The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.Free searchable eBook of Volumes 1 and 2 of the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. |
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The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci equal the importance of his paintings and are perhaps the greatest literary legacy any artist has bequeathed to the world. He wrote about his sketches, inventions, architecture, elements of mechanics, painting ideas, human anatomy, grocery lists and even people that owed him money.
Leonardo kept notebooks throughout his life, in which he wrote daily, often in a private "backwards" or mirror-image handwriting. While the popular belief that he did this to keep some amount of secrecy may have some truth, the more plausible reason is that he did this naturally due to his left-handedness. It is easier to pull a quill pen than to push it; by using mirror-writing, the left-handed writer is able to pull the pen from right to left. It also prevents the ink from smudging. After his death, his notebooks fell into the possession of his favourite apprentice Francesco Melzi. Melzi held onto most of them and kept them safe until his own death in 1579. Melzi's heirs had less respect for the material and began to break up this huge and immensely important body of material. Indeed, to begin with, they left the notebooks in an attic, having no understanding of its significance, and then they gave them away or sold them cheaply to friends and collectors. In 1630 Pompeo Leoni, a sculptor in the Court of the King of Spain, acquired much of the material and tried to organise it by subject. This unfortunately resulted in the books being taken apart and the original order, which might have told us much about Leonardo's thinking, was lost. Each of the new books created by this process was a Codex, that resulted in two large collections, now known as the Codex Atlanticus and the Windsor Collection.
Following the same plan, Leoni put together at least four fascicles. From 1637 to 1796, some of the manuscripts were kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, but Napoleon on his arrival there arranged for them to be removed. Only some of these were returned to Milan in 1851, while some were kept in Paris and others in Spain, where a number of them were not found until 1966. This is why Leonardo's notebooks are so dispersed and divided now into as many as ten different codices:
Codex Leicester
The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It was purchased by Bill Gates in 1995 for $30.8 million. It is mostly dedicated to Leonardo's theories on astronomy, the properties of water, rocks and fossils, air and celestial light and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world. Leonardo compiled the Codex Leicester in Milan between 1506 and 1510. He wrote in sepia ink on 18 double-sided sheets of loose-leaf, linen paper. The Codex is named after Thomas Coke, later the 1st Earl of Leicester, who purchased it in 1717. Physically, the Codex takes the form of 18 sheets of paper, each folded in half and written on both sides, forming the complete 72-page document. At one time the sheets were bound together, but they are now displayed separately.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci - FreeThe text from Leonardo's notebooks have been compiled into a single eBook, which makes fascinating reading. This eBook is an ideal reference source since it contains a word search facility. No special viewers are required to read the eBook, although you will need a Windows compatible PC.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci - FreeJust some of the many drawings from Leonardo's Notebooks can be seen, and downloaded, from here.
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Codex Atlanticus (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana) 