Preface to the Translations

I

In the year nineteen hundred and six in the audacity of youth I ventured to apply a comprehensive title to what was in reality a comparatively small selection from the contents of Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks. I have now attempted to redeem the promise of my title in some degree of completeness.

More than half a century ago, when the work of transcription of the Leonardo manuscripts was first commenced, a controversy arose among scholars as to whether the best method of publication was by individual manuscripts or collectively with some attempt at classification. Time has a way of proving most controversies vain, and in this instance it has shown the essential rightness of the position of both disputants. The publication of the transcripts of the original manuscripts, with facsimiles, has served as the foundation of all subsequent study. Some classification of the material, however, has been found to be necessary on account of the extraordinary diversity of the subjects treated of in the same manuscript, in the majority of cases.

Leonardo himself admitted as much in a prefatory note to the manuscript now in the British Museum (Arundel 263), and the action of Pompeo Leoni in compiling the Codice Atlantico out of other manuscripts by the use of scissors and paste has only made confusion worse confounded. I have therefore arranged the subject-matter under various main headings, but beyond this I have made no change of order, the passages in each section appearing in the same sequence as in the manuscripts, those of Milan coming first followed by those in Paris, London and Windsor.

About a dozen pictures are all that can be attributed to Leonardo with any degree of certitude or even of probability, and the witness of contemporary record, however credulously interpreted, does not do more than double or treble the number. How he disposed of his time would be an enigma but for the existence of the vast collection of drawings, and particularly of the notebooks. These number upwards of five thousand pages, the contents of which I have attempted to classify under some fifty headings. The classification is, as I know, rough and imperfect, this the wellnigh infinite variety of the contents having rendered almost inevitable.

For, of this man who did a few works of art most divinely well, it may be said that he took all knowledge as his province, and that in his individual achievement he symbolizes the diversity of an epoch as fully as can be said of any man at any period in the world's history.

To one who has studied them intermittently for more than a quarter of a century these manuscripts — the product of how many thousand hours of intellectual activity! — are the records of the working of the mightiest machine perhaps that has ever been a human brain: fragments of a larger purpose, charted, defined, explored, but never fulfilled, of which the treatises containing the sum of his researches in anatomy, physiology and geology form component parts, fragments of a vast encyclopedia of human knowledge.

What Thinker Has Ever Possessed the Cosmic Vision So Insistently?

He sought to establish the essential unity of structure of all living things, the earth an organism with veins and arteries, the body of a man a type of that of the world. The perceptions of his brain are hardly if at all fettered by bondage of time and place. At rare times, however, the personal note supervenes and moods of exultation or depression flash out their meaning in a phrase. The mood of the seer finds expression in fable or allegory, or in the series of "the Prophecies," revealing the depth of his mordant humour and his power of analysis of the motives which guide human conduct, or in speculation as to results that would follow possible extension of man's power — in which time has confirmed his prescience and his foreboding.

The manuscripts are a wellnigh inexhaustible quarry in which the student of every phase of Leonardo's mental activity will find material.

The Manuscripts as Biography

They are of peculiar value for the biographer, both in their revelation of personality and in the manner in which they react on contemporary record. Thus they tend to confirm Vasari in his more picturesque statements. He has told how Leonardo when he passed the places where birds were sold would often take them from their cages, pay the price demanded, and restore their liberty by letting them fly into the air. "The goldfinch," wrote Leonardo, "will carry spurge to its little ones imprisoned in a cage — death rather than loss of liberty." The purport of the note becomes clear from the fact that certain varieties of the spurge form a violent poison.

His account of how Leonardo collected lizards, hedgehogs, newts, serpents and all sorts of strange creatures, and from these constructed the head of a hideous monster, when in his youth he received a commission to paint something on a shield which should cause terror to the beholder, is directly confirmed by the painter's own precept, "how to make an imaginary animal appear real"; the method being that each part should have a basis of reality — thus the body of a serpent, head of a mastiff or setter, eyes of cat, ears of porcupine, nose of greyhound, eyebrows of lion, temples of an old cock and neck of turtle.

The letters and fragments of letters are also of primary importance for the biographer. They sound the whole gamut of sensations from the proud confidence of the first letter to Ludovic and that to the Commissioners of the Cathedral of Piacenza, through the terse appeals of the later days in Milan when "the horse" was ready for the casting and foreign subsidies had exhausted the Treasury, to those written in the depression of the Roman period, when his hopes of employment had been frustrated and he had been denounced to the Pope for his practice of anatomy, while his nerves were reacting helplessly to the misbehaviour of an apprentice.

The Scientific Achievement

Of the real ultimate value of the results of Leonardo's various scientific researches and investigations I have no title to attempt to speak. They can be judged only by specialists, and when a section is thus passed under review the result from the time of Dr. William Hunter onwards has been to confirm the impression of their great worth, establishing him as a thinker of very exact powers of analysis as well as a fertile investigator whose work shows a firm grasp of the principles of experimental science.

Among the anatomical investigations which find record in the Windsor Manuscripts is that of the spinal cord and intestines of the frog: "The frog retains life for some hours when the head, the heart, and all the intestines have been taken away. And if you prick the said cord it instantly twitches and dies." On the reverse of the same sheet: "The frog instantly dies when the spinal cord is pierced; and previous to this it lived without head, without heart, or any bowels or intestines or skin; and here therefore it would seem lies the foundation of movement and life."

The originality of his methods of anatomical investigation is illustrated by the details he gives of the making of wax casts in order to discover the true form of the ventricles of the brain:

"Make two air holes in the horns of the great ventricles and insert melted wax by means of a syringe, making a hole in the ventricle of the memoria, and through this hole fill the three ventricles of the brain; and afterwards when the wax has set take away the brain and you will see the shape of the three ventricles exactly."

Leonardo, as the learned editors of the Quaderni d'Anatomia inform us, was the first to make casts of the cerebral ventricles, and several hundred years elapsed before the idea occurred to any other anatomist.

It is on the fringe of this uncharted knowledge that the gift of expression often haunts and tantalizes by its beauty.

"Every weight tends to fall towards the centre by the shortest way" is the kernel of Newton's law of gravitation. "The earth is moved from its position by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it. The surface of the sphere of the water is moved by a tiny drop of water falling upon it." Is this also the language of mechanics?

In "the Prophecies," he has expressed his sense of the potentialities of literature, although somewhat enigmatically: "Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, towards heaven; that is by letters written with their quills."

Leonardo's Literary Art

Although disclaiming for himself all title to the rank of literary artist he displays a remarkable power of lucid expression, so that his language seems exactly to mirror his thought and his phrases arrest by their simplicity. This literary quality pervades his humour, which is on occasion terse and trenchant — e.g. "that venerable snail the sun"; "Man has great power of speech but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood."

The latter sentence might fitly serve as proem to the Bestiary in Manuscript H, where it is stated of the great elephant that he has by nature qualities which rarely occur among men, namely probity, prudence, and the sense of justice and of religious observance.

Leonardo and the Problem of Armenia

The problem of the interpretation of the letters purporting to be written from Armenia has been a vexed question ever since Dr. Jean Paul Richter made their existence known. The evidence, I think, tends to confirm the view that they are a record of fact and that Leonardo was for a time in the East. The references to books which occur in Leonardo's manuscripts show that he was in the habit of studying all classical and medieval authorities obtainable on the subjects in which he was interested. Ptolemy was one of the chief sources from which he gratified his curiosity as to the distant and dimly recorded places and peoples of the earth.

Practical Wisdom

The manuscripts are the repository of much practical wisdom designed to sweeten the intercourse of life and revealing itself in divers unexpected ways. A social reformer might profitably stand upon the precept: "Let the street be as wide as the universal height of the houses." Riches had lost some of their chief lures for the man who could write thus: "Small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray"; and, "Wine is good but water is preferable at table."

The golden mean in all things — failing this, renunciation. "Neither promise yourself things nor do things, if you see that when deprived of them they will cause you material suffering."

The Observer of Nature

Of the closeness and exactness of his power of observation certain of the anatomical drawings afford example, equally with the studies for pictures. The lines seem to have the spontaneity and inevitability of life itself. The same power translated is visible in his descriptions of Nature in her changeful moods. These have something of the effect of studies taken with a camera at close range — as when for example he speaks of the waves made by the wind in May running over the cornfields without the ears of corn changing their place; of water in impact with a larger fall turning like the wheel of a mill.

"At the first hour of the day the atmosphere in the south near to the horizon has a dim haze of rose-flushed clouds; towards the west it grows darker, and towards the east the damp vapour of the horizon shows brighter than the actual horizon itself, and the white of the houses in the east is scarcely to be discerned; while in the south, the farther distant they are, the more they assume a dark rose-flushed hue, and even more so in the west; and with the shadows it is the contrary, for these disappear before the white."

Who having witnessed the sequence of the effects of sunrise from the angle of observation afforded by a hilltop, can doubt Leonardo's description to be a record of what he had actually seen?

Pre-imagining and Post-imagining

"Pre-imagining — the imagining of things that are to be. Post-imagining — the imagining of things that are past." So in a passage in the Windsor Manuscripts Leonardo defines with singular felicity two fields of thought over which his spirit ranged.

It is in the realm of pre-imagining, "the imagining of things that are to be," that the manuscripts constitute the most impressive revelation of his creative thought. That a single mind could conceive and anticipate the growth of knowledge at such divers points as the circulation of the blood, the heliocentric theory, the law of inertia, the camera obscura, is only to be believed because the evidence for it exists.

Leonardo and Warfare

All the most characteristic developments of the Great War, those which distinguish it from all in the long roll of its predecessors — the use of the bombing aeroplane, the use of poison gas, the tank and the submarine — all afford examples of his prescience. He foretold the construction of each, not with the enigmatic utterance of the seer, but with such precision of scientific and mechanical detail as would be natural in one who held the office of military engineer.

It may seem something of an enigma that such activities should have emanated from the brain of one who stigmatized warfare as "bestialissima pazzia" (most bestial madness). The clue to its solution is found in a passage in which he refers to the difference between offensive and defensive warfare:

"When besieged by ambitious tyrants I find a means of offence and defense in order to preserve the chief gift of Nature, which is liberty."

The prototype of the tank or armoured car appears in one of Leonardo's drawings in the British Museum: "These take the place of the elephants. One may tilt with them. One may hold bellows in them to spread terror among the horses of the enemy, and one may put carabiniers in them to break up every company."

On the submarine, Leonardo chose silence:

"How by an appliance many are able to remain for some time under water. How and why I do not describe my method of remaining under water for as long a time as I can remain without food; and this I do not publish or divulge, on account of the evil nature of men, who would practice assassinations at the bottom of the seas by breaking the ships in their lowest parts and sinking them together with the crews who are in them."

Among the Greatest Minds

As the long labour of preparation of this edition draws to an end, a letter comes to me from the United States telling me of the fact of the Faculty of Princeton University having drawn up a list of ten names of men of all time who have done most to advance human knowledge. The names are: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Leonardo, Pasteur, Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

No such list is ever likely to win general agreement, for the lack of a common standard of values. It may at any rate be claimed for this one that each name is cut deep in the rock of achievement.

As, independently of the researches of Galileo, he wrote "the sun does not move," so he enunciated the root principle of Newton's law of gravitation in the words: "every weight tends to fall towards the centre by the shortest way"; so also in several passages he would seem to have been pointing along the road which in our own times has been travelled by Einstein.

II

The early biographers of Leonardo da Vinci cultivated the picturesque with an almost metrical licence. Their narratives, which together constitute what Pater has termed the légende, are as inadequate to reveal his work and personality as the fables of Vulcan's forge and the like are unsatisfying as an origin for Etna's fire.

For the capricious volatile prodigy of youthful genius which the légende has bequeathed, modern research has substituted a figure less romantic, less alluringly inexplicable, but of even more varied and astonishing gifts. His greatness as an artist has suffered no change, but modern research has revealed the ordered continuity of effort which preceded achievement.

This habit of scientific investigation — in inception subsidiary to the practice of his art — so grew to dominate it as to alienate him gradually from its practice to the study of its laws, and then of those which govern all created Nature. The fruits of these studies lay hidden in manuscripts of which the contents have only become fully known within the last half century.

Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer and musician — he aroused the wonder and admiration of his contemporaries. But to them, the studies which traversed the whole domain of Nature, prefiguring in their scope what the spirit of the Renaissance should afterwards become, were so imperfectly comprehended as to seem mere trifles, "ghiribizzi," to be mentioned apologetically, if at all, as showing the wayward inconstancy of genius.

Modern savants have resolved these trifles. Anatomist, mathematician, chemist, geologist, botanist, astronomer, geographer — the application of each of these titles is fully justified by the contents of his manuscripts at Milan, Paris, Windsor and London.

The Forerunner

He has been spoken of as the forerunner of Francis Bacon, of James Watt, of Sir Isaac Newton, of William Harvey. He cannot be said to have anticipated the discoveries with which their names are associated. It may, however, be claimed that he anticipated the methods of investigation which, when pursued to their logical issue, could not but lead to these discoveries.

In method Leonardo was the forerunner of Vesalius, and consequently of William Harvey. No passage in his writings constitutes an anticipation of Harvey's discovery. He knew that the blood moved just as he also knew that the sun did not move, but the law of the circulation of the blood was as far beyond the stage at which his deductions had arrived as was the discovery of Copernicus. It was his work to establish that "science comes by observation not by authority."

On a page of mathematical notes at Windsor he has written in large letters: "the sun does not move" (il sole no si muove).

Leonardo and Goethe

Coleridge called Shakespeare "myriad-minded." The true analogy for Leonardo lies not with Faust but with Goethe, between whom and Leonardo there is perhaps as great a psychological resemblance as ever has existed between two men of supreme genius. In each the purely artistic and creative faculties became subordinate, mastered by the sanity of the philosophical faculties.

The result in each case was limpid, serene, majestic, for the elements which had gone to the making of it had been fused molten in the flame-heat of genius. Yet the man behind the artist is still unsatisfied. He never shares the artist's accomplishment with such measure of absorption as characterized Raphael and Giovanni Bellini.

The Purpose of Life

His writings inculcate the highest morality, though rather as a reasoned process of the mind than as a revelation from an external authority. His own path lay along the field of scientific inquiry; but where the results of this research seemed at variance with revealed truth, he would reserve the issue. "Nature indeed cannot break her own laws." The processes of science are sure, but there are regions where we cannot follow them.

The impelling necessity to use life fully is the ever-recurrent burden of his moral sayings:

"Life well spent is long."

"Thou, O God, dost sell unto us all good things at the price of labour."

"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death."

Death follows life even as sleep rounds off the day. During the passing of the day there is so much to be done, such opportunity to construct and to observe, so much knowledge to be won, that there is scarce time remaining in which to stand in fear and wonder at thought of what chimeras the coming shadow may hold within it.

The Solitary Artist

In the case of Leonardo there are no grounds for supposing that any chapter of romance was ever begun. None of his biographers connect his name with that of any woman in the way of love, nor do his own writings afford any such indication. They show that he lived only for the things of the mind. He would seem to have renounced deliberately all thought of participation in the tenderness of human relationship.

His conception of the mental conditions requisite for the production of great art presupposes something of that isolation expressed in Pater's phrase: "each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

"If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied even by one companion you belong only half to yourself, or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct. ... If you must have companionship choose it from your studio; it may then help you to obtain the advantages which result from different methods of study."

Behind all his strength lay springs of tenderness; in life confined within the strait limits whereby his spirit proposed that its work should be more surely done, in his art they are manifest, therein revealing the repression of his life.

Patient Exposition

It was his aim to extend the limits of man's knowledge of himself, of his structure, of his environments, of all the forms of life around him, of the manner of the building up of the earth and sea, and of the firmament of the heavens. To this end he toiled at the patient exposition of natural things, steadfastly, and in proud confidence of purpose:

"I wish to work miracles: I may have fewer possessions than other men who are more tranquil and than those who wish to grow rich in a day."

The Representation of Battle

It is perhaps in the passages indicating the manner in which particular scenes and actions should be represented in art that Leonardo's powers as a writer find their most impressive utterance. The descriptive passage entitled "The way to represent a battle," in which the effect is built up entirely by fidelity of detail, forms an absolute triumph of realism.

There can be no possibility of difference of opinion as to how Leonardo regarded warfare. It was a grim necessity — he characterizes it elsewhere as "most bestial madness" (bestialissima pazzia). Consequently he shows what is actually happening amid the clouds of dust and smoke and the rain of gunshot and falling arrows; and describes tersely, graphically, relentlessly, the passions and agonies of the combatants — "and see to it that you make no level spot of ground that is not trampled over with blood."

Like Tolstoy and Verestchagin, Leonardo seeks to make war impossible, by showing it stripped of all its pageantry and trappings, in its naked and hideous reality.

The Duke Has Lost His State

After Ludovic Sforza's attempt to regain possession of Lombardy had ended with his defeat and capture at the battle of Novara in April 1500, Leonardo wrote among notes on various matters:

"Il Duce perse lo Stato e la roba e la libertà, e nessuna sua opera si finì per lui."

Leonardo was a homeless wanderer in consequence of the events referred to, and one of the works of which the Duke had not witnessed the completion was that of the statue on which Leonardo had been engaged intermittently during sixteen years, and the model of which had served as a target for the French soldiery; but this terse impassive comment is the only reference to these occurrences found in his writings.

There is a certain poignant brevity and concentration in the sentence, which suffices even to recall some of the most inevitable lines of Dante.