101 Things You Didn't Know About Da Vinci (18 page)

His notes range from almost boring, to completely out of this world. While some comments were pretty abstract, he also made useful suggestions. In one of his more practical moments, Leonardo notes any room or building that serves as a dance hall should be located on the ground floor, so as to avoid the danger of dancers stomping their way through the floor. Other portions of Leonardo's notebooks reveal his fascination with the process of conception—from a medical standpoint—and the layout of a fetus in the womb. He didn't stop there, though, and continued to chronicle the lives of people from infancy into the teenage years.

Leonardo's notes also contain pithy philosophical statements and maxims on such topics as religion, morality, science, mechanics, politics, speculation, spirits, and nature. His writings include a number of mathematical tricks and rebuses. In addition, he constructed a number of short fables, mostly featuring animals. He also wrote a variety of jokes and other amusing stories, such as this one:

“It was asked of a painter why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.” (from
The Complete Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci,
translated by Jean Paul Richter)

The majority of the text (without any pictures) of Leonardo's notebooks is available free online from Project Gutenberg. You can view or download the text from here:
www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8ldvcl0.txt

71
And the lucky winner is …

Upon his death, Leonardo probably wanted to leave his notebooks to a close personal ally, someone who would never sell them or lose them in the basement. And whom did Leonardo trust with this weighty responsibility? None other than his pupil and close friend Francesco Melzi. Leonardo's last will and testament reads, in part:

“The aforesaid Testator gives and bequeaths to Messer Francesco da Melzo, nobleman, of Milan, in remuneration for services and favours done to him in the past, each and all of the books the Testator is at present possessed of, and the instruments and portraits appertaining to his art and calling as a painter.” from
www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/7ldvc09.txt
)

Since he had no wife, children, or other close relatives that we know about, Leonardo chose to leave the bulk of his estate to Melzi. Scholars believe that Leonardo left at least fifty (and perhaps as many as 120) complete notebooks to Melzi. Today, unfortunately, only twenty-eight survive in various versions. There aren't very many notes left from before 1500, so most of what's available are his writings from about 1500 up until his death in 1519. In addition to notes, there are also drafts of letters Leonardo composed as well as financial statements showing how much he was paid, or was owed, by various people.

After Leonardo's death in France, Melzi brought the pages back to Italy with him, keeping them with him until his death in 1570. There is some evidence that Melzi attempted to organize and excerpt some of Leonardo's writings, as well, including discussions that became
A Treatise on Painting
.

By the time of Leonardo's death, unfortunately, much of his fame and reputation had been forgotten. He died as a recluse in France and didn't produce much in his final years. His choice of heirs didn't help much in spreading the word of Leonardo's good name—Melzi was a minor noble, but of little importance. When the notebooks were discovered after his death, their value was not recognized. Because of Leonardo's mirror writing, they appeared to be gibberish to the untrained eye, and many people probably thought they were mere scribbles. Melzi's heirs didn't help the situation much either—they left the precious documents in an attic! They later gave away or sold many of the individual sheets, without any idea of what they were actually worth.

It was through these various blunders and ignorance that Leonardo's notebooks, sketches, and writings became scattered. Many were probably discarded, and some of the remaining pages show notes in other handwriting in various places—meaning someone else (a monk, perhaps) made their own notes on top of Leonardo's. Can you imagine doing your homework on top of the
Mona Lisa
?
Tragically, only a small percentage of Leonardo's prolific written output was saved, and these pieces have been collected over the years in volumes called codices. Probably the pages with particularly interesting sketches were kept more often than the pages and volumes with only text.

In the end, many factors doomed Leonardo's prolific scientific output to obscurity: his secretiveness in recording his observations, the lack of publication, and his many incomplete projects. Because very little of Leonardo's work was ever published or shared, his discoveries actually had little impact on the progress of science. How would anyone have known what Leonardo was thinking if he never shared it with anyone? Scientific discovery and invention, in fields from military engineering to human anatomy, proceeded in the slow, steady pace typical of history—unfortunately, it proceeded without the benefit of Leonardo's great leaps of intellect. Maybe history just wasn't ready for Leonardo, but we'll never know because Leonardo gave so little of his work a chance to be studied!

Leonardo's notebooks were not studied in any systematic fashion until the nineteenth century, when some of the first translations were made. Historians tried to determine and restore the original order of the notes. It was also around this time that Leonardo's notebooks were first exhibited to the general public.

Because of his lack of influence on future generations of scientists, Leonardo is sometimes called the last of the ancient scientists (because of technological and political limitations, these scientists tended to work in isolation). Today, the progress of science is much more collaborative—scientific discoveries are all based on the theories that came before. A truly innovative thinker like Leonardo, who basically invented most of his work from the ground up, would have had a very different place in a modern scientific world!

72
Decoding the codices

About 5,000 pages of Leonardo's notes still exist today. Originally written on loose sheets of paper, these notes have been bound into notebooks called “codices.” And what is a
codex
, you ask? It is, simply put, a collection of manuscripts. The word codex is a useful one to apply to Leonardo's books because they've been arranged into separate volumes; each codex has a name, and it's easy to identify which particular sheet belongs to which group. The modern arrangement of the codices is somewhat haphazard, though, and the current volumes probably bear no resemblance to the actual order in which Leonardo wrote them. He should have numbered his pages!

Perhaps the person most responsible for this erratic mess was Pompeo Leoni, a sculptor at the royal court of Spain in the seventeenth century. Leoni collected many of Leonardo's writings, but while trying to organize them, he cut and pasted pages from various notebooks and sections of Leonardo's writings, organizing them into separate volumes arranged into artistic, technical, and scientific sections. It messed up the original order, but at the same time provided us with a convenient cataloging system. From Leoni's efforts sprang the “Codex Atlanticus,” and the so-called Windsor collection. Both of these codices are notable because they consist mainly of drawings and sketches that Leoni cut out of other places in Leonardo's writings. When Leoni died, some of the manuscripts were brought back to Italy, while others remained in Spain.

The “Codex Atlanticus” is currently located in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. This volume contains hundreds of sheets of Leonardo's original notes, most of which date from between 1480 and 1518. The codex was donated to the library in 1637, but was taken to Paris along with other notebooks of Leonardo's when Napoleon conquered Milan in 1796. What a war prize! There, the notebooks were kept in the National Library of Paris and the Institute of France. In 1851 the “Codex Atlanticus” was returned to Italy, but twelve other manuscripts remained in France at that point. Primarily, the “Codex Atlanticus” contains the technical, mechanical, and scientific drawings from different notebooks, while the artistic, natural, and anatomical drawings are part of the collection at Windsor.

About 400 pages of the “Codex Atlanticus” are currently available online, although only in Italian at the moment! The site is
www.ambrosiana.it/ita/ca_principak.asp
.

Diving into the dusty library stacks isn't always a thrill, but the folks in Madrid are glad they did! Some of Leonardo's most valuable writings remained safe but unknown in the Biblioteca Nacional, in Madrid, until they were found by chance in 1966. These documents are now known as the “Madrid Codices.” The two volumes include work on mechanics, dating from 1490 to 1496, and geometry, from 1503 to 1505.

Leonardo's other codices are located all over the world. Currently housed in the British Library is the “Codex Arundel,” 238 sheets that were removed from various notebooks, forming a hodgepodge of drawings and notes. Leonardo started the collection in 1508, while he was living in Florence. While most of the contents come from around 1508, other pages were written at different points in Leonardo's life. The subjects include everything from mechanical designs to studies on the flight of birds. In this volume Leonardo also wrote that he had begun collecting various comments and sketches in one central location, which he wished to later reorganize according to subject. Of course, he never actually got around to finishing this project.

Parts of the “Codex Arundel” are currently available online from the British Library, in a shockwave format that allows you to turn pages and translate text, at this site:
www.bl.uk/collections/treasures/digitisation.html
.

A more minor codex, called the “Codex Trivulzianus,” currently makes its home in the Biblioteca Trivulziana at the Sforza Castle in Milan. This selection of fifty-five sheets contains Leonardo's notes on architecture and various religious themes, as well as literary notes. These early works are thought to date from between 1487 and 1490. Another minor codex, called “On the Flight of Birds,” is in the possession of the Biblioteca Reale in Turin. Consisting of seventeen pages, dating from about 1505, Leonardo used this codex to make a rigorous study of the details of flight, including wind and air resistance.

The only codex that is currently in the United States is the “Codex Leicester,” written between 1504 and 1510. Software giant Bill Gates paid $30 million to purchase the “Codex Leicester” in 1995. Bet you didn't realize they even were for sale! This seventy-two-page codex consists of double-sided sheets of linen paper, and its main topics include studies of water, rocks, light, and air. Like most of Leonardo's works, it was done in Leonardo's signature mirror writing. The “Codex Leicester” was one of the few manuscripts not inherited originally by Melzi and, at the moment, is the only manuscript of Leonardo's that is privately owned.