Notebooks Read online
Table of Contents
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
Title Page
Copyright Page
PREFACE
Introduction
NOTE ON THE TEXT
Acknowledgements
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
A CHRONOLOGY OF LEONARDO DA VINCI
NOTEBOOKS
I - TRUE SCIENCE
I. EXPERIENCE
II. REASON AND NATURE’S LAWS
III. MATHEMATICAL DEMONSTRATION
IV. EXPERIMENT
V. SEARCH FOR TRUE KNOWLEDGE
II - THE UNIVERSE
I. THE FOUR ELEMENTS
II. THE FOUR POWERS OF NATURE
III. MECHANICS - REFERENCES TO BOOKS ON APPLIED MECHANICS
III - FLIGHT
I. MOVEMENT THROUGH WIND AND WATER
II. STRUCTURE OF BIRDS’ WINGS
III. SWIMMING AND FLIGHT
IV. FLYING MACHINE
IV - THE ARTS
I. THE ARTIST’S COURSE OF STUDY
II. COMPARISON OF THE ARTS
III. ARCHITECTURAL PLANNING
IV. THE ARTIST’S LIFE
V - TALES AND ALLEGORIES
I. BESTIARY
II. FABLES
III. PROPHECIES
IV. JESTS
V. SYMBOLISM
VI. IMAGINATIVE DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE
VI - REFLECTIONS ON LIFE
I. LIFE PASSES
II. LIFE OF THE BODY
III. LIFE OF THE SPIRIT
IV. ON GOVERNMENT
VII - LEONARDO’S WAY THROUGH LIFE
I. FIRST FLORENTINE PERIOD ( c . 1464/9 - 1482/3)
II. FIRST MILANESE PERIOD (1481-1499)
III. SECOND FLORENTINE PERIOD (1500 - 1506)
IV. SECOND MILANESE PERIOD (1506-1513)
V. ROMAN PERIOD (1513-1516)
VI. FRENCH PERIOD (1516-1519)
EXPLANATORY NOTES
REFERENCES TO MANUSCRIPTS AND SOURCES
INDEX
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 investigations 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 Universal 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.
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Selection © Oxford University Press 1952, 2008
Introduction © Thereza Wells 2008
Preface © Martin Kemp 2008
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 1952. First published in Oxford World’s Classics 1980
New edition 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
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 extraordinary fluency of his thought, unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, and the brilliance of his graphic techniques are unrivalled. Probably ab
out 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 treasured 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 movement that was beginning to realize the value of private writings 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 parallel 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 balance, and Richter’s daughter Irma sensibly took advantage of his translated anthology. However, Richter’s earlier compilation, 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 surviving 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, many of the professional categories we take for granted postdate 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 intellectual 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 mathematics 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 conspicuously 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 ‘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.
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 including 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 notebooks 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 dominant 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 country 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 fr
agmentation 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 humanist 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 scholars 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 mechanisms he devised to build the cathedral were to influence Leonardo’s own approach to mechanics. Brunelleschi also made a fundamental contribution to painting with his creation of linear perspective, the system of recording the appearance of a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface. Alberti’s own contribution to perspective was to describe its optical rules, explained as a geometry of vision. This provided an accessible way of understanding how to successfully render the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. He wrote a theoretical and practical guidebook for artists, De Pictura (On Painting, 1435) as well as De Re Aedificatoria (On Building, 1452, pub. 1485), ten books on architecture developed from the Ten Books of Architecture by Vitruvius (first century BC), the ancient Roman architect and engineer.