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The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
Translated by Jean Paul Richter
1888
A singular fatality has ruled the destiny of nearly all the mostfamous of Leonardo da Vinci's works. Two of the three most importantwere never completed, obstacles having arisen during his life-time,which obliged him to leave them unfinished; namely the SforzaMonument and the Wall-painting of the Battle of Anghiari, while thethird—the picture of the Last Supper at Milan—has sufferedirremediable injury from decay and the repeated restorations towhich it was recklessly subjected during the XVIIth and XVIIIthcenturies. Nevertheless, no other picture of the Renaissance hasbecome so wellknown and popular through copies of every description.
Vasari says, and rightly, in his Life of Leonardo, "that he labouredmuch more by his word than in fact or by deed", and the biographerevidently had in his mind the numerous works in Manuscript whichhave been preserved to this day. To us, now, it seems almostinexplicable that these valuable and interesting original textsshould have remained so long unpublished, and indeed forgotten. Itis certain that during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries theirexceptional value was highly appreciated. This is proved not merelyby the prices which they commanded, but also by the exceptionalinterest which has been attached to the change of ownership ofmerely a few pages of Manuscript.
That, notwithstanding this eagerness to possess the Manuscripts,their contents remained a mystery, can only be accounted for by themany and great difficulties attending the task of deciphering them.The handwriting is so peculiar that it requires considerablepractice to read even a few detached phrases, much more to solvewith any certainty the numerous difficulties of alternativereadings, and to master the sense as a connected whole. Vasariobserves with reference to Leonardos writing: "he wrote backwards,in rude characters, and with the left hand, so that any one who isnot practised in reading them, cannot understand them". The aid of amirror in reading reversed handwriting appears to me available onlyfor a first experimental reading. Speaking from my own experience,the persistent use of it is too fatiguing and inconvenient to bepractically advisable, considering the enormous mass of Manuscriptsto be deciphered. And as, after all, Leonardo's handwriting runsbackwards just as all Oriental character runs backwards—that isto say from right to left—the difficulty of reading direct from thewriting is not insuperable. This obvious peculiarity in the writingis not, however, by any means the only obstacle in the way ofmastering the text. Leonardo made use of an orthography peculiar tohimself; he had a fashion of amalgamating several short words intoone long one, or, again, he would quite arbitrarily divide a longword into two separate halves; added to this there is no punctuationwhatever to regulate the division and construction of the sentences,nor are there any accents—and the reader may imagine that suchdifficulties were almost sufficient to make the task seem adesperate one to a beginner. It is therefore not surprising that thegood intentions of some of Leonardo s most reverent admirers shouldhave failed.
Leonardos literary labours in various departments both of Art and ofScience were those essentially of an enquirer, hence the analyticalmethod is that which he employs in arguing out his investigationsand dissertations. The vast stru