The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

PREFACE

It is somewhat The OCR "what" likely replaces "somewhat." difficult to imagine Leonardo in the role of a private tutor to the Sforza princes The Sforza family was the ruling dynasty of Milan; Leonardo worked for Duke Ludovico Sforza for many years. even though he performed various functions at the court. However, it is quite possible that these lists—though written in his usual "left-handed writing" This refers to Leonardo's famous mirror-image writing, which he wrote from right to left.—were compiled for the purpose of teaching. The fact that his allegories about animals (which are mostly compiled from Pliny Pliny the Elder, a Roman author of a massive natural history encyclopedia. and medieval bestiaries term: bestiaries; medieval books describing various real and mythical animals, often with moral lessons.) are also found in Manuscript H suggests a possibility: if the Latin grammar and glossary were written for the instruction of the Sforza princes, then Leonardo’s book of beasts may have been put together for their education as a sort of "antidote." In this way, the harshness of learning Latin grammar could be varied by such rare and refreshing fruit as the story of the amphisbaena—a four-footed beast that resembled the "Pushmipullyou" of Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle books in having a head at each end. However, unlike the creature in the modern story, both heads of the amphisbaena discharged poison. Leonardo’s imagination is perhaps seen in its most complete freedom in a fragment of a fantastic tale written in the form of letters in the Codice Atlantico original: "Codice Atlantico"; The Atlantic Codex, a twelve-volume set of Leonardo's drawings and writings.. The giant described there is of such stature that when he shook his head, he dislodged showers of men who were clinging to his hairs—a fantasy curiously suggestive of the actions of Gulliver in Lilliput.

The problem of how to interpret the letters claiming to be written from Armenia has been a long-debated original: "vexed" question ever since Dr. Jean Paul Richter first made their existence known. The evidence, I think, tends to confirm the view that they are a record of fact and that Leonardo was indeed in the East for a time. I do not believe this interpretation is made impossible—as Dr. Verga seems to suggest—by the fact that Leonardo used the classical naming system original: "nomenclature" of Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy, an ancient Greek-Roman geographer and astronomer whose works were rediscovered in the Renaissance. in these letters. The references to books found in Leonardo’s manuscripts show that he was in the habit of studying all available classical and medieval authorities on the subjects that interested him. Ptolemy was one of the primary sources he used to satisfy his curiosity regarding the distant and dimly recorded places and peoples of the earth. Pliny, Strabo An ancient Greek geographer., and even Sir John Mandeville The supposed author of a famous, though largely fictional, book of travels. also appear in his list of sources. Ptolemy's system of naming supplied the terms Leonardo would have inevitably used to express his first ideas of distant places. The same consideration must certainly have influenced the minds of many contemporary travelers. Geography was one of the sciences in which the knowledge of classical literature may be said to...