Notebooks

by Leonardo da Vinci

And the city will be of a beauty equal to its name, and useful to you for its revenues and the perpetual fame of its growth.

Open your eyes and look carefully that your money is not so spent as to purchase your own shame. I can assure you that from this district you will get nothing but average works of inferior and coarse masters. There is not a man who is capable—and you may believe me—except Leonardo the Florentine who is making the bronze horse of the Duke Francesco and who has no need to bring himself into notice, because he has work to do which will last him the whole of his life, and I doubt whether he will ever finish it, so great it is.

The sculptor in creating his work does so by the strength of his arm and the strokes of his hammer by which he cuts away the marble or other stone in which his subject is enclosed—a most mechanical exercise often accompanied by much perspiration which mingling with grit turns into mud. His face is smeared all over with marble powder so that he looks like a baker, and he is covered with a snowstorm of chips, and his house is dirty and filled with flakes and dust of stone.

How well the master’s art answers to nature. Da Vinci might also have rendered the soul as he has rendered the rest. But he did not, so that his picture might be a better likeness.