PREFACE.

The first memory that Leonardo preserves for us in his manuscripts, among the fragments concerning his childhood, seems almost like a prophecy: In the first recollection of my childhood, he writes, recalling a vision from his youth, it seemed to me that, while I was in my cradle, a kite A "nibbio" is a bird of prey in the hawk family. This specific memory became famous in later centuries, particularly through Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic interpretation of Leonardo's life. came to me, opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with that tail inside my lips. (Atlantic Codex, f. 161 r.) A Greek tradition tells that bees announced to the world that Demosthenes Demosthenes (384–322 BC) was the most celebrated orator of ancient Greece; legend says bees settled on his lips as a child, symbolizing his future eloquence. would be the sweetest and most exquisite political orator; does the kite not seem here to foreshadow the most elevated and clear describer of nature? Leonardo himself is gripped by this superstitious thought: his life must be the fulfillment of the arduous task of revealing nature's secrets to mankind. Beside the preceding lines, he writes this revealing expression: it seems it is my destiny. original: "par che sia mio destino."

At the dawn of his life as an artist, around 1472, Leonardo's pursuit was to revive in his own imagination the figure