The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. I

Leonardo himself lamented this confusion, and for that reason I do not think that the publication of the texts in the order in which they occur in the originals would at all fulfill his intentions. No reader could find his way through such a labyrinth; Leonardo himself could not have done it.

Added to this, more than half of the five thousand manuscript pages which now remain to us are written on loose leaves, and are at present arranged in a manner which has no justification beyond the whim of the collector who first brought them together to make volumes of varying length. Indeed, even in the volumes whose pages were numbered by Leonardo himself, their order—so far as the connection of the texts was concerned—was obviously a matter of indifference to him. The only point he seems to have kept in view when first writing down his notes was that each observation should be complete by the end of the page on which it was begun. The exceptions to this rule are extremely few, and it is certainly noteworthy that we find in such cases, in bound volumes with his numbered pages, the written notes: "turn over," "this is the continuation of the previous page," and the like. Is this not sufficient to prove that it was only in quite exceptional cases that the writer intended the consecutive pages to remain connected when he should, at last, carry out the often-planned arrangement of his writings?

What this final arrangement was to be, Leonardo has in most cases indicated with considerable completeness. In other cases this authoritative clue is missing, but the difficulties arising from this are not insuperable; for, as the subject of the separate paragraphs is always distinct and well-defined in itself, it is quite possible to construct a well-planned whole out of the scattered materials of his scientific system, and I may venture to state that I have devoted especial care and thought to the proper execution of this responsible task.

The beginning of Leonardo's literary labors dates from about his thirty-seventh year, and he seems to have carried them on without any serious interruption until his death. Thus the manuscripts that remain represent a period of about thirty years. Within this span of time his handwriting altered so little that it is impossible to judge from it the date of any particular text. The exact dates, indeed, can only be assigned to certain notebooks in which the year is incidentally indicated, and in which the order