Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [15]
He followed any new development in geography or discovery of new plants and animals. He was mesmerized by maps. There is no evidence he ever journeyed farther than France—this was a time when most people never traveled farther than a day or two from their homes—but it was an electric era when people’s notion of the geographical world was expanding rapidly. This was thanks in part to Italian merchants who were pressuring traders and sailors for exotic temptations, like precious spices, from the Orient. After Christopher Columbus, financed by Spain, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and reached what turned out to be the “New World” in 1492, everyone’s horizons were broadening fast. Leonardo himself was friends with Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian navigator who explored the New World from 1497 to 1504. (Vespucci was also intelligent enough to realize the continent was not part of Asia as Columbus believed, but a new one—which was later named after him.)
Practically the only facet of life that didn’t interest Leonardo was current politics. Around him swirled intrigue, executions, invasions, violent changes in regime—none of which he wrote about. He tried to remain above it all, considering himself a “citizen of the world.”
Yet there was no way to stop politics from intruding on his life. The French invaded Milan. Sforza, Leonardo’s patron, was overthrown. In 1499, after eighteen years in Milan, Leonardo was forced to flee. He packed up his books, the precious notebooks, his collection of seeds (including lily and watermelon), and household items such as bowls and sheets—all in trunks to be carried by mules.
Together with Salai and Luca Pacioli, the forty-seven-year-old artist-scientist began to roam.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Fabulous Notebooks
AT THE TIME Leonardo’s mules were schlepping the notebooks around Italy, the pages were valuable only to their author. Today they are among the most precious things on the planet. The notebooks, the core obsession of Leonardo’s life, are what place him among the giants of science, not specific discoveries he made or new inventions he created.
So what are they, exactly?
We call them “notebooks,” but they are not bound like a typical notebook. Mostly they are loose sheets of paper casually gathered together and wrapped with different fabrics. Some pages are large. Others are only two or three inches square; these must be from the tiny blank notebooks he always kept tied to his belt.
Leonardo went out of his way to make the notebooks difficult for any other person to read—tremendously out of his way. The main roadblock is his famous mirror-image script. His tiny writing goes backward, reading from right to left. The drawings aren’t backward, just the words.
What was he thinking?
Although he could draw with both hands, Leonardo remained left-handed. Was it simply easier or faster for him to write this way? Less smudging of the ink? Or was this eccentricity a function of his fear of scrutiny? Sometimes his work challenged church teachings. That could be dangerous. Was he worried that the notebooks could be used to incriminate him?
We know he lived in fear of having his ideas stolen and published. Although there is no evidence that anyone ever tried to steal his work, he dreaded that someone else would take credit for his beautiful brain flashes.
Sometimes he worried about “the evil nature of men”—that bad guys would misuse his inventions. For example, he invented a diving suit but worried that people would use it to stay underwater long enough to drill holes and sink the ships of their enemies. He didn’t trust many people.
He could also have been merely following common practice. Many astrologers and alchemists of the day wrote in code. The famous French seer