The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

Volume 1

Translated by Jean Paul Richter

1888






PREFACE.





A singular fatality has ruled the destiny of nearly all the most
famous of Leonardo da Vinci's works. Two of the three most important
were never completed, obstacles having arisen during his life-time,
which obliged him to leave them unfinished; namely the Sforza
Monument and the Wall-painting of the Battle of Anghiari, while the
third--the picture of the Last Supper at Milan--has suffered
irremediable injury from decay and the repeated restorations to
which it was recklessly subjected during the XVIIth and XVIIIth
centuries. Nevertheless, no other picture of the Renaissance has
become so wellknown and popular through copies of every description.

Vasari says, and rightly, in his Life of Leonardo, "that he laboured
much more by his word than in fact or by deed", and the biographer
evidently had in his mind the numerous works in Manuscript which
have been preserved to this day. To us, now, it seems almost
inexplicable that these valuable and interesting original texts
should have remained so long unpublished, and indeed forgotten. It
is certain that during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries their
exceptional value was highly appreciated. This is proved not merely
by the prices which they commanded, but also by the exceptional
interest which has been attached to the change of ownership of
merely a few pages of Manuscript.

That, notwithstanding this eagerness to possess the Manuscripts,
their contents remained a mystery, can only be accounted for by the
many and great difficulties attending the task of deciphering them.
The handwriting is so peculiar that it requires considerable
practice to read even a few detached phrases, much more to solve
with any certainty the numerous difficulties of alternative
readings, and to master the sense as a connected whole. Vasari
observes with reference to Leonardos writing: "he wrote backwards,
in rude characters, and with the left hand, so that any one who is
not practised in reading them, cannot understand them". The aid of a
mirror in reading reversed handwriting appears to me available only
for a first experimental reading. Speaking from my own experience,
the persistent use of it is too fatiguing and inconvenient to be
practically advisable, considering the enormous mass of Manuscripts
to be deciphered. And as, after all, Leonardo's handwriting runs
backwards just as all Oriental character runs backwards--that is
to say from right to left--the difficulty of reading direct from the
writing is not insuperable. This obvious peculiarity in the writing
is not, however, by any means the only obstacle in the way of
mastering the text. Leonardo made use of an orthography peculiar to
himself; he had a fashion of amalgamating several short words into
one long one, or, again, he would quite arbitrarily divide a long
word into two separate halves; added to this there is no punctuation
whatever to regulate the division and construction of the sentences,
nor are there any accents--and the reader may imagine that such
difficulties were almost sufficient to make the task seem a
desperate one to a beginner. It is therefore not surprising that the
good intentions of some of Leonardo s most reverent admirers should
have failed.

Leonardos literary labours in various departments both of Art and of
Science were those essentially of an enquirer, hence the analytical
method is that which he employs in arguing out his investigations
and dissertations. The vast structure of his scientific theories is
consequently built up of numerous separate researches, and it is
much to be lamented that he should never have collated and arranged
them. His love for detailed research--as it seems to me--was the
reason that in almost all the Manuscripts, the different paragraphs
appear to us to be in utter confusion; on one and the same page,
observations on the most dissimilar subjects follow each other
without any connection. A page, for instance, will begin with some
principles of astronomy, or the motion of the earth; then come the
laws of sound, and finally some precepts as to colour. Another page
will begin with his investigations on the structure of the
intestines, and end with philosophical remarks as to the relations
of poetry to painting; and so forth.

Leonardo himself lamented this confusion, and for that reason I do
not think that the publication of the texts in the order in which
they occur in the originals would at all fulfil his intentions. No
reader could find his way through such a labyrinth; Leonardo himself
could not have done it.

Added to this, more than half of the five thousand manuscript pages
which now remain to us, are written on loose leaves, and at present
arranged in a manner which has no justification beyond the fancy of
the collector who first brought them together to make volumes of


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