They lived in different centuries, spoke different languages, and created works that seem to have nothing in common. But Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Beethoven, Toni Morrison, and many other names that have stood the test of time shared something far beyond talent. Behind every masterpiece, there was a set of attitudes, habits, and ways of seeing the world that repeat with surprising regularity throughout art history.
What makes someone become a great artist? This question has fascinated scholars, admirers, and young creators for centuries. The answer is rarely simple, and certainly not just about “natural talent.” Researchers in art history, creativity psychology, and artist biographies have identified patterns that repeatedly appear in the trajectories of the greatest names in human culture.
In this article, we will explore these common traits — not as a magic formula, but as a fascinating map of what drives the creative minds that changed the world.
The Obsession with Observing the Real World
One of the most striking traits of great artists is an almost disturbing attention to what exists around them. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) dissected over 30 human bodies to understand the musculature that would appear in his paintings. His notebooks — the so-called Codex — are filled with meticulous records of water currents, facial expressions, and rock formations.
This same obsession appears in Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), who kept a diary for decades recording everything he saw and felt, or in Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), who spent years in the New Mexico desert studying flowers, bones, and arid landscapes until capturing something no one had managed to represent before.
Observing does not mean just looking: it means asking why things are the way they are. Great artists rarely accept the world as given. They interrogate it.
The Discipline No One Sees
The myth of the artist who creates in bursts of sudden inspiration is, for the most part, exactly that: a myth. The reality of the brightest trajectories in history points to rigorous routines and continuous work.
Bach (1685–1750) composed over 1,000 works throughout his life, many of them to fulfill weekly obligations as a church organist and singer. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) produced around 20,000 works over his career — paintings, sculptures, prints, and ceramics. Not because inspiration struck every day, but because he worked every day.
Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), even bedridden after accidents and surgeries, continued painting. Her studio was adapted so she could work lying down. Discipline, in these cases, was not an external imposition — it was an internal, almost visceral necessity.
This consistency appears so recurrently that art historians often cite voluminous production as a condition for great works: it’s hard to create a masterpiece without having created hundreds of mediocre works before.
The Intimate Relationship with Pain and Personal Experience
It would be simplistic to say that suffering creates art. But it’s undeniable that many of the greatest artists consciously transformed painful experiences into creative raw material.
Frida Kahlo painted her own fractured spine, her miscarriages, her physical and emotional pain with a frankness that shocked and delighted at the same time. Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death, pardoned at the last moment, and sent to forced labor in Siberia — experiences that deeply shaped characters like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
Toni Morrison (1931–2019), the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1993), wrote about the traumas of American slavery with poetic precision that was only possible because she refused to look away. Her work stems from a collective and historical pain transformed into a universal narrative.
What these artists have in common is not just suffering, but the ability to process and give form to what would be paralyzing for many. Art functioned, for them, as a language for the unspeakable.
The Willingness to Break the Rules of Their Time
Great artists were almost always, at some point, misunderstood, rejected, or considered too radical for their time.
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) sold only one painting in his lifetime — The Red Vineyard, in 1890, the year of his death. Today, his works are among the most valuable ever created. Claude Monet (1840–1926) had his paintings rejected by the Paris Salon — the official French art institution — before founding, along with other artists, the movement that would become known as Impressionism, precisely because of a sarcastic critique of one of his works.
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) caused a memorable scandal at the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913 in Paris: the audience booed, fights broke out in the audience, and the police had to intervene. Today, the work is considered a milestone of 20th-century music.
This pattern of conscious rupture is no accident. Great artists deeply study the rules before breaking them — and when they break them, they do so with intention. The difference between genius and amateurism is often exactly in this order: first understand, then subvert.
The Curiosity That Knows No Boundaries Between Fields
Another recurring trait is the refusal to be limited to a single discipline or field of knowledge.
Leonardo da Vinci is the most extreme example: he was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist, musician, and inventor. But he is not the only one. Michelangelo (1475–1564) was a painter, sculptor, architect, and poet. William Blake (1757–1827) was a poet and engraver, creating texts and images as an integrated language.
More recently, David Bowie (1947–2016) was a musician, actor, painter, and contemporary art collector. His readings — he frequently cited authors like Yukio Mishima and Bertolt Brecht — directly influenced his music and performances.
This transdisciplinary curiosity seems to fuel creativity in ways that no isolated specialization can. When a musician understands architecture or a writer is interested in neuroscience, unexpected connections arise — and it is precisely in these connections that original ideas are born.
The Relationship with Criticism and Failure
No great artist reached the top without collecting rejections, devastating critiques, and public failures. What differentiates these names is how they processed these setbacks.
J.K. Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers before publishing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Marcel Proust financed the publication of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time with his own resources, after being rejected by major publishers. Beethoven (1770–1827) continued composing after completely losing his hearing — his Ninth Symphony, one of the most celebrated works in music history, was written when he was already deaf.
The ability to separate failure from identity — understanding that a rejected work does not mean a worthless artist — appears as a common denominator in these stories. This does not mean they were immune to pain or doubt. Letters and diaries of Beethoven, van Gogh, and Kafka reveal deep anguish. But they continued.
The Pursuit of an Authentic and Unmistakable Voice
Finally, perhaps the most difficult trait to define and the most important of all: great artists developed, over time, a unique and unmistakable voice.
You recognize a Vermeer painting by the light. You recognize a paragraph by Clarice Lispector by the syntax. You recognize a Miles Davis song by the silences. This artistic identity does not come from nowhere — it is built through years of work, experimentation, mistakes, and conscious choices about what to keep and what to abandon.
Cézanne (1839–1906) spent decades painting the same mountain — Montagne Sainte-Victoire, near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence — from different angles and lighting conditions, in search of a way to represent what he saw that did not yet exist in painting. This process of obsessive refinement is what leads to style.
Authenticity, in these cases, is not a starting point. It is an achievement.
Conclusion
Bringing together such different names as Bach, Frida Kahlo, Toni Morrison, and Van Gogh in the same article may seem like a risky generalization. And indeed, each trajectory is unique and laden with its own historical, social, and cultural context.
But what art history reveals, with impressive consistency, is that artistic greatness is rarely an accident. It arises from the combination of attentive observation of the world, silent discipline, courage to break with the established, boundless curiosity, and, above all, the refusal to abandon one’s own voice even in the face of incomprehension.
These traits are not exclusive to geniuses of the past. They are practices and attitudes that any creative person can cultivate — not to guarantee immortality, but to make work more honest, deeper, and truer.
And perhaps that is exactly what unites them all: the seriousness with which they took the act of creating.
