Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [16]
Historians argue over Leonardo’s reasons for being so baffling. In any case, much to a translator’s exhaustion, the notebooks must be held up to a mirror to be read.
Even then, it’s a challenge. Like other writers of his day, he used inconsistent spellings and abbreviations, no punctuation, and capitalization only rarely. On days when he must have been feeling especially secretive, he wrote in code.
And yet he was always addressing an imaginary readership—people who were brilliant, open to new ideas. Preferably geniuses. In the margins, he begged the reader to make sure his work got printed in book form—maybe, he hoped, after his death. So he wanted to be discovered and read. “I tell you . . . I teach you,” he wrote frequently.
He boldly worked in ink—no revision. Lead pencils were uncommon in his day, anyway. When drawing the human body, he liked to work in red chalk, which he found good for conveying flesh. Getting paper was always a problem for him, and he obviously hated wasting it. He crammed every page with words and images. A page listing generous sums for Salai’s clothes would be filled up with a recipe for a powder to make plaster models, as well as several diagrams illustrating the play of light and shade. He mixed together shopping lists, thoughts for the day, tips for young artists, jokes whose humor hasn’t lasted, and passages from borrowed library books.
The greatest hurdle for the reader is that his notes were not arranged in any logical order. He doesn’t seem to have been a linear thinker; he jumps from insight to insight, sometimes with no apparent connection. Sometimes he contradicts himself. But because so many pages are lost and because Leonardo never dated his pages, it’s impossible to know what his final thoughts on a subject were.
And—surprise!—he left everything unfinished. He worked as if he had all the time in the world, even though he was already elderly for his era.
The universally awe-inspiring aspect of the notebooks is the sublime quality of the illustrations. These were no amateur doodles. No one could draw as well as Leonardo. Some think that no one has since, until computer-assisted draftsmanship was invented.
His text, although precise, witty, and often poet ic, was there to explain the elegant artwork, not the other way around. He was of the “one picture is worth a thousand words” school, and no one who has ever seen one of his notebook pictures could argue against that. To Leonardo the key to everything was saper vedere—“knowing how to see.” He wanted to be a sort of camera; he referred to “becoming like a mirror.” The way he illustrated anything was always clear, dramatic. He observed, then recorded.
Whether he was studying the mysteries of flight; the relationship of the sun, moon, and stars; or the formation of fossils, he followed a pattern: recording ideas, doing experiments, and confirming or changing his ideas. It was a pattern revolutionary for its day—Leonardo was working his way toward the scientific method.
CHAPTER NINE
The Fabulous Notebooks, Part 2
THE CRUMBLING PAGES of Leonardo’s otebooks are now five hundred years old. Ancient. How could they possibly be relevant to anything today?
Prepare to be surprised.
Leonardo was deeply interested in just about every area of science, but the three subjects he got the furthest on were anatomy, optics, and anything to do with water.
Medicine then was dominated by the twenty-two volumes of the ancient Greek Galen—who lived in the second century—and his theories about complexion and humors. The body had its own normal balance of four fluids, or “humors,” as they were called: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each of the four humors could be reduced to its basic qualities: hot, cold, wet, and dry. People’s “complexions,” or temperaments, could be classified the same way: sanguine (optimistic), phlegmatic (low in energy), choleric (easily angered), and melancholy