The early notebooks as evidence of Leonardo's interests

To the early years of Leonardo's residence in Milan belong the first of those notebooks and manuscripts which, for the remainder of his life, give us a full record of his activities, both practical and scientific. It is a curious fact that these records only begin when Leonardo was thirty, an age when the average busy man ceases to take notes; yet the few scraps surviving from the earlier period of his life do not suggest that he was then in the habit of recording his interests, or indeed, that his interests were very wide. They consist of some drawings of machinery and engines of war done in a simple diagrammatic style, with a primitive notion of dynamics, and show that in spite of his boasting letter to Ludovico, Leonardo's knowledge of military engineering was not in advance of his time. But as official artificer to the Sforza court he was expected to undertake a number of duties demanding technical skill--architecture, engineering, the conduct of masques and pageants. In order to increase and display his mastery of such work he began to keep notes of machinery and ingenious devices of all sorts, either seen or invented. Before Leonardo's time other Renaissance artists had set out the result of their enquiries into machinery, architecture and fortification in the form of treatises: such, for example, is a manuscript in the Laurentian Library (cod. Ashb. 361) attributed to Francesco di Giorgio, which actually belonged to Leonardo and is annotated in his handwriting. It contains plans of churches, drawings of weapons and machinery--everything, in fact, which we find in the early manuscripts of Leonardo, and although the style of drawing is more primitive the technical knowledge displayed is hardly inferior. Inspired by some such compilation as this, Leonardo began to arrange his notes with a view to a systematic treatise, and the result was the earliest of the notebooks, the so-called MS. B in the library of the French Institute.

Before analysing these early notebooks as evidence of Leonardo's interests at this date, it may be convenient to give some account of his manuscripts as a whole. He seems to have kept nearly everything he wrote, and at the end of his life he bequeathed these writings to his disciple Francesco Melzi. A great part has survived and forms a mass of material for the understanding of Leonardo's thought. The most important collection is the great scrapbook of notes and drawings in the Ambrosian Library, known as the Codice Atlantico. It contains about four thousand sheets of various dates and sizes, dealing with every subject, all covered with Leonardo's minute writing, and was put together by the same hand as the collection of drawings now at Windsor Castle, probably by the sculptor, Leoni, who bought Leonardo's papers from Melzi's heirs. The compiler has made a half-hearted attempt at arrangement, but has done little more than classify certain drawings of machinery, etc., and for all practical purposes the sheets are in no order. It is our greatest source of knowledge about Leonardo's movements, friends, pupils, reading and mental habits.

Then come thirteen manuscripts in the Library of the Institut de France, which are referred to by the letters A to K inscribed on their covers. They are all of different dates and sizes, and most of them were used for a period of one or two years. Some are half-arranged treatises; others are quite small and may properly be called notebooks. The Library of the Institut also contains one of these pocket-books dealing with the flight of birds, and three more of the same size are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Forster Collection. There are other Leonardo manuscripts in the collection of the Earl of Leicester, in the Trivulzio Collection and at Turin, and there is a very important manuscript in the British Museum which belonged to the Earl of Arundel, the original possessor of the drawings now at Windsor. Two-thirds of this manuscript dealing with dynamics were written consecutively at one date; a third is a collection of odd sheets like the Codice Atlantico.

This mass of material is the most exacting subject of study because of its complete lack of continuity. At any point, on any sheet, embedded in the most trivial discussion, there may be some important evidence of Leonardo's movements or opinions. The student of Leonardo is engaged in a vast jigsaw puzzle, and in spite of the labours of devoted scholars such as Müller-Walde, Calvi and Solmi, much remains to be discovered. In particular, very little effort has been made to gauge how far Leonardo's knowledge increased and scientific method improved as his life went on. Some idea of Leonardo as a mind developing by contact with other minds is necessary if we are to form a true picture of him, and compare his scientific activity with his development as an artist. But to form this idea would require immense erudition, for not only would the student need to be familiar with all Leonardo's writings in their chronological order, but he would have to know enough about the state of learning in the Renaissance to judge Leonardo's progress in relation to that of his contemporaries.