Notebooks (61 page)

4
Marius . . . permit me my own
: Marius was a Roman military commander who fought against and defeated Jugurtha in 109-104 BC. His speech to the Romans comes from the Roman historian Sallust’s
Jugurthine War,
ch. 85, para 25.

5
abbreviators
: the name
abbreviatori
was given to the secretaries at the chancery of the Vatican. During his stay in Rome Leonardo was impeded in his anatomical researches by the Vatican and in writing this may have had their obstruction in mind.

Justinus
: Marcus Junianus Justinus, Roman historian of the second- third century AD and author of an abridgement of the
Philippic History
by Pompeius Trogus (first century BC). The book was much used in the Middle Ages. See also p. 313.

7
Wisdom . . . experience
: see Dante Alighieri,
La divina commedia
:
Paradiso,
ii. 94-6, ‘Experience, the only fountain whence your arts derive their streams’.

15
Anaxagoras
: Anaxagoras (
c.
500-428 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whom Leonardo credits with this cosmological theory.
Plato
: Plato’s
Timaeus,
written
c
.360 BC, posits the composition of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) as platonic solids, with each one being made up of components which could be broken down and made up into any of the other elements, thus making the elements interconvertible.

27
braccia
: a braccio (pl. braccia) is an arm’s length, or approximately 58 cm.

52
The sun does not move
: a similar statement by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) more than a hundred years later was condemned as heresy.

53
The Spera . . . the sun
:
La Sfera,
written by the Florentine Gregorio Dati before 1435, was an illustrated text on astronomy and geography. Lines 16-22 are in praise of the sun. Renaissance poet, scholar, and soldier, Michele Tarcaniota Marullus dedicated a poem to the sun (1487).

82
Vitruvius says
: Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, first-century BC Roman architect and engineer, in
De Architectura
(
The Ten Books of Architecture
), 10. 16
.
5.

99
tent . . . covered with cloth
: Leonardo is describing a parachute.

103
the eye takes cognizance of ten different qualities of objects
: this theory was first propounded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in
De Anima
(
On the Soul
),
c
.350 BC.

111
Necessity has . . . the eye
: the image formed on the retina is upside down, but it is the brain and not the lens which transposes the image and enables us to see things in their correct position. In the figure Leonardo conceives the lens as a ball in the centre of the eyeball.
visual power
: compare with Plato,
Timaeus,
45, which includes in the physical description of vision, ‘light-bearing eyes’ that project light from the eye to perceive and interact with the world.

113
Linear perspective . . . disappearance
: the last two of the three subjects are now generally known as ‘aerial’ perspective.

115
I ask to have
. . .
place where it strikes
: this corresponds to the first axiom in the Greek mathematician Euclid’s
Optics,
a treatise on perspective (
c
.300 BC).

140
Vitruvius . . . his work on architecture
: Vitruvius,
De Architectura
, 3. 1.

157
Avicenna
. . .
error
: Avicenna (Ibn Sina,
c
.980-1037), Persian physician, philosopher, and scientist, in his
De Anima
.

172
One who was drinking . . . the man who is leaning
: some of the gestures described here can be found in the final version of the
Last Supper
(Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie).

185
the grandchild of nature and as related to God
: see Dante Alighieri,
La Divina Commedia
:
Inferno,
xi. 105: ‘so that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild’.

186
the sense which comes second
: according to ancient traditions the five senses ranked in order of nobility. Sight came first, then hearing. These two were connected with the arts of painting and music, and were superior to the senses of smell, taste, and touch.

189
Apelles painted the Calumny
: Apelles (late fourth-early third-century BC) was a famed Greek artist whose lost painting, the
Calumny,
was made following an attempt by a rival artist to slander him. This story was widely known in the Renaissance and the Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) painted a version,
The Calumny of Apelles
(Florence, Uffizi).

190
King Mathias
: Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, a friend of Ludovico Sforza and patron of art and literature. Ludovico commissioned a
Madonna
from Leonardo on Corvinus’s behalf.

192
time is numbered among continuous quantities
: see p. 139.

193
various degrees of pitch proper to the human voice
: a reference to Leonardo’s theory that objects of equal size placed so as to recede at regular intervals of say, 20 braccia, each diminish to ½, ⅓, ¼ of their size, and so on in harmonious progression. There is therefore a close analogy with the divisions of the string on the monochord producing the octave, fifth, and fourth, etc. The Italian architect, mathematician, and art theorist Leon Battista Alberti recommends the use of these proportions in architecture: ‘The numbers through which the consensus of voices appeal most agreeably to the ears of men, are the very same which also fill men’s eyes and soul with marvellous pleasure.’
De Re Aedificatoria
(
On Building
), completed 1452.

211
some who look at the objects of nature through glass
: devices to facilitate the correct placing of objects on the picture plane were recommended by Alberti,
Della Pictura
(1435), 2; by the Milanese art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo,
Trattato dell’arte
(1584), 6. 14 and 15; and by the German artist Albrecht Dürer,
Unterweisung der Messung
, etc., who illustrated the subject with four woodcuts.

245
Truth was the only daughter of Time
: cf. the Latin author Aulus Gellius,
Noctes Atticae
(
Attic Nights
) (
c.
150 AD), 12. 11. 2, ‘Veritas filia Temporis’.

249
Babylon
: this name was commonly applied to Cairo in the Middle Ages.

258
O Time . . . consumed!
: Leonardo paraphrases Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, 15. 228-33 (trans. Loeb):

Helen also weeps when she sees her aged wrinkles in the looking glass, and tearfully asks herself why she should twice have been a lover’s prey.

O Time thou great devourer, and thou envious Age,

Together you destroy all things; and slowly gnawing with your teeth you finally consume all things in lingering death.

263
To keep in health this rule is wise
: the original is written in rhyming verse.

265
Cornelius Celsus
: Roman physician and encyclopaedist who dedicated eight books of his encyclopedia,
Artes
(
Arts
), to medicine (
c
.20 AD).
bodily pain . . . compared to it
: quoted from the Renaissance military historian and humanist Roberto Valturio (Roburtus Valturius),
De Re Militari
(
On Military Matters
) (written
c.
1540) which Leonardo owned (see p. 313).

Good men by nature wish to know
: cf. Dante Alighieri’s philosophical essay
Convivio
, 1. i, ‘All men by nature wish to know’.

266
Thou, O God . . . labour
: above this is the word
oratio
which either may be translated as ‘a prayer’ or may refer to the Roman poet Horace, who wrote: ‘Life gave nothing to mortals without hard work’ (
Satires,
1. 9. 56-60).

270
inside my lips
: this note is the main theme of Freud’s psychosexual study of Leonardo. The bird of Leonardo’s dream was a kite (
nibbio
in Italian) and the same bird figures in his studies of flight. Its deeply forked tail serves as a powerful rudder enabling it while soaring on its wide wings to steer its course with scarcely an apparent movement. This accounts for Leonardo’s interest in the bird. Freud mistranslates
nibbio
into ‘vulture’ and bases his theory on the fact that in Egyptian hieroglyphs the words ‘vulture’ and ‘mother’ were both represented by the figure of a vulture for phonetic reasons, since both were pronounced
mut
.

273
Carlo Marmocchi
: geographer and astronomer.

Benedetto
: Benedetto de l’Abbaco, Florentine mathematician.

Maestro Paolo
: Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer.

Domenicho di Michelino
: Florentine painter and pupil of the artist Fra Angelico.

Giovanni Argiropulo
: famed Greek humanist and translator of Aristotle.

A head of the Duke
: possibly Duke Francesco Sforza whose equestrian monument Leonardo was planning to carry out.

274
Atalante
: Atalante Migliorotti, a famous musician and friend of

Leonardo who accompanied him to Milan. He may be the sitter of

Leonardo’s
Portrait of a Musician
(Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana).

279
Lake Como
: although the memoranda appear here, Leonardo actually visited the region in 1492.

Pliniana
: the Villa Pliniana is near Torno on the eastern shore.

283
Chiaravalle
: the Abbey of Chiaravalle, a few miles from Milan, has a central tower on the intersection of the cross.

284
Marliani
: G. Marliani, author of
Algebra
and member of celebrated family of physicians.

Milan
: on another sheet there is a sketch of a view of Milan and a rough plan with indication of the gates (C.A. 199
^v
/73
^v-a
).

Cordusio
: the name of a piazza in the centre of Milan.

San Lorenzo
: an octagonal building dating back to the sixth century.

The dome is to this day one of the most wonderful cupolas ever constructed.

Messer Fazio
: Fazio Cardano, jurist, natural philosopher, and mathematician. He was father of the famous Girolamo Cardano, mathematician, astronomer, and physician.

Brera . . . de Ponderibus
: the Brera Palace now houses a gallery, library, academy of fine arts, and astronomical observatory, but was until 1571 a monastery.
De Ponderibus
(
On Weights
) is a treatise on statics written by the thirteenth-century mathematician Jordanus of Nemore. See note to p. 347.

Alchino
: Al Kindi (fl.
c
.850), Arab mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and physician.

book on celestial phenomena by Aristotle, in Italian
:
Meteorologica
(
Meteorology
), devoted primarily to weather phenomena.

284
Giannino Bombardieri
: a maker of cannon from Ferrara.

Benedetto Portinari
: the Portinari were one of the great merchant families of Florence and represented the Medici Bank at Milan. Benedetto di Tommaso Portinari represented them in Bruges.

285
‘Knots’ by Bramante
:
Gruppi
, i.e. twisted ornaments, which Leonardo also drew (see illustration). Donato Bramante (
c
.1444-1514) was a celebrated architect whose stay in Milan overlapped with Leonardo’s by ten years.