Notebooks

by Leonardo da Vinci

Making any selection from Leonardo’s 6,000 or so surviving pages (plus those that are only known in the Treatise) is a real problem. Which Leonardo do we present? The artist, the scientist, the engineer, the natural philosopher, the author of literary snippets …? The underlying difficulty is that although Leonardo and his age would have recognized some of the terms we use, such as painter, sculptor and engineer, many of the professional categories we take for granted post-date the Renaissance. No one went to a college to learn to be an engineer or an architect. Leading masters of many trades such as Filippo Brunelleschi, builder of the dome of Florence Cathedral, sculptor and inventor, moved fluidly across what we now regard as disciplinary boundaries. Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great sculptor of the Baptistery doors, listed all the intellectual territories that learned artists should master: grammar, philosophy, medicine, astrology, optics, history, anatomy, the theory of design and arithmetic. A recipe for a Leonardo!