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In case you did not arrive from the "Leonardo's Life: Index", in my invented room image map I depict a bookcase containing notebooks to represent the Maestro's notebooks. Visit that Index via the easel image link at page end. |
In the opening scene of [
79 Concerning Flight] Kathryn Janeway refers to Leonardo's voluminous notebooks and reproves Holo-Leonardo for not finishing things (she has the benefit of historical hindsight, of course).
Janeway: "Your beautiful painting of the Adoration, the great bronze horse in Milan, the Battle of Anghiari - unfinished, all of them. You were going to publish your notebooks. You never did. You have given up, abandoned your most important works."
Janeway as Catarina, Holo-Leonardo's apprentice, rebukes the Maestro who hangs his head, [79 Concernng Flight]
 Holo-Leonardo with some of his sketches
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It was during his first stay in Milan, 1482-1499, mostly over that period with Milan's ruler the Duke Ludovico Sforza as his patron, that Leonardo began to record his theories and studies in great detail, covering thousands of pages with sketches of diverse technical and military designs, although many of his inventions he first conceived of during his earlier time in Florence. These included designs for crossbow-firing machines, siege defences, fountains and other water-lifting device, heating plants and garden pavilions. Sketches were accompanied, indeed usually surrounded on the same page, by copious notes. His notes were in minute handwriting. He was left-handed, unrepentantly so in an age when left-handed was literally considered sinister. In Latin "sinistra" means "left", and from ancient times onward "left" meant unlucky or ill-omened. Like many left-handed people, Leonardo found it convenient to write from right to left in mirror script so as not to smudge the ink and be able to read easily what he was writing. |
Leonardo's sketches and notes in mirror handwriting upon the Sun to the Earth and the size of the Moon
| Personally I believe, and this is no doubt a common speculation, that in an age when only some people could read and write and when mirrors were not readily available, Leonardo's mirror writing also afforded his notes more security than we might realise since nowadays mirrors (and perfect ones) are readily available and all but a tiny minority are literate. This is also bearing in mind the fact that in those days plagiarism did not have legal force the way it does in modern times. In particular, some of Leonardo's studies and subsequent theories would have been considered heretical by the Church, such as his anatomical studies which involved the dissection of dead human bodies. In addition, he did not want to publicise his invention of an underwater contraption (the forerunner of the modern submarine) for fear that it would be used in war. That fear was to prove posthumously correct with the invention of the modern submarine. |
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| The preservation and loss of Leonardo's literary works
After Leonardo's death in 1519 Francesco Melzi, his favourite pupil, brought many of his manuscripts and drawings back to Italy. This is confirmed by a note written by an agent of the Duke of Ferrara, dated 1523, referring to: "those little books by Leonardo about the anatomy, and many other interesting things", a fact mentioned also by an early 16th century source, the "Anonimo Gaddiano", in regard to the inheritance left by Leonardo to Melzi, which included: "cash, clothing, books, drawings, painting instruments and portraits". Fortunately, of Leonardo's vast output, over five thousand pages of drawings and notes are still extant, in his characteristic "mirror-image" hand-writing, running from right to left. But this huge mass of writings, undoubtedly the largest collection of the entire Renaissance, has endured many vicissitudes following Leonardo's death. In fact, Leonardo's manuscripts are today nothing like the way they appeared and were grouped together during his lifetime, or even when they passed into the hands of Francesco Melzi. It was Melzi's heirs who, after his death in 1579, began to scatter the material. Having no idea of their importance, they initially stored Leonardo's drawings and manuscripts in a loft, later giving parts of it away or selling sheets cheaply to friends and collectors! Already in 1630, the Barnabite Antonio Mazenta speaks of the dispersal of the Leonardo manuscripts, and singles out Pompeo Leoni, a sculptor at the court of the King of Spain, as one of those chiefly responsible not only for losing part of the collection, but even worse, for rearranging the order of its contents. Indeed, in an effort to sort the artistic drawings from the technical ones, and to put together the scientific notes, he split up the original manuscripts, cut and pasted pages and created two separate collections. One is now called the "Codex Atlanticus", the other the Windsor collection, which contains some six hundred drawings. Using the same method, Leone went on to create at lest four more volumes. Upon Leoni's death, his heirs brought part of the manuscripts back to Italy, where they were purchased by Count Galeazzo Arconati who, in 1637, donated them to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana where they remained until 1796, the year of Napoleon Bonaparte's arrival in Milan. Napoleon ordered the manuscripts to be transferred to Paris, but in 1851 the Austrian government requested their return. Only the Codex Atlanticus was actually returned, while the other twelve manuscripts, marked with the letters A to M, remained in Paris, and were regarded as lost. Other manuscripts stayed in Spain and then went their different ways. Others remained undiscovered until 1966, when they were found quite by chance in the archives of the National Library of Madrid. The current Codex Leicester (formerly Hammer) is instead one of the manuscripts which Melzi did not inherit and which, curiously, strayed from the path of most of the other Leonardo notes and today is the only manuscript to be found in private hands. Studies on the Leonardo manuscripts were only embarked upon systematically towards the mid-19th century; around the turn of the century these investigations led to the establishment of the "Vinci Royal Commission"; the aim of these painstaking studies and transcriptions was to reconstruct the original arrangement of the manuscripts. The first public exhibitions of Leonardo's scientific and technological works dates back to this period. Source: slightly edited from http://www.museoscienza.org/ |
example: page of drawings and notes on the science of waves from Codex Hammer
Incidentally, I have not visited Windsor Castle for several years, but if you visit there may still exist a fudge shop near the opposite of the entrance to the Castle, in the main street, which sells the most wonderful fudge (and in a wide variety of flavours) - recommended.
 Janeway looks at Holo-Leonardo's sketch of a flying machine, [ 79 Concerning Flight] |
Not all of Leonardo's engineering designs were realised. They would have been produced as design drawings accompanied by notes, then a model mock-up of the prototype produced and finally, if it proceeded to manufacture, a full-size working prototype. |
Dates for many drawings vary in sources, often by several years, and should be considered approximate, partly because of lack of reliable or complete historical evidence, and partly because Leonardo would have worked on his designs often for years.
| The nature of Leonardo's drawings tends to be that of work-in-progress drawings, often with some details not fully drawn. Apart from certain presentational drawings, he drew an idea then elaborated just a few of the details involved in that phase, ending up with a whimsical or highly theoretical impression. Notes were not always placed on the page in one go but often successively, and these notes were often irregularly placed. Both text and drawings were working notes to himself. Leonardo worked on his notebooks in much the same way as he did his paintings, namely he continued to apply his "brushstrokes", sometimes in the form of notes, at other times as drawings, as long as there was empty space on the "canvas". |   The Dream Of Flight includes manuscript examples but this link is here mainly so as not to miss one of the themes in the notebooks |
Leonardo seems to have intended to publish his notebooks except for, fearing misuse for war, his invention of an underweater breathing tube. The following is speculation, probably common to anyone who studies Leonardo for any length of time. Leonardo may not have published his notebooks because he felt that many designs required further development. In addition, he was for some time concerned with typographical problems. In his time, printing books was a long and involved business which is hard to appreciate in modern times, and some of the landmarks in printing history are noted in Chronological Table). In his study for mechanical elements (in Codex Madrid II), in the margins of an anatomical page dating from c.1510, Leonardo mentions a printing technique capable of faithfully reproducing his designs. In c.1510 Leonardo was an old man and he may have been daunted by the prospect of overseeing the publication of so many thousands of pages. In addition, he may have feared investigation or even persecution by the Church, for many of his experiments and ideas would have been considered heretical, thus leaving it to history to appraise Leonardo's inventions and theories - many of these would later prove to be correct or viable. In January 2005, researchers discovered the hidden laboratory used by Leonardo for studies of flight and other pioneering scientific work. This laboratory is located in previously sealed rooms at a monastery next to the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata, in the heart of Florence. Some inventions, as noted below, influenced later thinkers and design engineers, though Leonardo's notebooks remained obscure not to mention scattered in different physical locations until the 19th century and in the intervening period were unable to be directly of value to the development of science and technology. Many of his designs, thought to be forerunners of later inventions, in fact would not have worked as per his designs, such as the Aerial Screw or other flying machines, but he did invent certain items even if they seem less glamorous than a flying machine and he contributed to other later inventions. It is not for nothing that Leonardo is universally considered to have been a man far ahead of his time.
Leonardo's actual inventions or significant development from earlier ideas include:
- air-conditioning system - a method to cool Isabelle d'Este's house using a hydraulic system, c.1500
- ball-bearings: the Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Roman all independently invented a primitive ball-bearing for reducing friction between moving parts, but the first systematic study of friction was by Leonardo whose Notebooks contain numerous designs of ball-bearings, c.1500
- the first known prototype of the centrifugal action pump, c.1508
- lifting machines of various kinds date back to at least Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century BC, but new progress was made c.1500 by Leonardo's prototype pivot crane (and also of the job-crane) which, unlike previous cranes, was not limited to movements up and down and from front to back but could carry a load laterally, and it was not until 1770 that the Russian F.D. Golovin improved Leonardo's design which was then later improved upon with the coming of the age of steam
- Hero of Alexandria of the 1st century BC invented the first steam engine, namely employing the principle of the expansion of water vapour, but his machine remained an object of curiosity and had no practical application; Leonardo's design appears in the Codex Hammer and dates from 1504 and is actually a device for measuring the expansion of steam, but in another invention dating from c.1509 (but whose invention he erroneously, perhaps deliberately erroneously to give the matter weight, attributes to Archimedes) his notebooks show a steam-pressure-operated cannon - he called iot "architonitro"; while a third sketch was for a steam weight-lifting machine
- There are a number of others, which I plan to describe briefly in the section on just 48 of Leonardo's machines, accessed from the Secret Room in the "Leonardo's Life" section.
Just some of Leonardo's various designs were:
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 A |
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 crossbow machines |
Not all of these were practicable or were realised. Regarding items H and I, a crossbow is seen on Holo-Leonardo's workbench in [68 and 69 Scorpion], a reference no doubt to Leonardo's study of its workings in order to design crossbow machines. |
 H |
 I |
 J |
 K |
 K |
 L |
It is in [79 Concerning Flight] that Holo-Leonardo achieves what Leonardo himself did not, despite reams of design drawings and some practical experimentation - namely manned flight using a device he had invented, though Holo-Leonardo's machine gains the air thanks to the lightness of 24th century materials such as duranium alloy.
Leonardo's Notebooks have ended up in ten major portions, each assigned a Codex name. Some are available for public viewing, if limited, as follows:
- The Codex Hammer (formerly known as Codex Leicester) was bought by Bill Gates the chairman of Microsoft Corporation, and is the largest collection of Leonardo manuscripts in private ownership, and each year it is displayed somewhere different in the world to offer exposure to as many visitors as possible.
- The Codex Forster is at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England.
- The worldwide tour of (most of) the Codex Atlanticus which began in Europe in 2006 is at that London Museum until 7th January 2006, and thereafter travels to other parts of the world including the USA and Japan in 2007.
- The Codex Windsor, comprising some 600 drawings of anatomical studies, geography, studies of horses, sketches and caricatures plus a series of maps, has recently been largely published for the first time by Taschen at www.taschen.com, by kind permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
- The Codex Arundel which comprises 283 folio pages contains studies in physics and mechanics, optics and Euclidean geometry, weights and architecture (the last two include the works for the royal residence of François I at Ramorantin, in France), and is at the British Library in London.
- Leonardo's manuscripts together with the drawings are available online since April 2006 except for the Codex Atlanticus. One website advertises facsimiles of various Codices for sale though I have not bought any so cannot verify that advertising. See also Sources for information about certain books, an interactive CD-ROM and websites.
 Quotes from Leonardo's Notebooks |
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