The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

Codex Forster II, written between 1487 and 1505. See the whole notebook interactively online at the Victoria and Albert Museum website.

Leonardo’s Notebooks (1480s-1518) are the sketchbooks of one of the greatest painters who ever lived. But they contain not just his sketches for, say, “The Last Supper”, but stuff like to-do lists, anatomical studies, mathematical puzzles, geological field notes, ideal cities, pictures of birds in flight rarely seen before the invention of stop-motion photography, designs for wings he was building so he could fly himself, parts of books he was writing that never got printed, and endless pictures of horses, flowing water, churches, craggy looking men, and strange machines.

Leonardo’s advice to artists:

“As you go about town, constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behaviour of men as they talk and quarrel or laugh, or come to blows.”

Which is why he had a small notebook hanging from his belt. But he also wrote and drew on larger pieces of paper at his art studio:

Vitruvian Man: one of the more famous pages from his notebooks. Click to enlarge.

Lost and found: We have more than 7,200 pages in 25 notebooks. But something like three-quarters of his notebooks are lost. Some more might still show up – one was discovered in 1966 at a library in Spain!

His design for a helicopter – with an example of his mirror writing.

Mirror writing: He wrote backwards, from right to left. You can read it in a mirror. He did that probably because he was a left-handed genius who did not want to smear the ink as he wrote.

A window: His notebooks show not only what he was seeing, thinking, and learning (he taught himself Latin at age 43, for example) but the process by which he did art, science and engineering. On one page you can see what looks like Mona Lisa’s smile – and also the dissection of lip muscles. He knew exactly how people smiled. But he said little about himself. His notebooks looked outward not inward.

A mess: He never meant for others to read his notebooks. His writing is hard to read even with a mirror. Most pages are self-contained, but few are dated or numbered. He did not keep them in any kind of reasonable order while collectors have taken many notebooks apart and reassembled them to their liking.

A wonder: Like a small child – or Einstein – he asked very simple questions: Why is the sky blue? How do birds fly? And then he set about to answer them in his notebooks. His way of doing science was almost a hundred years ahead of its time, heavy on first-hand observation, experiment and mathematics (but short on abstraction and published findings).

One of his tank designs.

Documentation effect: Part of why he seems like such an amazing genius is because he is so well documented. For example, he may not have been the first to think of submarines, helicopters or tanks, but because of his notebooks we know for a fact that he did think about them. But some of his thoughts which we thought were his own have turned out to be copied from books!

Last words: The last thing he is known to have written in his notebook:

“the soup is getting cold”

– Abagond, 2019.

Sources: mainly Google Images; “Leonardo’s Notebooks” (2005) edited by H. Anna Suh; “Leonardo da Vinci” (2017) by Walter Isaacson; “Leonardo da Vinci” (1959) by Kenneth Clark.

See also:

• Leonardo da Vinci
• science
• Einstein

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