Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks

Leonardo da Vinci, the great Florentine artist, scientist, inventor and designer, died half a millennium ago this very day. Celebrated the world over by historians and scholars as the ideal of the ‘Renaissance Man’, he outshines every other individual from history in terms of the range of his prodigious talent and legacy. Although he cannot be classed as a diarist, like his near Florentine contemporary Landucci Luca, who was one of the very earliest of European diarists, Leonardo was a prolific keeper of notebooks. Alas, these notebooks, sometimes called journals, contain little about his personal or private life, nor were most of the many thousands of pages that make up the notebooks ever dated. All but one of these journals are in major libraries or museums, and several of them have been fully digitised and can be viewed online.

Leonardo was born, an illegitimate child, in 1452 near the Tuscan hill-town of Vinci. His father had a flourishing legal practice in the city of Florence. Aged 14, Leonardo was apprenticed to the sculptor Andrea Verrocchio, and by 1472 he had joined the brotherhood of Florentine artists. He worked as an artist in Florence for a decade or so, but became increasingly interested in more technical uses for his drawing ability - such as for anatomy and engineering. In 1482, with permission from the ruling Sforza family, he moved to Milan, where he undertook many commissions for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (preparing floats and pageants for special occasions, for example, creating designs for a dome in Milan cathedral, and designing a model for a huge equestrian monument of his predecessor). In 1499, when the French invaded, he fled to Venice where he was employed as a military architect and engineer.

The next few years saw Leonardo back in Florence (though he spent some time in Cesena in the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, creating military maps). He rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke and spent two years designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari, with Michelangelo designing a companion piece. By 1508, he was back in Milan where he bought his own house. From 1513 to 1516, under Pope Leo X, he spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were also employed. In 1516, he entered the service of King Francis I of France. He was given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé (now a public museum) in the Loire Valley close to the king’s residence, where he lived with his friend Count Francesco Melzi. Here, Leonardo died on 2 May 1519.

As one of the world’s most famous individuals in all of history, there is a wealth of information about Leonardo, his life and his work, available on the internet: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The National Gallery, a Leonardo dedicated site, The Art Story. And here is a random selection of some of the many articles/events celebrating the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death: The Telegraph, CNN, Royal Collection Trust, Fox News, i.Italy, National Geographic, The Guardian, The Getty Museum, Bodleian Libraries, Indian Express, The Louvre.

Astonishingly, only 15 artworks attributable to Leonardo have survived. However, he left behind a vast quantity of extraordinary notes and sketches (some 7,000 pages are extant). Over the centuries, these have been collated, and are now formally called his codices, but they are also referred to as his notebooks or journals. Although the world’s oldest diaries can be traced to Japan a millennium ago, the earliest diaries in Europe extant today started to appear in Florence, in fact, during the 15th century - particularly those kept by Landucci Luca and Nicolo Barbara. Leonardo’s notebooks cannot be considered diaries in the sense of comprising dated entries about his daily life, and yet the coincidence of Leonardo’s output coinciding with the first diaries is notable, as is their sheer volume (not to even mention their, literally, marvellous content).

According to Wikipedia, ‘Leonardo’s notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirlpools, war machines, flying machines and architecture.’ According to the British Library (see below), its notebook features many topics ‘including mechanics, the flow of rivers, astronomy, optics, architecture and the flight of birds’. More specifically, it includes a study for an underwater breathing apparatus, studies of reflections from concave mirrors, and drawings for the design of a mechanical organ.

Almost all the codices are held by major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan and the British Library. Bill Gates owns the only codex in private hands, and it is, apparently, displayed once a year in different cities around the world. Universal Leonardo is an excellent source for information about the codices, with a summary of their contents, their location, sample images etc. The initiative was launched back in 2006 by the Council of Europe and supported by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Led by Leonardo scholar Professor Martin Kemp from Oxford University and Professor Marina Wallace from Central Saint Martins it has aimed to be the most comprehensive set of exhibitions and website ever devoted to the Italian genius.

Most of Leonardo’s writings are in, what’s called, mirror-image cursive, making it very difficult to read; he also used a variety of shorthand and symbols. Conveniently, though, topics are covered with text and diagrams on single sheets - thus, as it happened, latter collation of the sheets was independent of missing pages or disorder. But that said, many of the single pages are confused in themselves. According to Dr Richter (see below): ‘A page, for instance, will begin with some principles of astronomy, or the motion of the earth; then come the laws of sound, and finally some precepts as to colour. Another page will begin with his investigations on the structure of the intestines, and end with philosophical remarks as to the relations of poetry to painting; and so forth.’ 

Content from Leonardo’s notebooks first appeared in English in 1883, when the publisher Samson Low et al brought out The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci by Dr Jean Paul Richter. Both volumes, 500-600 pages long, can be read freely at Internet Archive (vol. 1, vol. 2). Two decades later came Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-books - Arranged and rendered into English with Introductions by Edward McCurdy (sic) (Duckworth, 1906). And 30 years after that, the author revised his book, quadrupling its pages from 300 to over 1200 (in two volumes) and this time calling it The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci - Arranged, Rendered into English and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy (sic) (Jonathan Cape, 1938). The two volumes (vol. 1 and vol. 2) are also available at Internet Archive. Both Richter and McCurdy opted to arrange Leonardo’s writings in sections by topic (i.e. without relation to their codex source). In his first attempt, McCurdy chose to compile Leonardo’s writing in four main subject areas: life, nature, art, fantasy; 30 years later he opted for 50 topics and subjects. More recently, Oxford University Press has published Notebooks edited by Thereza Wells and Martin Kemp.

The Guardian, The Journaling Habit and Owlcation all have useful articles on Leonardo’s notebooks. Otherwise, several of the codices can be examined online in all their glorious detail: the British Library, for example, has digitised its holding, the Codex Arundel (Turning the Pages, full manuscript); and the Victoria & Albert Museum has done the same with its holding, the Codex Forster.