Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks

449 Pages·2008·3.88 MB·English

by  Irma Anne

oxford world’s classics

NOTEBOOKS

Leonardo da Vinci was born in Tuscany in 1452, the illegitimate
son of a Florentine notary. By the age of 20 he was in Florence
where he became a pupil of Verrocchio. Around 1482 he left
Florence for Milan, where he was to live for the next seventeen
years. It was here that he undertook many of his scientific investiga-
tions and painted many of his greatest pictures, including The Last
Supper. He returned to Florence in 1500 and stayed there for several
years, during which time he painted the Mona Lisa. He returned to
Milan where he stayed until 1513 when he went to Rome. His final
years were spent in France, where he died in 1519. As well as a great
artist, Leonardo was a deeply curious scientist and passionately
interested in all branches of knowledge. His notebooks—covered in
sketches of flowers, clouds, birds, human anatomy, and designs for
flying machines, fortifications, and waterways—testify to his
unquenchable curiosity and restless, acute intelligence.

Irma A. Richter was the daughter of Jean Paul Richter, who first
translated Leonardo’s writings in The Literary Works of Leonardo da
Vinci.

Thereza Wells is a Research Fellow at the University of the
Arts, London. She has worked on exhibitions at a number of
museums in Britain and America, and was associate curator of the
V&A’s exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, and
Design. She is one of the founders, with Martin Kemp, of the Uni-
versal Leonardo project.

Martin Kemp is Professor of the History of Art at the University
of Oxford. He is the author of Leonardo, and Leonardo da Vinci: The
Marvellous Works of Nature and Man and the driving force behind
the Universal Leonardo project.

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

LEONARDO DA VINCI
Notebooks

Selected by
IRMA A. RICHTER

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
THEREZA WELLS

Preface by
MARTIN KEMP

1

3
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Selection © Oxford University Press 1952, 2008
Introduction © Thereza Wells 2008
Preface © Martin Kemp 2008

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First published 1952. First published in Oxford World’s Classics 1980
New edition 2008

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452–1519
Notebooks / Leonardo da Vinci; selected by Irma A. Richter; edited with an
introduction and notes by Thereza Wells; preface by Martin Kemp.
p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics)
First published in 1952.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–929902–7 (alk. paper)
1. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452–1519—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
I. Richter, Irma A. (Irma Anne) II. Wells, Thereza. III. Leonardo, da Vinci,
1452–1519. Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. IV. Title.
ND623.L5A4 2008
709.2—dc22
2007042346

Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

ISBN 978-0-19-929902-7

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

PREFACE

martin kemp

Leonardo’s notebooks are amongst the most remarkable
survivals in the history of human culture. There is nothing
quite like them in art, science, and technology. The extraor-
dinary fluency of his thought, unconstrained by disciplinary
boundaries, and the brilliance of his graphic techniques are
unrivalled. Probably about four-fifths of what he wrote has
disappeared, but what remains is extraordinary in range and
depth.
The existence of the notebooks and caches of drawings
(inherited by his immediate heir, Francesco Melzi) was
known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not least to
artists like Poussin and Rubens. Melzi’s pious compilation of
the Treatise on Painting, which contains many passages from
manuscripts that are no longer traceable, was published in
Italian and French in 1651. However, by the nineteenth century
there was very little knowledge of the extent or contents of
Leonardo’s manuscript legacy. Jean Paul Richter changed all
that. His editions of Leonardo in English and German
effectively revealed an unknown Leonardo.
We now take it for granted that the private ‘notebooks’ or
‘papers’ of great individuals are of huge value in providing
insights into their minds. Although drawings had been treas-
ured since the sixteenth century, this was not the case with
notebooks. Some manuscript legacies survived, such as those
of Sir Isaac Newton, but they were revered as memorials or
souvenirs rather than because their contents were considered
to be of major importance. Richter was a pioneer in the move-
ment that was beginning to realize the value of private writ-
ings and sketches that speak of a great mind at work, however
unresolved the results might be.

There can be few if any works of historical scholarship
published in the late nineteenth century that remain key
sources today. An art historian and dealer, Richter was a
protégé of Giovanni Morelli, the inaugurator of systematic
connoisseurship. His Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci
(1883) is an extraordinary achievement. He trawled through
Leonardo’s horribly illegible texts, mostly unpublished,
making a telling selection and providing the reader with par-
allel transcriptions and translations. Both have stood up
notably well, though the translations are very much of their
period, with their somewhat Shakespearian tone.
Richter’s selection is weighted more towards the arts than
the sciences and technologies, although his choice of non-
artistic texts gives a good idea of the nature of his writing on
other topics. In 1938 Edward MacCurdy’s The Notebooks of
Leonardo da Vinci in two volumes served to redress the bal-
ance, and Richter’s daughter Irma sensibly took advantage of
his translated anthology. However, Richter’s earlier compila-
tion, not least with the excellent Commentary published by
Carlo Pedretti, remains my most frequent port of first call
when I begin to research some aspect of Leonardo’s writings.
For general rather than specialist use, Richter’s two
mighty volumes were rather ponderous—hence the rationale
for his daughter’s judicious abridgement, with significant
reordering and some augmentation, first published in 1952.
Trained as an artist at the Slade School of Art, Irma also
studied in Oxford and in Paris. As a scholar, she collaborated
both with her father and her sister, Gisela, a distinguished
authority on ancient art.
Making any selection from Leonardo’s 6,000 or so surviv-
ing pages (plus those that are only known in the Treatise) is a
real problem. Which Leonardo do we present? The artist,
the scientist, the engineer, the natural philosopher, the author
of literary snippets . . . ? The underlying difficulty is that
although Leonardo and his age would have recognized some
of the terms we use, such as painter, sculptor and engineer,

Preface
vi

many of the professional categories we take for granted post-
date the Renaissance.
No one went to a college to learn to be an engineer or an
architect. Leading masters of many trades such as Filippo
Brunelleschi, builder of the dome of Florence Cathedral,
sculptor and inventor, moved fluidly across what we now
regard as disciplinary boundaries. Lorenzo Ghiberti, the
great sculptor of the Baptistery doors, listed all the intellec-
tual territories that learned artists should master: grammar,
philosophy, medicine, astrology, optics, history, anatomy,
the theory of design and arithmetic. A recipe for a Leonardo!
For his part, Leonardo defined painting as the supreme
science, since it conclusively presents—as he would have said,
‘demonstrates’—all the visual effects in the world in terms of
their underlying causes. If we ask, is this or that text on math-
ematics or geology relevant to his art, the answer cannot but
be yes. We would define Leonardo as having written far less
about art than about other things. He would have rejected the
premiss on which we would make this judgement.
Irma Richter’s selection and ordering, starting with
Leonardo’s definitions of ‘True Science’, before moving to
‘The Universe’, serves the needs of the wholeness of
Leonardo’s thought better than her father’s classifications.
Jean Paul began with a substantial group of texts from the
so-called paragone, the comparison of the arts, and the whole
of his first volume is dedicated to texts on painting. Leonardo
stressed the foundation of all visual knowledge on certain
‘principles’, and this is how Irma’s presentation begins.
In all, under one-third is devoted to writings on art. Of all
Leonardo’s major concerns, only engineering is conspicu-
ously underrepresented, even allowing for the fact that the
Madrid Codices were then unknown.
The broad headings under which she grouped the texts,
dealing with fields of activity rather than our classification of
professional disciplines, are notably different from her father’s.
He saw Leonardo as dealing with ‘Physical Geography’ and

Preface
vii

‘Astronomy’, while she signals Leonardo’s writing on
‘Microcosm and Macrocosm’. She announces ‘The Four
Powers of Nature’, whereas her father used the modern term
‘Dynamics’. Looking back at her 1952 publication, I am more
than ever impressed at the prescience of her editing, and its
independence from the late nineteenth-century conceptual
framework of her father.
Irma Richter’s compact volume of Leonardo’s writings has
provided generations of readers with their most accessible
introduction to Leonardo’s own voice and to key documents
of his career. It is good to have her selections newly edited,
with Thereza Wells’s perceptive introduction and her
judicious updating, above all of the apparatus. As I tell my
students, if you want to know about Leonardo, read what
he wrote, and only then turn to what others have written
about him.

Preface
viii

CONTENTS

Introduction
xiii

Note on the Text
xxxiv

Acknowledgements
xxxvi

Select Bibliography
xxxvii

A Chronology of Leonardo da Vinci
xl

NOTEBOOKS

I. TRUE SCIENCE
3
i. experience
3
ii. reason and nature’s laws
7
iii. mathematical demonstration
8
iv. experiment
10
v. search for true knowledge
10

II. THE UNIVERSE
14
i. the four elements
15
1. Water
17
2. Water and Earth
26
(a) The Deluge and Shells (b) Rivers and
Strata (c) The Mediterranean
3. Water and Air
36
4. Earth, Water, Air, and Fire
40
5. Microcosm and Macrocosm
44
6. A Spirit amid the Elements: Its limitations
47
7. The Vault of Heaven
50
ii. the four powers of nature
53
Plans for a Book on Theoretical Mechanics
54
1. Weight
55

Contents
x

2. Force and Weight
58
3. Movement
62
4. Movement and Weight
63
5. Movement and Force
67
6. Impetus and Percussion
70
iii. mechanics
75
References to Books on Applied Mechanics
75
1. Friction
76
2. Weighing Instruments
78
3. Wheels and Weight
80
4. The Screw
82

III. FLIGHT
83
i. movement through wind and water
84
ii. structure of birds’ wings
87
iii. swimming and flight
90
iv. flying machine
98

IV. THE ARTS
102
1. the artist’s course of study
102
1. The Eye and the Appearance of Things
102
(a) The Five Senses (b) The Eye
(c) Perspective
2. The Surface of Things and Light
118
(a) The Geometric Foundation (b) Light
and Shade and Colour
3. The Life and Structure of Things
137
(a) Proportion (b) The Anatomy and
Movement of the Body (c) Physiology
(d) The Tongue (e) The Lips
( f ) The Embryo (g) Comparative
Anatomy (h) Draperies (i) Botany
4. The Expression of the Spirit
167
5. Composition
170

Contents
xi

ii. comparison of the arts
184
1. Painting, Music, and Poetry
184
2. Time and Space
191
3. Sound and Space
192
4. Painting and Sculpture
194
iii. architectural planning
196
iv. the artist’s life
204

V. TALES AND ALLEGORIES
215
i. bestiary
215
ii. fables
220
iii. prophecies
230
iv. jests
239
v. symbolism
242
vi. imaginative descriptions of nature
246
1. The Whale
246
2. Mount Taurus
248
3. The Giant
253

VI. REFLECTIONS ON LIFE
257
i. life passes
257
ii. life of the body
260
iii. life of the spirit
263
iv. on government
267

VII. LEONARDO’S WAY THROUGH LIFE
269
i. first florentine period (c.1464/9–1482/3)
269
ii. first milanese period (1481–1499)
274
iii. second florentine period (1500‒1506)
315
iv. second milanese period (1506‒1513)
334

v. roman period (1513‒1516)
348
vi. french period (1516‒1519)
355

Explanatory Notes
365
References to Manuscripts and Sources
371
Index
383

Contents
xii

INTRODUCTION

he laboured much more by his word than in fact or deed
Vasari, Lives of the Artists

Most of what we know about Leonardo da Vinci, we know
because of his notebooks. Some 6,000 sheets of notes and
drawings survive to show us his widely varied interests includ-
ing painting, sculpture, architecture, geometry, geology,
engineering, optics, anatomy, botany, hydrodynamics, and
astronomy. It is thought that the surviving sheets represent as
little as one-fifth of what he actually produced. Leonardo’s
early biographer, Giorgio Vasari, was right: Leonardo
appears to have laboured more by his word—especially words
accompanied by sketches—than anything else. The note-
books are a valuable resource, incomparable to that of any
other artist before or since. They tell us relatively little about
Leonardo’s private life, however. If he kept a personal diary,
it has not survived. Much of the biographical information we
have about him and his family comes from contemporary
sources and other related documents. On the other hand,
what we have in his notebooks shows us how he approached
his life and work, what interested him, what obsessed him
and why. They are the key to understanding how he thought.
Little is known about Leonardo’s early life. He was born in
1452, the illegitimate son of Ser Piero di Antonio da Vinci,
a leading notary, and Caterina, a young farmer’s daughter.
His birthplace of Vinci lies in the hills of Tuscany west
of Florence where agriculture dominated the economy.
Leonardo would later write about exploring this countryside
as a child and his love of nature, which would become a dom-
inant feature in his later investigations, began with this early
exposure. Leonardo was probably taken to Florence by his
father following the deaths of his grandfather and stepmother
in 1564.

Italy in the mid-fifteenth century was not the united coun-
try we know today, but a collection of many states with
differing forms of government, including several northern
states each run by a signore or lord; the Papal States under
the control of the pope; larger kingdoms, such as Naples; and
a number of important city-state republics including
Florence and Venice. The political fragmentation of Italy
meant that centres of culture grew up not only in Florence,
Venice, and Rome but also in small states governed by
rulers with an interest in the arts, for example the Sforza of
Milan and the Gonzaga of Mantua—both of whom gave
commissions to Leonardo.
Florence in this period was a prosperous banking and
mercantile-based centre of around 50,000 people. It was
proud to be a republic and its citizens had a strong sense of
civic duty. Its wealth enabled an active and thriving artistic
population to cater to the prominent families of the city.
A building boom was taking place and keen patrons were
keeping the workshops busy with demands for furniture,
sculpture, and paintings for the home and church. On an
intellectual level, in Florence and the rest of Italy, the human-
ist revival of classical Roman culture was well established and
almost every major Italian city considered itself the daughter
of Rome, using imperial or republican Rome as a model
depending on their own type of government. The works of
great thinkers such as Euclid, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Plato
were being translated from Greek to Latin in the first half of
the fourteenth century, and were therefore accessible to a
wider audience, and a number of Byzantine and Greek schol-
ars had arrived in Italy, bringing their science and philosophy
books with them.
Two figures in Florence who had developed much of their
thinking from a classical foundation were the architect and
engineer Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and the architect,
author, mathematician, and art theorist Leon Battista Alberti
(1404–72). Brunelleschi’s design for the dome of Florence
Cathedral was a monumental engineering feat and the

Introduction
xiv