H. Anna Suh

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 show more 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. show less

The sheer scope of this man's thought is breathtaking. If not the smartest human that ever lived, then damn close. I thought I appreciated Leonardo before going through this - I had no idea. This is a book I will pick up again and again, browsing for inspiration or simple wonder. This belongs on every bookshelf.

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

Fascinating but hard to read. None of the referenced illustrations are included. Some entries are small or lists, some are quite detailed. An index would be great.

FROM AMAZON: Leonardo da Vinci 'artist, inventor, and prototypical Renaissance man'is a perennial source of fascination because of his astonishing intellect and boundless curiosity about the natural and man-made world. During his life he created numerous works of art and kept voluminous notebooks that detailed his artistic and show more intellectual pursuits. The collection of writings are drawn from his notebooks. The book organizes his wide range of interests into subjects such as human figures, light and shade, perspective and visual perception, anatomy, botany and landscape, geography, the physical sciences and astronomy, architecture, sculpture, and inventions. show less