The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

By Leonardo da Vinci

A fascinating collection of writings from the great polymath of the Italian Renaissaince, Leonardo da Vinci.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329572454

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer and scientist. His many works of genius include The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa.

Reviews for The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

[deldevries · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Go to the source for original ideas. Filled with quotes, writing, sketches, and drawings.

[gottfried_leibniz-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Masterpiece to learn and understand Renaissance Man. Although, I'm not a painter -- I got a glimpse of Leonardo's life through his journal entries.

"A Painter is not admirable if he is not universal." This seems to strike chords with thinkers of School of Salamanca, who viewed Knowledge holistically and didn't take positivist approach of segmenting branches of Knowledge.


--Deus Vult
Gottfried

[alcracka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Da Vinci was very specific.

On depicting a battle:
"The air must be full of arrows in every direction." (There follows several pages more of instructions, including bits like, "There must not be a level spot that is not trampled with gore.") (p. 26-28)

And his bits on anatomy are famous enough without me. The distance between the corner of your eye and your ear is the same as the height of your ear. Now you know.

But then, on the less specific side, there's this: "Of grotesque faces I need say nothing, because they are kept in mind without difficulty." (p. 131) So da Vinci's not so different after all, is he? His specificity varies in inverse proportion to his subject's attractiveness. I like boobs.

Unfortunately, "Women must be represented in modest attitude, their legs close together, their arms closely folded, their heads inclined and somewhat on one side" (p. 63), which is not at all what I heard on the internet.

Some of it's amazingly perceptive, and some of it's completely wrong, and some I don't understand at all, but the effect of reading his diary is weird and powerful; more than, say, reading an autobiography tends to be. While he probably knew his journals would be read (he actually addresses "Reader" off and on), he was still writing mainly for himself, so there's a directness.

What comes across most is his curiosity. He'll jot down some weird paragraph about shadows or something, and you understand that this is what he must have done all day today: measure shadows and build shapes and math formulas out of them, because he wanted to know how they work. True, his conclusion was that they send out "dark rays" that bounce into "reflex streams" or something, which I think might be gibberish, but still. What did you do today? I pretty much just thought about boobs.

[06nwingert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci are a good representation of the real Da Vinci (opposed to the pseudo- image we've been given via popular culture- i.e., The Da Vinci Code). It's a little disorganized becuase Da Vinci wrote everything backwards (i.e. right to left) and because of the various translations it's undergone.

[peterclack · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Here you have the means to find out what a genius was thinking. Helicopters ...... perhaps. City defences. And ideas about the world he lived in. And sketches. It is impossible to summarise this book. You simply have to borrow it from the library and dip into it as the fancy takes you. Love it.