Today the Cv (curriculum vitae) is the tool that everyone fills in to apply for a job or show skills and attitudes, but the concept is not modern at all: already in 1482, Leonardo da Vinci sent to Lodovico the Moro A letter that we consider the first today curriculum of historyin which it lists its most useful skills at the Court of Milan and even offers a trial period. Since then, i curriculum They evolved in the shapes and supports, but the function remains the same: to present themselves at the best and demonstrate what can be done. curriculum derives from the Latin courrethat is to run: curriculum vitae In fact, it means “course of life”. In Italy the phrase appears for the first time in 1892 and in 1941 The single form is also documented curriculumaccording to theAccademia della Crusca.
Who invented the curriculum vitae and when: Leonardo da Vinci
In the 1482 Leonardo da Vinci is thirty years old and spent the last twenty in Florence, where he trained at the Verrocchio shop and worked for the doctors. On this date, he writes a letter a Lodovico the MoroDuke of Milan. It is already A painter and sculptor establishedhe dealt with successful scientific studies, but when he writes to the Duke he does not present himself only as an artist, rather as one strategist and an engineercapable of putting the own skills At the service of what Lodovico wants to get for his city.
“I know the way to win the sieges, dig tunnels and channels, build covered and catapulted wagons”
The document, now preserved in the Ambrosiana Library of Milanis a perfect presentation letter e curriculum vitae Together: Leonardo does not praise his qualities, but Let it be the projects he has dealt with for him. In addition, he places himself with proactivity and the right dose of humility, proposing himself for a period of “internship” in which to make an experiment and test his skills under the gaze of the Duke:
“And if any of the above tells things to anyone, it seems impossible and inconstandable, I offer me to make it an expert in the park, or in which loco it will like to yourxcellenzia, to which I humbly as much as I can recom by.”
We know that Lodovico the Moro will consent to have it in Milan, and Leonardo goes to the city, where he remains for others almost twenty years, until 1499. Here his artistic and engineering production at the service of architecture and urban planning is particularly flourishing: among the works painted and kept in the city, for example, there is the very famous Last Supper.
The curriculum from 1800 to today’s digital revolution
If we fix the 1482 The birth of the first curriculum of historywe can imagine that in the centuries similar letters have been sent to dozens of dukes and gentlemen, until the end of the800when the cv It takes on an “official” form, documented by the “Academy of the Crusca”: letters in which skills and skills were listed in the service of a working project. The real revolution arrives in the years’90with the spread of computer And then of the web: write and send a curriculum becomes simple and accessible to everyone, and they are born standard Shared. In the 2002 theEuropean Union introduces theEuropassa preset format valid throughout the EU.
Today i curriculum they can be traditional, graphic, video, creative or digital on platforms such as LinkedInadapting to the context and for the purpose. Summarize everything we are and we know how to do a challenge remains, but this is precisely the meaning of the “course of life“, As poetry also suggests Write a curriculum of the Nobel Prize Wisława szymborska:
What is necessary?
It is necessary to write a question,
And when asked to attach the curriculum.Regardless of how much it has lived
It is good that the curriculum is short.(…)
