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. 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. 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 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 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. vi Preface 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 vii 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 viii Preface ‘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. 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