The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

shall raise men toward heaven just as they do birds; that is, by letters written with their quills.’

Although disclaiming for himself any title to the rank of literary artist, he displays a remarkable power of clear expression, so that his language seems to mirror his thought exactly and his phrases captivate by their simplicity. This literary quality permeates his humor, which is occasionally brief and cutting, for example: ‘that venerable snail, the sun’; ‘Man has great power of speech, but the greater part of it is empty and deceitful. Animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and a small, certain thing is better than a great falsehood.’ The latter sentence might appropriately serve as a preface to ‘A Bestiary’ in Manuscript H, where it is stated that the great elephant possesses by nature qualities that rarely occur among men, namely integrity, prudence, and a sense of justice and religious observance. Perhaps something of the same mood can be discerned in the instruction that leather bags—intended to prevent an aviator from harming himself if he happens to fall from a height of six braccia onto water or land—should be tied in the manner of rosary beads; or when, after referring to the damage caused to great things by the firing of a cannon, he speaks of spiders’ webs being completely destroyed. So too, where under the heading ‘Of local movement of flexible dry things’ he discusses the movement of dust when a table is struck—of the dust that is separated into various small mounds, descending from the hypotenuse of these mounds, entering beneath their base and rising around the axis of the mound’s peak, moving in such a way as to look like a right-angled triangle. One finds oneself wondering when, if ever, the table was dusted, and reflecting on how much his powers of observation would have been limited by marriage.

I have not considered it necessary to transcribe the numerous pages of Latin declensions and conjugations or the various portions of a Latin-Italian glossary found in Manuscript H of the ‘Institut’. It has been suggested that they were compiled for the instruction of Maximilian and Francesco Sforza, who were born in January 1493 and February 1495, and whose features are familiar as they kneel in chubby complacency in the Zenale altar-piece in the Brera; the elder of whom is the boy seen sitting and reading Cicero in the fascinating fresco by a Milanese painter now in the Wallace Collection. It is some-