INTRODUCTION

This volume is the second in the publication of the Leonardo da Vinci manuscripts from the Royal Library of Windsor, a project initiated by Mr. Theodore Sabachnikoff. Teodoro (Theodore) Sabachnikoff was a Russian scholar and collector who funded these early, high-quality facsimile editions of Leonardo's work.

The rules established for us in the previous publications (The Flight of Birds and Anatomy A) will be strictly observed in this volume and in the series of volumes that will follow.

First, we will address the assembly of the book. It does not exist as a bound collection—as we present it here—nor is it in the original order in which Leonardo wrote it.

The entire treasure of the Leonardo collection at Windsor Castle consists of individual sheets that originally formed specific notebooks. However, over time—and even before they arrived at the Royal Library—these sheets were detached and scattered. Among these fragments, we are attempting to reconstruct the original books as far as possible.

Identifying the sheets that originally formed a single unit is not a grave difficulty, thanks to various physical clues such as the dimensions, the paper type, the ink, the tint, the handwriting, the presence of stains, and the alignment of stitch marks|the physical holes left from where the papers were once sewn into a binding. However, establishing the exact order in which they were written is often impossible due to missing pages, the discontinuity of subjects, and a total lack of original page numbering.

In this second volume of Anatomy—the sheets of which we have labeled with the letter B to distinguish it from the first (Sheets A) and the subsequent volumes reconstructed from the Royal Library papers—43 sheets remain.