary covers attention residue and the short “ready-to-resume” plan that reduced it.

Unusual combinations: risky, sometimes rewarding

Mixing fields brings both risks and rewards. A 2013 study of 17.9 million papers found that the highest-impact science is mostly grounded in very conventional combinations of earlier work. Yet it also features an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers like this were twice as likely to be highly cited.

The same study found that teams were 37.7% more likely than solo authors to bring novel combinations into familiar fields.

A study of almost 900 research-centre scientists found that interdisciplinary research brought both penalties (fewer papers published) and benefits (more citations). It called such work a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. Across 18,476 grant proposals in Australia, the more interdisciplinary a proposal, the less likely it was to be funded.

Two cautions. These studies measure papers and citations, not individual polymaths. And the novelty measures themselves are debated: a 2020 study found that novelty, measured as an atypical combination of knowledge, overlaps with interdisciplinarity.

Explore, then focus

One finding speaks most directly to a many-sided life. A 2021 study of the career histories of artists, film directors and scientists found that people tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak. They become notably more focused after it begins. The authors describe the sequence as exploration followed by exploitation.

Set beside the pivot penalty, it suggests that breadth works best as a wide search that later settles, rather than as constant jumping. That is our reading of two studies, not a rule.

Must-knows and must-haves

The writers who built the ideal were specific about what an all-round person should know and be able to do. Their lists were written for upper-class men at court, and the version for women was narrower, as the section on the gendered term shows. Read with that in mind, they still make a useful checklist.

What the period’s own writers listed

Castiglione’s courtier. Besides arms, letters, music and drawing, covered earlier on this page, Book I of The Book of the Courtier asks for a trained body and a clear voice. In Opdycke’s translation, the speaker asks for:

• Riding and sport. The courtier should be a perfect horseman in every kind of seat (§21). It is fitting also to know how to swim, to leap, to run and to throw stones (§22).

• Knowledge. What matters most for speaking and writing well is knowledge (§33).

• Lightness. He should not always speak of grave matters, but also of amusing things, games, jokes and banter, as the occasion suits (§34).

• Clarity. On a difficult subject he should explain his meaning carefully, with precision of both word and thought (§34).

For the court lady, Book III asks above all for a certain pleasant affability (§5), alongside letters, music, painting and dancing.

Hoby’s checklist. Thomas Hoby’s English translation of 1561 ends with a summary, “A breef rehersall of the chiefe conditions and qualities in a courtier”. In his spelling, it asks the courtier:

• “To be more then indifferentlye well seene in learninge, in the Latin and Greeke tunges” (more than moderately learned, in Latin and Greek)

• “To be seen in tunges, and specially in Italian, French and Spanish”

• “To have the feate of drawing and peincting”

• “To play upon the Lute, and singe to it with the ditty” and “To swimme well”

• “To delite and refresh the hearers mindes in being pleasant, feat conceited, and a meerie talker, applyed to time and place” (to be pleasant, witty company, suited to the moment)

• “Not to be rash, nor perswade hymselfe to knowe the thing that he knoweth not. To confesse his ignorance, whan he seeth time and place therto, in suche qualities as he knoweth him selfe to have no maner skill in” (not to fool himself that he knows what he does not, and to admit it at the right moment)

A shorter list for “a waytyng gentylwoman” includes “To be learned” and “To drawe and peinct. To daunse.”

Alberti’s own record. The Latin Vita, probably Alberti’s own work as described above, gives the most detailed list of all. Bonucci’s Italian says that from boyhood he was given to horses, arms and musical instruments (our translation of “dato a’ cavalli, agli armeggiamenti ed ai musicali istrumenti”). He was also given to letters and the fine arts.

For exercise he took up running, leaping, wrestling and throwing the dart, and above all climbing steep mountains. He did it more for strength of body than for play and amusement (our translation). With his feet together he could jump over a standing man.

He taught himself music, and what he composed pleased the masters. When letters tired him, music, painting and exercise restored him (our translation).

The Vita also shows how he learned. He gave himself wholly to letters and to canon and civil law, and the strain of study made him seriously ill. At twenty-four, after his doctors told him to give up the studies that tired his memory most, he turned to physics and mathematics.

He chose them because in these, the Latin says, he understood that the mind had to be exercised more than the memory (our translation of ingenium magis, quam memoriam).

He asked smiths, architects, boatmen and even shoemakers whether their crafts held anything uncommon or secret (our translation; the scan reads “febbri” for fabbri, smiths). At times he pretended not to know things in order to discover other people’s skill.

When he painted a portrait, he would ask children whether they recognised it. If they did not, he counted the picture a failure.

Set side by side, the three lists cover the same ground: a trained body, languages and reading, music, drawing, and conversation. Two habits run through them that are easy to miss: admitting what you do not know, and asking people who know other things. That is our reading of the texts, not a rule from them.

The same list today

Each row pairs something the period listed with its nearest present-day form, and one sourced fact about it. These describe what people do; what fits your life is your call.

Listed then	Closest present-day form	One sourced fact
Arms, and the exercises around them: running, leaping, wrestling, tennis, and Alberti’s mountain climbing	Regular physical activity, including strength work	The WHO reports that nearly a third (31%) of adults worldwide, 1.8 billion people, do not meet its recommendation of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week. Our Darebee guide covers one free way to train at home.
Riding in every kind of seat, and swimming	Practical skills that keep a person safe, swimming above all	The WHO lists teaching school-age children basic swimming, water safety and safe rescue skills as one approach to preventing drowning.
Latin and Greek, then Italian, French and Spanish	A second language, and old books read in good translations	In Eurostat’s 2022 survey, around three-quarters of working-age adults in the EU, aged 25 to 64, said they knew at least one foreign language. Project Gutenberg, listed below, holds many of the old texts quoted on this page.
Reading music, playing the lute, singing	Learning an instrument or to sing, and reading notation	IMSLP, the Petrucci Music Library, describes itself as sharing the world’s public domain music.
Drawing and painting	Sketching, including drawing to remember and to explain	In seven lab experiments published in 2016, words that people drew were better remembered than words they wrote out. An independent team found the same “drawing effect” in 2025. Both were lab tests of memory for words.
Conversation that refreshes the listeners’ minds, clear explanation, and Alberti’s questions to craftsmen	Conversation, asking questions, and explaining plainly	In one team’s 2017 studies of live conversations, people who asked more questions, especially follow-up questions, were better liked. Our How to Win Friends summary covers the caveats.
Alberti’s physics and mathematics, begun at twenty-four	Maths and science learned later in life	OpenStax, a nonprofit initiative of Rice University, says every textbook in its library is free to read online or download as a PDF.

How to build a many-sided life today

None of this needs a genius. These are practices that fit the evidence above, each with the source it comes from. They describe practices; what fits your life is your call.

1. A home field, with neighbours. The pivot-penalty research found the biggest costs for the biggest jumps away from earlier work. One way to work across fields with that in mind is to keep one area deep and add neighbouring ones.

2. Exploring first, then narrowing. The hot-streak study found exploration followed by focus, not either alone. A season of sampling widely, followed by a choice of what to go deep on, matches that pattern.

3. Practising properly in each field. Ericsson’s sense of deliberate practice meant following training activities designed by an expert to build specific abilities, and using feedback to find weaknesses and work on them. That applies field by field; skill in one rarely carries over on its own.

4. Looking for analogies on purpose. People tend to miss distant analogies unless they compare examples or are prompted. So one practice is to ask, when stuck, where have I seen a problem shaped like this?, and to put two examples side by side.

5. A commonplace book. The historian Robert Darnton writes that the practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians. Readers copied striking passages into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus, Darnton notes, instructed them how to do it.

   John Locke’s indexing method was printed in English in London in 1706, after appearing in French in 1686. He wrote that he had used it “for the Space of Five and Twenty Years”.

   Of Thomas Jefferson’s literary commonplace book, Darnton writes that 339 of its 407 entries are citations of poetry. A notebook organised by topic, not by date, is where ideas from different fields meet.

6. Planning the switches. Switch costs shrink with preparation. In a set of four studies, among people expecting to return to the interrupted task under time pressure, a brief “ready-to-resume” plan helped. It reduced attention residue, so that performance on the interrupting task did not suffer. A short note on where you stopped and what comes next is the everyday version.

7. Working with people who know other things. Teams in the 2013 study were more likely than solo authors to bring unusual combinations into a field. Tim Brown’s T-shaped crossbar is about collaboration across disciplines. Breadth can be shared.

8. Letting the effort show. Castiglione’s courtier hid his effort on purpose. The legend gives its heroes an ease the record does not. Leonardo left the Adoration and the horse unfinished, and Goethe’s colour theory was criticised as science. Starting things, and dropping some, is part of a many-sided life, not proof of failure.

Free places to learn (as of October 2026)

Each of these describes itself on its own site; none pays us anything.

• MIT OpenCourseWare calls itself a free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses. It has no start or end dates and needs no account, and MIT does not offer credit or certification to OCW users. Its materials are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which does not allow commercial use.

• OpenStax is a nonprofit education initiative of Rice University. It says every textbook in its library is free to read online or download as a PDF.

• Open Yale Courses offers lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge, with no course credit, degree or certificate.

• Project Gutenberg calls itself an online library of more than 75,000 free eBooks, many of them the primary texts quoted on this page. Readers outside the United States are told to “check the laws of the country you live in” before downloading.

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes itself as an edited open access work produced by a collaborative community of scholars. It says all entries and substantive updates are refereed by its editorial board before they go online.

How to use this

Castiglione’s courtier was meant to hide his effort, and the polished picture of the Renaissance man still does. The record shows people who studied hard, asked others what they knew, and left things unfinished. So when someone’s breadth looks effortless, it can help to ask what work and which habits sit behind it.

Sources

The idea and its history

• Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Project Gutenberg #2074), Part II ch. 2 and Part V ch. 6; first published as Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel, 1860).
• Cecil Grayson and Giulio Carlo Argan, “Alberti, Leon Battista”, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 1 (1960).
• Opere volgari di Leon Batt. Alberti, ed. Anicio Bonucci, vol. 1 (Florence, 1843), Latin Vita with Italian translation (archive.org scan).
• L. B. Alberti, I libri della famiglia, Prologo (Wikisource transcription).
• Villa I Tatti, Harvard University, fellow page for Martin McLaughlin.
• Oxford English Dictionary, factsheets for “Renaissance man”, “polymath”, “uomo universale” and “Renaissance woman”.
• W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, 1400–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 1906) (archive.org scan).
• Online Etymology Dictionary, “Renaissance” and “polymath”.
• American Heritage Dictionary, “Renaissance man” and “Renaissance woman”.
• Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke (1901), Project Gutenberg #67799; Italian text, Libro primo (Wikisource); Thomas Hoby’s translation of 1561, Tudor Translations edition of 1900 (archive.org scan).

Leonardo

• Uffizi Galleries, Adoration of the Magi.
• Royal Collection Trust, Leonardo in the Royal Collection and Leonardo’s Study of Anatomy.
• The British Library, The Codex Arundel: mapping Leonardo’s working life (Google Arts & Culture).
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Jean Paul Richter, Project Gutenberg #5000, Nos. 10, 723 and 1340.
• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, Life of Leonardo (Project Gutenberg #28420).
• PBS NewsHour (Associated Press), 23 October 2019; AFP via Malay Mail, 23 October 2019.
• University of Oklahoma Libraries, History of Science Collections, Treatise on Painting.

Many-sided people from other times and places

• MacTutor History of Mathematics: Zhang Heng, Hypatia, Al-Biruni, Shen Kua.
• Fan Ye, Hou Han shu 59, Biography of Zhang Heng (Wikisource).
• Review of Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 1995.07.07.
• Dimitri Gutas, “Ibn Sina [Avicenna]”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• C. E. Bosworth, “Bīrūnī, Abū Rayḥān i. Life”, Encyclopaedia Iranica IV/3 (1989).
• Shen Kuo, Mengxi bitan, juan 24 (Wikisource); Matthew Marone, “Ancient Chinese Science and the Teaching of Physics”, Education About Asia.
• Benedict XVI, Apostolic Letter proclaiming St Hildegard of Bingen a Doctor of the Universal Church (7 October 2012).
• University of Pennsylvania Archives, Benjamin Franklin; Library of Congress, Benjamin Franklin: Scientist and Inventor; The Franklin Institute, Benjamin Franklin’s Inventions.
• Hellmich & Hellmich, Laryngologie, Rhinologie, Otologie 61 (1982), PubMed 6755111; Barteczko & Jacob, Anatomy and Embryology 207 (2004), PubMed 14760532; Rupik, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2021), PubMed 33660133; Margo & Harman, Survey of Ophthalmology 64 (2019), PubMed 30321568.
• Karen Detlefsen, “Émilie du Châtelet”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Natural History Museum, London, “Maria Sibylla Merian”.

Women of the period

• British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog, “Christine de Pizan and the Book of the Queen” (26 June 2013).
• Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, Paderborn University, “Pizan, Christine de (1364-1430)”.
• University of Chicago Press, Isotta Nogarola, Complete Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret L. King and Diana Robin.
• Carrie Hintz, review of Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, Early Modern Literary Studies 4.3 (1999).
• National Museum of Women in the Arts, “5 Fast Facts: Sofonisba Anguissola”.
• University of Padua, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia and heritage page.
• “Margaret Lucas Cavendish”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”, in R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible (1977), pp. 137–64 (catalogue record).

The popular claims

• Folger Shakespeare Library, Greenes Groats-worth of Witte, Shakespeare Documented.
• Geffray Mynshul, Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners (1618), Edinburgh reprint of 1821 (archive.org scan).
• Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732), no. 3051 (archive.org scan).
• [Charles Lucas], Pharmacomastix (Dublin, 1741), p. 34 (Wellcome copy on archive.org).
• Internet Archive full-text search (Open Library “search inside”), run 5 October 2026.
• Word Spy, “T-shaped”, quoting David Guest, The Independent, 17 September 1991.
• D. L. Johnston, “Scientists Become Managers-The ‘T’-Shaped Man”, IEEE Engineering Management Review 6(3) (1978), Crossref record.
• Morten T. Hansen, “IDEO CEO Tim Brown: T-Shaped Stars”, Chief Executive, 21 January 2010.
• Subotnik, Edmiston, Cook & Ross, Journal of Advanced Academics 21(4) (2010), quoting Root-Bernstein et al. (2008) (ERIC full text); Root-Bernstein et al., Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology 1(2) (2008), doi:10.1891/1939-7054.1.2.51.
• M. and R. Root-Bernstein, “Polymathy Among Nobel Laureates As a Creative Strategy”, Creativity Research Journal (2022), doi:10.1080/10400419.2022.2051294; Root-Bernstein et al., PNAS 116 (2019), doi:10.1073/pnas.1807189116.
• Passmore, Hellwig, Garcia & Kidd, “The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling”, Open Mind 9 (2025), pp. 501–514, doi:10.1162/opmi_a_00199.
• Ericsson & Pool, excerpt from Peak, Salon, 10 April 2016.
• Hambrick, Macnamara & Oswald, Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020) (Europe PMC); Ericsson, Psychological Research 85 (2021) (Europe PMC).
• Princeton University Press, Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (new edition, 2017).
• Teodoridis, Bikard & Vakili, Administrative Science Quarterly 64(4) (2019), doi:10.1177/0001839218793384.
• Mannucci & Yong, Academy of Management Journal 61(5) (2018), doi:10.5465/amj.2016.0529.
• Custódio, Ferreira & Matos, Journal of Financial Economics 108(2) (2013), abstract; working-paper version.
• Benjamin F. Jones, “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’”, NBER Working Paper 11360; Review of Economic Studies 76(1) (2009).
• Wuchty, Jones & Uzzi, Science 316 (2007), PubMed 17431139.
• Hill, Yin, Stein, Wang, Wang & Jones, “The pivot penalty in research”, Nature (2025), doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09048-1.
• Peter Burke, The Polymath (Yale University Press), “Appendix: 500 Western Polymaths” (chapter record).
• ICI Berlin, Peter Burke, “The Polymath in an Age of Specialization”; Joseph Epstein, “A Gallery of Know-It-Alls”, Commentary.
• Zeng et al., “Increasing trend of scientists to switch between topics”, Nature Communications (2019), doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11401-8.

Learning research

• Sala & Gobet, Current Directions in Psychological Science 26(6) (2017), doi:10.1177/0963721417712760.
• Sala et al., “Near and Far Transfer in Cognitive Training”, Collabra: Psychology 5(1) (2019), doi:10.1525/collabra.203.
• Bediou et al., Psychological Bulletin 144(1) (2018), doi:10.1037/bul0000130.
• Sala & Gobet, Memory & Cognition 48 (2020), pp. 1429-1441, as reanalysed in Bigand & Tillmann, “Near and far transfer: Is music special?”, Memory & Cognition 50 (2022), doi:10.3758/s13421-021-01226-6.
• Kubricht, Lu & Holyoak, Memory & Cognition 45 (2017), doi:10.3758/s13421-016-0687-7, summarising Gick & Holyoak (1980, 1983); Catrambone & Holyoak (1985), ERIC ED265212.
• Monsell, “Task switching”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3) (2003), PubMed 12639695.
• Leroy & Glomb, “Tasks Interrupted”, Organization Science 29(3) (2018), doi:10.1287/orsc.2017.1184.
• Rohrer, Dedrick & Stershic, “Interleaved practice improves mathematics learning”, Journal of Educational Psychology 107(3) (2015), doi:10.1037/edu0000001.
• Uzzi, Mukherjee, Stringer & Jones, “Atypical combinations and scientific impact”, Science 342 (2013), doi:10.1126/science.1240474.
• Leahey, Beckman & Stanko, Administrative Science Quarterly 62(1) (2017), doi:10.1177/0001839216665364.
• Bromham, Dinnage & Hua, “Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success”, Nature 534 (2016), doi:10.1038/nature18315.
• Fontana, Iori, Montobbio & Sinatra, Research Policy 49(7) (2020), doi:10.1016/j.respol.2020.104063.
• Liu, Dehmamy, Chown, Giles & Wang, Nature Communications 12 (2021), doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25477-8.

Must-knows and must-haves

• Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Opdycke (1901), Book I §§21, 22, 33, 34 and Book III §5 (Project Gutenberg #67799); Thomas Hoby’s translation of 1561, “A breef rehersall of the chiefe conditions and qualities in a courtier” and the list for “a waytyng gentylwoman”, Tudor Translations reprint of 1900 (archive.org scan).
• Alberti’s Latin Vita with Bonucci’s Italian, Opere volgari, vol. 1 (Florence, 1843) (archive.org scan); English ours.
• World Health Organization, fact sheets “Physical activity” and “Drowning”.
• Eurostat, “Foreign language skills statistics” (Adult Education Survey, 2022 data).
• IMSLP, the Petrucci Music Library, main page.
• Wammes, Meade & Fernandes, “The drawing effect”, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 69(9) (2016), PubMed 26444654; Namias & Huff, Memory 33(10) (2025), PubMed 41021707.
• Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson & Gino, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113(3) (2017), PubMed 28447835.

Practices and free resources

• Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces”, The New York Review of Books, 21 December 2000.
• John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (London, 1706) (archive.org scan).
• MIT OpenCourseWare, About and Terms of Use; OpenStax, About; Open Yale Courses, About; Project Gutenberg, About and licence; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, About.

We read the primary texts above in public-domain translations and editions on Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and the Internet Archive; where the English is ours, the page says “our translation”. For the research we read each study’s abstract and, where available, its full text; five sources (Root-Bernstein et al. 2008, Kelly-Gadol 1977, Burke’s The Polymath, Johnston’s 1978 article and Guest’s 1991 newspaper article) we could not read in full, and the page reports them only through the sources named. Free-resource details were read on each organisation’s own pages on 5 October 2026.

Checked October 2026.