PREFACE

inner reasons; the incompleteness of his artistic output is revealed through its true causes and ceases to be seen as the result of individual whim; the ignorance of his contemporaries regarding Da Vinci the scientist is justified by his very character.

The judgment of the 16th and subsequent centuries necessarily falls away.

"He brought very few works to completion," Sabba da Castiglione Sabba da Castiglione (1480–1554) was an Italian humanist writer and knight who provided one of the few contemporary accounts of Leonardo’s work in Milan. had said, "driven by a natural lightness and volatility of talent; because when he should have attended to painting, in which he would have undoubtedly succeeded as a new Apelles Apelles of Kos was the most celebrated painter of ancient Greece; comparing a Renaissance artist to him was the highest possible compliment., he gave himself entirely to Geometry, Architecture, and Anatomy Original: Notomia, an archaic Italian term for anatomy..*" And Vasari, later collecting this fallacious judgment from the mouths of the painters of his time, had written: "He set himself to learn many things, and once started, he abandoned them.**"

We must overturn this judgment of his contemporaries. They measured the whole of Leonardo by his outward manifestations

* Memories Original: Ricordi. Published in Venice, 1555, sheet 51 verso.
** The Lives Original: Le Vite. Referring to Giorgio Vasari’s "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," the foundational text of art history., vol. IV, pages 18, 49.