The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Leonardo da Vinci

First published:Treatise on Painting, 1651; The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by Edward MacCurdy, 2 vols., 1938

Type of work: Journals and notes

Critical Evaluation:

One need only look at one of Leonardo’s paintings to realize that he was a man of great genius, but the vast range of that genius is not fully appreciated until one has read his notebooks. Very little is revealed there about the man as a person, but very much about his genius. It is not so much the fact that the notebooks are not a diary as it is that the external facts of life, love, friendship, and the like, are unimportant when placed beside the life of the mind. The notebooks are a record of Leonardo’s love affair with his own mind and with everything that came within the sight of his outer and inner eye. The notebooks reveal an eye and sensitivity more acute than even those of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who in his notebooks also looked for the essence of all phenomena. Leonardo was a born artist, but he was also a made artist. The notebooks evidence his careful preparation. Read carefully, they reveal both what Leonardo achieved and how he achieved it.

The portions of the notebooks that are extant were written during the last thirty years of his life and cover several thousand pages. The mystery that surrounds Leonardo’s life and art is present even in the notebooks, both in their form and in their content. The first striking example is the handwriting itself, which is backwards and moves from right to left, looking like some sort of esoteric script. Then there is the fragmentary nature of the observations. Leonardo himself commented in 1508 on the lack of order in his writings. Seldom is a point pursued more than several sentences and there is great alacrity in moving from one topic to the next. This fragmentation has caused most modern editors to classify and rearrange the entries, but the form is valuable in that it reveals the delight and spontaneous exuberance Leonardo must have felt in being able to follow and to record the wanderings of his own mind. Thus while rearrangements like Edward MacCurdy’s go a long way in clarifying the contents of the original manuscript, they fail to show the reader the way Leonardo’s mind worked. In some instances, the great “esemplastic” power of his imagination is lost sight of in the desire of his editors to compartmentalize. This is a fault of the earliest as well as the most recent editors.

For example, his notebooks were bequeathed to his young friend Francesco Melzi but later fell into the hands of the rather unscrupulous Pompeo Leoni. Leoni separated the scientific from the artistic observations and sold the manuscripts piecemeal. This practice probably accounts for the loss of some of the material. Further extraction took place in 1651, when the famous TREATISE ON PAINTING was published by Rafaelle du Fresne. This treatise is based upon the notebooks and represents Leonardo’s observations on the craft and aims of painting. Though it organizes these observations, they lose something by being taken out of their original context. In the nineteenth century the drawings were taken out of the manuscripts and bound together. These drawings were intended to follow the text, and although their quality as drawings is remarkable, their removal from their context has somewhat distorted their meaning.

What is important to remember is that although there is no clear organization in the notebooks, there is also no separation. The eye controls everything. Thus Leonardo’s observations on science and on art are part of the same interest. Though painting is in Leonardo’s terms a higher human activity than science, it cannot be said that science is simply the handmaiden of the arts. It is more accurate to say that for him science was an art and art a science. There is an empirical base and philosophical end for both, and art achieves this end more completely than science.

Leonardo dissected over thirty human bodies, it is said, and his notebooks contain some brilliant anatomical drawings. These drawings were not undertaken or executed simply to prepare the painter. Nor was the study of water and its movement undertaken solely for the purpose of creating more lavish landscapes in the paintings. Leonardo’s mind was attracted to such studies because it had an insatiable desire to know. Painting, architecture, scientific experiments and philosophical theorizing were all part of this desire to know. Knowing begins with the study of everything the eye can see, thus the empirical base, and concludes with the perception of the unity that lies beneath everything—that is, the philosophical end. It is not so much an accretion of facts that when added up produce unity as it is the fact that each recorded observation of a natural phenomenon provides a microcosm in which unity, the macrocosm, can be perceived. This is another reason why a rearrangement and classification of the material in the notebooks provides a misleading description of the ways in which Leonardo’s mind moved.

A closer look at some of the recorded observations will strengthen this claim for the indivisibility of his observations. The bulk of Leonardo’s extant writings have to do with science, and his delight in these speculations is readily apparent. Because most of his scientific knowledge was not made known until long after his death, it is difficult to talk about his contributions to the history of science. This fact does not affect, however, the reader’s amazement in observing how far in advance of his times Leonardo was. His work on anatomy, mentioned above, is especially startling. His drawings are astonishingly accurate, though at times he uses a larynx of a dog or a thyroid of a pig in drawing human anatomy. He records making a wax cast of the cerebral ventricles and is regarded by many historians of science as coming very close to discovering the nature of the circulatory system. The eye came in for as much consideration as the body. Indeed, the study of the eye as well as what the eye studies is central in the notebooks, both in the discussions of science and in those of art. He not only considered as far as the eye could see but further. Thus, scientific observations often run to fantasy, though the later progress of science does not make the idea of diving bells, poison gas, flying machines, tanks, and cannon seem as fantastic as they were once thought. Leonardo’s drawings of floods reaches the great swirling fantasy of some of Van Gogh’s skyscapes. It is with a sense of shock that we sometimes see amidst his flights of fancy such observations as “the sun does not move.” But such ambiguous juxtaposition is essential to the claim for unity in all things.

If the great swirls appear to look like the curls of human hair, it is because Leonardo saw them as such. With the principle of unity always before him, he was especially attentive to analogy. The curl and the interlacing such as appears on the ceiling of the Sala delle Asse in Milan, and in the pages of the notebooks, are examples of the ambiguous perfection he found in nature and a symbol for the characteristic movement of his mind. The interlacing has neither beginning nor end. It is perfect in itself. Following the contours becomes an exciting adventure.

Although Leonardo noted that the sun did not move, and although he devoted some time in the notebooks to the study of astronomy, what really interested Leonardo about the heavenly bodies was the light they give to mankind. The scientific study of light and shade is crucial to the observations Leonardo makes on the greatest of human activities, painting. In fact, painting’s claims to superiority over the other arts rest on the fact that painting makes the greatest use of the principles of science. Painting is superior to theology because it is more specific and experiential. It is superior to poetry because it gives a more total image than poetry and expresses itself in space where poetry is limited in time. It is superior to sculpture because it explores not only space but also the way in which light works upon space. Thus painting grows out of science and reflects as well as perceives the influence of the universe. Leonardo speaks of painting in these theoretical terms, but also in practical terms, even as he does of science. Thus, while he is theoretical on comparisons between the arts or on the qualities a painter must possess, he is practical in his discussion of drapery, clouds, trees, landscapes, shadows, the mixing of paints, and the proper choice of brushes. When writing on painting his mind moves in a way characteristic of the notebooks as a whole. He alternates between an empirical philosophy and a philosophy close to the Florentine Neo-Platonists.

This ability to hold contraries together is part of the mystery that has always surrounded Leonardo. If he is not as mythical as past ages have felt, he has revealed in his notebooks how mysterious it is to be human. He writes of a dark cave and the ambivalence he feels when approaching it. He feels both fear and desire. The Faustian mind that takes all knowledge for its kingdom has led him into the cave. The notebooks, basically, are explorations of the light. A knowledge of them, plus an awareness of what he brought back from his journey into the darkness of the cave is basic to an appreciation and understanding of Leonardo’s art.