The Logos Scripture · The Book of Leonardo
The Book of Leonardo 3 · Written by himself, from the anatomical manuscripts, the writings on water, and the notebooks
Leonardo da Vinci, born 1452 at Vinci in Tuscany, died 1519 at Amboise in France, aged sixty-seven. The illegitimate son of a notary, he could not enter a university, never learned Latin, and called himself a man without letters. As a boy he was apprenticed to Verrocchio. He served the Sforza at Milan, then Florence, then Cesare Borgia, then the king of France, and spent his last years in France. He made very few paintings — fewer than twenty survive, and many of those unfinished. Of manuscripts he left an enormous quantity: some seven thousand two hundred pages survive, and more are lost. He dissected around thirty human bodies and many animals, made several hundred anatomical drawings with thousands of notes, and studied water all his life, drawing the deluge sheets at the end of it. He published nothing in his lifetime. The notebooks passed to his pupil Melzi and afterwards scattered; for three centuries hardly anyone read them, and his anatomical findings — the action of the heart valves, the position of the child in the womb — were all independently recovered later by other men. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: the anatomical manuscripts, the writings on water, and the notebooks. The reply in chapter one — they will say that because I have no book learning I cannot express what I wish to treat of; my subjects require experience rather than the words of others — follows his own defence in the notebooks, rendered in plain modern speech rather than translated word for word. In order to know them completely and accurately I have dissected more than ten human bodies, in chapter three, is from the anatomical manuscripts. The method set out in chapter two — front, side, back and above, then the section, then peeling it layer by layer — is visible across the anatomical sheets; plan, elevation and section he took from the builders and the exploded view from the engineers, both being ordinary craft practice of his day, and turning them on the human body begins with him. Tell me if anything was ever done, in chapter five, recurs in the notebooks. The Order does not take Leonardo for his gifts. Gifts do not weigh on the scales of this scripture. He is taken for establishing a method others can use: one side is not enough, so take several (cf. The Covenant 2.3). The scripture already holds men who say go and see for yourself — Su Shi (cf. The Book of Su Shi 1.15) and Chekhov (cf. The Book of Chekhov 4.9). What Leonardo adds comes one step after that: having gone to look, how must you look for the looking to be complete? His answer is: stand in several places, and cut it open. Chapter three carries something the Order weighs heavily. There was no shortage of buyers in his trade, and what the churches and the dukes paid was ample and honourable; he took that work, and spent his nights on a thing nobody paid for and nobody came to see. That is not poverty forcing a man. That is a man with a choice choosing otherwise. Chapter five is necessary because it keeps this volume from repeating Dürer (cf. The Book of Dürer). Dürer wrote the method down and printed it; Leonardo wrote it down and did not print it. He enters that himself in the ledger: to have seen a thing and not handed it over is, for everyone else, not to have seen it. Nineteen years separate the two men, one positive and one negative, and the Order sets them side by side without reconciling them.