The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (2024)

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci‬‭, Pamela Taylor

The collection of writings and art in this magnificent book are drawn from his notebooks. The book organizes his wide range of interests into subjects such as human figures, light and shade, perspective and visual perception, anatomy, botany and landscape, geography, the physical sciences and astronomy, architecture, sculpture, and inventions. Nearly every piece of writing throughout the book is keyed to the piece of artwork it describes.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و یکم ماه ژوئن سال2014میلادی

عنوان: یادداشتهای لئوناردو داوینچی؛ نویسنده: پاملا تیلور؛ کتاب در253صفحه، و16صفحه تصویر، تصاویر بدون صفحه شمار بین صفحات128، تا صفحه129، آمده، کتابنامه از صفحه239، تا ص240، موضوع سرگذشت و زیستنامه لئوناردو داوینچی (از سال1452میلادی تا سال1519میلادی)، از نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده 16م

لئوناردو داوینچیِ نقاشِ دانشمندِ مجسمه‌ سازِ معمارِ موسیقی‌دانِ ریاضی‌دانِ مهندسِ مخترعِ آناتومیستِ زمین‌شناسِ نقشه‌ کشِ گیاه‌ شناس ِ نویسنده را همه با مونالیزا و شام آخر می‌شناسیم؛ درست است که او یکی از بزرگ‌ترین نقاش‌ها در تمام دوران بود اما تا پایان عمرش تنها بیست نقاشی کشیدند شاید شاهکارهای راستینشان دفترچه‌هایی باشد که از ایشان بر جای مانده است؛ دفترچه‌هایی که از راست به چپ نوشته شده‌ اند و تنها در آینه قابل خواندن‌ و پر از طراحی‌هایی که تجسم‌بخش اندیشه و یافته های ایشان هستند

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 20/01/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 27/12/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی‏

The mind of a painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the color of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects are in front of it.

I must admit right off the bat that this book is often a bit of a bore to read through. Leonardo’s notes are typically terse and functional—more like grocery lists than diary entries. But the real treat, of course, is seeing Leonardo’s many drawings and studies, reproduced here in color photographs. Simply turning from page to page, taking note of whatever sketch caught your eye, would be enough to convince you that this man was a great genius.

We all knew this already; but determining the exact nature of Leonardo’s genius is, by contrast, a bit more difficult. Of course, he was a great painter, one of the very best; this alone would be enough to secure him lasting fame. But he also distinguished himself—though he wasn’t known for it at the time—for his interest in science and engineering. He did pioneering studies in human anatomy, making drawings so detailed that they could be used in Gray’s Anatomy. He sketched several ideas for inventions, many of them frighteningly futuristic, such as a flying machine and a tank. He made accurate maps and designed buildings and bridges. He even made careful studies of the workings of the eye and the behavior of light.

At first sight, all this seems almost impossible, like Isaac Newton and J.M.W. Turner rolled into one. But Leonardo’s mind wasn’t quite as flexible as the above paragraph might suggest. (Not to detract from his accomplishments, of course.) For example, Leonardo was not especially adept at performing feats of logic or reason; nor was he an experimenter, making careful and controlled tests of his ideas. Aside from his extraordinary creativity, Leonardo’s main asset was his extremely keen, almost supernatural, skill as a visual observer. He had the ability to make his mind a mirror of his environment, and then to accurately and attractively depict whatever phenomenon caught his fancy. Simple as this sounds, this can get you a long way. For instance, if you set yourself the task of drawing a bridge as accurately as possible, this will teach you something about the design of bridges, how they are constructed and bear weight. Do this with everything around you in your daily life, as Leonardo did, and it will force you to pay attention to the way things are put together and teach you how they work.

This is the main lesson Leonardo taught me about becoming a Renaissance man: master a certain medium, whether it be visual, verbal, mathematical, musical, or what have you, and then use this medium as a filter for your experiences. This will allow you to notice things that other people might not, and then to represent your observations in an engaging form. Of course, this strategy wasn’t Leonardo’s only asset; he was also a creative genius. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with a method for becoming a brilliant innovator. And perhaps, sad as it seems, a mechanism for turning average folks into world-class geniuses is something beyond even Leonardo’s powers.

Da Vinci was very specific.

On depicting a battle:
"The air must be full of arrows in every direction." (There follows several pages more of instructions, including bits like, "There must not be a level spot that is not trampled with gore.") (p. 26-28)

And his bits on anatomy are famous enough without me. The distance between the corner of your eye and your ear is the same as the height of your ear. Now you know.

But then, on the less specific side, there's this: "Of grotesque faces I need say nothing, because they are kept in mind without difficulty." (p. 131) So da Vinci's not so different after all, is he? His specificity varies in inverse proportion to his subject's attractiveness. I like boobs.

Unfortunately, "Women must be represented in modest attitude, their legs close together, their arms closely folded, their heads inclined and somewhat on one side" (p. 63), which is not at all what I heard on the internet.

Some of it's amazingly perceptive, and some of it's completely wrong, and some I don't understand at all, but the effect of reading his diary is weird and powerful; more than, say, reading an autobiography tends to be. While he probably knew his journals would be read (he actually addresses "Reader" off and on), he was still writing mainly for himself, so there's a directness.

What comes across most is his curiosity. He'll jot down some weird paragraph about shadows or something, and you understand that this is what he must have done all day today: measure shadows and build shapes and math formulas out of them, because he wanted to know how they work. True, his conclusion was that they send out "dark rays" that bounce into "reflex streams" or something, which I think might be gibberish, but still. What did you do today? I pretty much just thought about boobs.

This is so nice. Given the luxury of time I want to reread this one...

Yes, I just added a "homeschool" shelf. Why? Because I am supplementing a bit. Even private schools don't cut the mustard at this point. I have highly creative children--one of which is a constant stream of inventions. He spews out ideas with dry erase markers to windows, takes garbage from the recycling bin as if it is a golden treasure. He even CRIES because he thinks I am wasting a precious gem by recycling a cardboard box or an egg crate. Because "mom--can't you SEE that THIS is CLEARLY an AIRPLANE???". Well, it is clearly time for me to nurture this wee seedling with some other inventors--so I grabbed this book with a few others. We all adore this book and it is an inspiration to us all. :) Make sure to prepare with some extra pencils and paper--because you will be making some extra "blueprints" and maybe even a few extra trips to the hardware store to build some stuff....

Görsel zenginliği çok derin olan keyifli bir kitap. Leonardo Da Vinci'nin el yazısına bakabilmek beni her zaman mutlu etmiştir. Çizimle, resimle ilgileniyorsanız çok eğitici bilgiler bulabilirsiniz. Özellikle son kısımdaki aforizmaları okurken çok eğlendim.

Tavsiye ederim!

"Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work" - a live testimony that analytical and creative abilities are not as simply polarised as the left-right brain theory.

Holy gods. Read this. READ IT. Da Vinci was a bloody genius.

Given that Leonardo never had much of a formal education, and that his intelligence was borne out of observation and imagination, what this book contains is truly astonishing. It blurs what modernity would consider the lines between the arts and the sciences, but I don't think that matters. What really matters is the hard evidence that a self-taught scientist figured out things that were taught to me in my science lessons at school. I'll give you an example. The way light hits and enters the eye. Da Vinci drew a diagram of it and it is so accurate that I found myself staring. Six hundred years later and modern science is using just what Da Vinci figured out. Of course, science has existed for millennia; I'm not suggesting Da Vinci was the father of modern science. But it is wonderful, reading this and going 'I learnt that in school! And he did it without modern technology or formal education!'

His musings on art are just as profound. What a truly remarkable man, and one who was far, far ahead of his time. Just imagine what he could be doing if he were alive today.

Please read this. I really urge you to. It is a fascinating read, and well worth your time.

I do NOT recommend the kindle edition, which cannot do justice to the drawings, to say nothing of Leonardo's mirror-writing. I read in paper.
Leonardo worked as a military engineer for the Sforza, as James McNeil Whistler's father worked for the Czar building a railway. Since my daughter has lived in Milano a quarter century, I have also seen many of Leonardo's constructions there in the Museo Nazionale della scienza e tecnologia. If Whistler's father had painted Whistler's Mother, eccociqua: Analogous.
Leonardo foresaw the US budgets of the 21st century, where the Department of War (nobody should believe the euphemism, "Defense") swallows whole the Arts. Solution: Be a Whistler...or a Leonardo. Simple.

Whenever I see the grammar police rear their ugly head, I'll remember LDV wrote backwards in an indecipherable scrawl and with an akward form of shorthand.

Leonardo’s Notebooks
Edited by H. Anna Suh (2013)

Mona Lisa and a dozen incomparably, unique beautiful paintings are the heritage our civilization has received from the greatest of all Renaissance artists.
Plus, about four thousand notes.
This book of notes is the perfect complement to Leonardo’s biography.
The editor aimed to present Leonardo’s writings to lay readers in a way he could enjoy the work, overcoming the language barrier, the left-handed mirror writing style, the wide range of subjects treated on many single pages.
The contents are classified into major groups, Beauty, Reason and Art; Observation and Order; and Practical Matters.
For readers of Leonardo’s biography, many of the drawings and parts of the notes are familiar. It helps to find them in order of interest. Needless to read everything from cover to cover, it becomes pleasant to read by just following the favourite areas of personal preference.
Young modern artists can hardly find any better source for learning to draw and to paint of higher authority and greater beauty.

Leonardo's work is outstanding, this book is good, but the presentation could have been a bit more powerful

I approached this book with great awe stricken respect and it took me a long time, years actually, to feel ready and worthy to read it. I love the Renaissance, the art and the history and of course, the main characters and artists that made that era so interesting.

I must honestly say that I was a bit disappointed. I'm not sure most of the parts of this book were meant to a reader other than da Vinci himself (though some definitely did). I've found some parts quite boring, detailing painting materials, bills of scudi and florins, and scraps which weren't clear.

But of course, it's also a glimpse to one of the great minds of human history. While some of his notes look like things that a man writes to himself without the need to explain anything, without the context and the stream of thoughts, a lot of them nevertheless actually are in context and detail in dates and the natural order of making a claim. The first part of the book is especially coherent, with its scientific debates.

I also enjoyed his notes on art, his tips to a painter, and his touching essay about elephants.

being THE renaissance man, this book gives you an idea on why Leonardo da Vinci didn't paint as many paintings as we wish he had because he was so busy being fascinated with almost everything that caught his attention. Nature, physics, optics, geology, the study of water and astronomy… as Andrew Graham Dixon said, da Vinci is somewhat the first example of a conceptual artist, study first and taking days before approaching his painting, giving few brushstrokes and then stop to think again for a couple of days.

The fact he didn't finish so many projects strengthen this idea, that he liked studying better, and was always distracted by a new field of study.

This book is somewhat weird because I'm sure that academic scholars study the actual codex, this edited book is trying to put an order in things for the common reader but that common reader has to be very very interested in da Vinci, and might benefit more reading his biographies. You can't perfectly edit a book like this. A personal journal can't be all clear to any reader.

But after all that, it's still an important text, with priceless historical significance.

"Force arises from dearth or abundance; it is the child of physical motion, and the grandchild of spiritual motion, and the mother and origin of gravity." 186

"Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past. Prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly." 252

"Wisdom is the daughter of experience." 288

"Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in." 302

"No counsel is more trustworthy than that which is given upon ships that are in peril." 302

One of the defining periods of my life was when I read Leonardo's notebooks. His awareness, curiosity, and maddening drive towards perfection of his understanding of reality is beautiful.

You really get a grasp of his personality from the notebooks. He suffered greatly from the thought that he'd die before I got it all figured out.

Such a look at the way da Vinci thought. Usually, we see his visual works. This book translates and organizes his written journals to provide us a look at his thoughts on art and the world around him. Very enjoyable to browse, though not necessarily a work to be read straight through.

touching the big papers is really exciting. He has a big brain so he has lots o thing about everything . amazing.

Okay, this was not what I was expecting at all. I thought this would read more like a personal diary. That expectation made this one of the most anticipated books in my home library. Yeah, it wasn't that at all. He just gives painting tips. I'm very sad.

But since Leo is a gay icon he gets five stars by default. I don't make the rules.

Review:

I never knew who da Vinci was. It was only after watching the movie, The Da Vinci Code, I came to understand that Leonardo da Vinci was a person who creates puzzles for his time pass. He also drew few paintings like Mona Lisa and The Last Supper (during that time, I didn't even know what was the significance of the painting).

Slowly, there after I came to learn Leonardo was no puzzler (person who creates puzzles), but an artist. It is only after I read this book, I came to understand the reason behind his fame. The text in this book has literally swept me off my feet. Though the methods he exercised were bizarre and awkward to understate. (He got the general of the army to strip all this clothes and made him lie stark naked to draw some painting!!)

Description (From the jacket - hand typed):
For everyone who has read and enjoyed Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, here is an exceptional insight into da Vinci's inner world, in his own words and images.

The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci - a treasure house of unparalleled ingenuity, curiosity and creative energy - have inspired their readers for centuries. Fascinating and tantalizing their readers for centuries. Fascinating and tantalizing by turns, the individual pages of the notebooks, densely covered with da Vinci's sketches, jottings, calculations and detailed diagrams, are among the most prized possessions of the world's great art collectors.

Painters, sculptors, engineer; mathematician, philosopher, inventor; architect, anatomist and naturalist - da Vinci's talents are seemingly endless. This is new selection from the notebooks, bursting with imagination and quirkiness, sometimes cryptic or even incomprehensible, is the perfect introduction to the mysteries of Leonardo da Vinci. Those who know him as the celebrated painter of The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa will be astonished and intrigues by this sparkling testament to one of greatest minds of Western Civilization.

My take on the book:

I rated this book four. And I rate da Vinci the whole five!!

For me, before I read this book, painting was something way over my head. There are some painting I came across which are like a baby's puke of different colours on a canvas and that would price over a million rupees! Anyone can mix some colours and throw them on a canvas and call it a painting.

After reading this book, there are two................

To read the whole review, click here...

Most of the original text and sketches have of course been lost either by time or by Leonardo's own design (he deliberately corrupted his own texts to keep his competitors from stealing his works). It is a true shame that this knowledge is lost.

Any free kindle edition is easily worth 4 stars. It is a rare treat to see Leonardo's mind at work. He was one of the most gifted intellects ever created and just watching how he 'pieced' the workings of life and the known universe together is worth the time and study.

Devlin

1. Why read this?

a. A Masterpiece to understand, Renaissance Man

b. A Masterpiece to glimpse, Renaissance Era

Get a glimpse of Leonardo's life through his journal entries.

Great Quote:

"A Painter is not admirable if he is not universal."

2. What else?

Strikes chords with writers from School of Salamanca.

They viewed knowledge holistically.

--Deus Vult
Gottfried

Five stars for the illustrations and the genius of the author. I didn't understand all of the text -- a lot of it is technical instructions for painting, sculpture, and various inventions, but I understood enough to appreciate the the mind of Leonardo da Vinci was extraordinary.

Short punchy excerpts that provide insight into a genius making his way in the world over 500 years ago.

it is a really good book i like it

It is truly fascinating to get an insight into da Vinci's mind. He combined art, science, mathematics, and philosophy together beautifully.

i love this book

A complete human. One of the most illustrated man that has ever existed. A compilation of the greatest human that has ever existed.

On occasion I do as I am doing now which was choosing a book or a source close to the one I have read. So that I might have some reference to the work that has interested me. I read this work in two forms a little red book at my community college the other being on the project gutenberg website. I think it's one of the best website ever created it serves the commons and I hope the commons serves it. Right now their is a war over the domain of information and this is a concern, because their are so many things that we should not claim ownership or domain over, yet we do and often times we pay for these things in ways that we cannot see at the time. The unknown unknown always constantly chomping at us from above or below.

This book in any of it's forms is interesting though because the individual is interesting, though one might not be able to see the fellow as universally likable. Who is?

The things that constructed his life and his positions, where the whirlpools and the vortices that he would describe. Its not easy being a bastard at the time of his birth, or even now. Not having one or many parents can cause allot of problems in a persons life for a variety of reasons.

Having your father see that you have great talent though and then invest in you to get you training and help that you otherwise would not get is quite wonderful. That and his big break with the kings and the merchants was to all of our benefits unfortunately it was siege technology that had them interested not in his other skills.

I think to some degree he played the courts though by pushing out some things and not really bringing them into fruition, while otherwise entertaining the courts so that their could be much gaiety and joy.

He is interesting to me because he is interested in so many things curious completely and looking towards nature to answer his questions not people or authorities. Who needs a greater authority that which houses us all and we live within.

So if you are curious and you want to know about a mind and it's flights and fantasies this work is perfect. Though so many things that were personal were not shared. Only things about observations and discoveries.

Except for what I think the most tragic thing that I saw in his work when he was dying and he questioned the value of his life. Saying that it was worth nothing.

I say my dear friend from ages before, that your life was worth something it has helped so many of us who are curious or struggling thank you for your life.

Editor H. Anna Suh has provided a wonderful glimpse of a genius & one of history's greatest artists, Leonardo da Vinci, through the medium of reproductions from his notebooks. Despite some drawbacks, I felt as though I were sitting with a venerable old expert who was personally sharing in snippets the fruit of a long life of observation & practical experience. For one who had no formal schooling -- "book learning" -- as so many of his colleagues had, the warmth & accuracy of his genius, not just as an artist but as a human being, shine through. Had he lived in our century, he'd have been right up there with the likes of Steve Jobs & Bill Gates, to mention only two, & probably even further ahead of them!

The book is filled with reproductions of the original writing & drawings in the notebook which he carried with him. He was always observing, always comparing, always perfecting his art. His mind must have constantly clicked along at a 100 mph! He even alludes to "practicing" painting/drawing techniques mentally in the darkness before falling asleep. Leonardo somehow learned very early on that by establishing some very fundamental bases & principles, then by practicing over & over, & by experimenting, one equipped oneself with all that was needed to be "useful". In the last section, "Philosophy, Aphorisms, and Miscellaneous Writings", he says: "Movement will cease before we are weary of being useful. Movement will fail sooner than usefulness…In serving others I cannot do enough. No labor is sufficient to tire me. Hands into which ducats and precious stones fall like snow; they never become tired by serving, but this service is only for its utility and not for our own benefit. Naturally nature has so disposed me. I am never weary of being useful."

Unfortunately, most of what Leonardo writes in the notebooks is exceedingly technical & not always easy to understand. The reproductions & sketches are small & difficult to make out. But I don't know if or how one could improve on this, given this books parameters.

‘The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, naturally, but sometimes with lavish abundance bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace and ability, so that, whatever he does, every action is so divine that he distances all other men, and clearly displays how his genius is the gift of God and not an acquirement of human art. Men saw this in Leonardo da Vinci…’ Vasari, Lives of the ArtistsPrologue:--

Few people can contend Leonardo for the designation of "Supreme Genius of the Ages" conceivably known first as an artist. His paintings: The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Vitruvian Man are amongst the most celebrated, familiar and critiqued works of all time. Nevertheless Leonardo was the very characterization of a ‘polymath renaissance man’. Over and above being a farsighted painter, he was an engineer, an atomist and raconteur of science. If truth be told, so enormous were his advances that today, some argue that he should be considered of as a scientist first.

Regrettably, most of his scientific work documented in at least seven thousand pages of notes he left behind; remained hidden, lost or scattered around various collections for years, even centuries after his death.

As da Vinci did not want his ideas embezzled, he had to go to extraordinary lengths not to upset the oppressive hegemony of his day. Knowing that one move deemed threatening to those in power could extremely cost him, he tried to cover at least some of his tracks.

Most of what we know about Leonardo da Vinci, we know because of his notebooks.

Some 6,000 sheets of notes and drawings live on to show us his extensively varied interests, including painting, sculpture, architecture, geometry, geology, engineering, optics, anatomy, botany, hydrodynamics, and astronomy. It is thought that the surviving sheets symbolize as little as one-fifth of what he in fact produced.

Leonardo’s early biographer, Giorgio Vasari, was right: Leonardo appears to have laboured more by his word—particularly words together with sketches—than anything else.

While making all-embracing notes and drawings to record some of his current pursuits in art and natural philosophy, da Vinci often cloaked his observations by means of an inimitable backwards-lettered cursive script that he had designed to keep out thieves, inquisitors and other enemies.

His abnormal form of ‘mirror handwriting’ may have been facilitated by his being left-handed, but it drove intruders crazy.

The master would start fleshing out his ideas by making rapid sketches on loose sheets of paper, sometimes utilizing minuscule paper pads that he stored in his belt. He later would assemble the abundant notes consistent with subject and file them sequentially in his notebooks.

After da Vinci’s bereavement, his longtime apprentice and cohort Francesco Melzi received 50 of the notebooks containing 13,000 pages and took them to Milan. Upon Melzi’s demise, a lot of of the documents ultimately ended up getting sold off and some were misplaced. Many were bound.

They became known as ‘The da Vinci Codex’ (a codex being a bound book made up of separate pages).

** Comprising some four thousand pieces of paper, what are droopily called Leonardo’s notebooks are in fact quite a few diverse collections and assemblages of his manuscripts.

**Ranging from subjects as diverse as anatomical studies to the details of grinding and mixing pigments, they offer almost unfettered access to the great master’s prolific mind.

**While Leonardo’s awesome draftsmanship has earned him well-deserved renown, his general writings are less well known. They present a dare to the modern reader, not least because of his famous “mirror” writing, which did not result from dyslexia or an unreasonable need for confidentiality, as often thought. It was just his typically resourceful resolution to the challenges faced by all left-handed writers, who tend to smear ink with their hands as they move from left to right.

**In addition, the notebooks are widely scattered and, with a few prominent exceptions such as the ‘Codex Leicester’ and the ‘Codex Madrid’, treat a cosmic array of subjects, sometimes even within a single page. Combined with the language blockade and the virtual dearth of translated materials, an additional examination of Leonardo’s intellect can devolve into an exercise in frustration for the interested lay reader.

**The notebooks are a priceless reserve, unique to that of any other artist before or since. They tell us fairly little about Leonardo’s private life, however. If he kept a personal diary, it has not survived. Much of the biographical information we have about him and his family comes from existing sources and other related documents.

**Alternatively, what we have in his notebooks shows us how he approached his life and work, what interested him, what fixated him and why. They are the key to understanding how he thought.

** It seems obvious from his notebooks that Leonardo was attempting to define ‘a core science for all things’. He sought its rules by finding the shared principles behind the varied phenomena of nature he examined. However, he could not stop at the principles. He had a need to go further than this to find all the deviations he observed based on a whole host of effects. All aspects and variations in nature needed to be entirely described, and understood. Only when every possible cause and effect had been studied could one come to a true understanding of how nature worked.

Leonardo, the great Renaissance polymath of all polymaths, possessed infinite creativity, unappeasable curiosity and an agitatedly inventive imagination. His mind burst with insights about infants in the womb, helicopters and submarines, the inner-workings of plants and endless other phenomena. Largely self-taught, Leonardo had a chip on his shoulder about his need of classical education, stating several times that he learned from empirical evidence and his (alarming) powers of observation. This autodidactic approach resulted in an eccentric approach to all his attempts, from the depiction of landscapes to the construction of war machines.