Leonardo da Vinci: Thinker, Researcher, and Poet

Richter, which was published in Italian and English in two magnificent volumes by subscription and distributed in about 300 copies throughout the civilized world, and another in duodecimo format A small book size, roughly 5 by 7.5 inches, created by folding a printed sheet into twelve leaves. by Dr. Edmondo Solmi. For the German public, I venture approximately the same as the latter, though with a somewhat different method in the treatment, selection, and grouping of the text. The biography of Leonardo—which I am compiling based on the works of Dr. Paul Müller-Walde, Eugène Müntz, Adolf Rosenberg, E. Solmi, Georg Gronau, Edward Mc Curdy, and many others, as well as the important accounts of Vasari, the anonymous Florentine of the Magliabechiano Codex (edited by Carl Frey), Lomazzo, Amoretti, Giuseppe Bossi, Calvi, etc., yet with the strictest adherence to the documents—will help me, in connection with the characterization of his intellectual nature as it flows from the description of his thinking, his creating, and his working, to supplement the fragmentary quality that unfortunately lies in the nature of Leonardo's texts and in the nature of an extract for the use of the Dauphin original: "usum delphini." A Latin phrase referring to editions of classics prepared for the education of the French prince, meaning a "cleansed" or simplified edition for general readers.. To be sure, we know only a few things with certainty about Leonardo's life; if I therefore wish to renounce imaginative combinations, I will be forced to repeat much that is well-known and to omit all sorts of charming things, often printed and also newly devised, here; yet the truth has its own beauty and eloquence; Leonardo requires no other.

Leonardo was born in 1452, according to a tradition still alive today, at Anchiano near Vinci, a mountain hamlet of Monte Albano. For five generations, his ancestors had been notaries, and thus members of one of the higher Florentine guilds; only Antonio, Leonardo's grandfather, followed, it seems, no trade other than perhaps viticulture and gardening. In the house of this grandfather in Vinci, in