Leonardo da Vinci: Thinker, Researcher, and Poet

modern research establishes with growing admiration. And yet, these deeds of his genius remained for the most part fruitless. His contemporaries, as well as the generation that followed him, speak of Leonardo's discoveries and inventions with that slight shudder one feels toward the supernatural; they use vague words veiled by incidental reproach, which only reveal to us the lack of understanding of men like Vasari and Lomazzo Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1592) were early art historians whose biographies of Leonardo focused more on his art and eccentricities than his scientific rigor. and mask their rejection of such things. Aside from his writings on painting, whatever else of his astonishing research results entered into the cycle of living development demonstrably did so only through detours and secret paths; in the triumphal march of knowledge, humanity was held back for a few centuries by this misfortune and cheated out of goals that were almost within reach.

Today, the content of Leonardo’s immense life’s work is, of course, largely outdated, expanded, corrected, and has become mere material for the history of the human spirit; nevertheless, there is so much of interest and strangeness in these writings—so much that is superior and world-spanning, such a captivating and luminous charm of personality, so much that provides insight into the nature of genius and the changing of the ages—that even we non-scholars feel cause and invitation to form a clear concept of it for ourselves. The great complete editions of the manuscripts are intended for specialized science; they require slow, attentive study before one can partially uncover Leonardo’s paths of thought within this world of fragmentary and jumbled notes. This gave rise to the plan to select the most beautiful, remarkable, and understandable passages from these writings and to arrange them in such a way that a portrait of Leonardo might emerge in outline. This attempt has been made several times. I know only the still indispensable work by Jean Paul Jean Paul Richter (1847–1937), a German art historian who published the first major compilation of Leonardo's literary works in 1883.