Notebooks (43 page)

Authors: Leonardo da Vinci,Irma Anne Richter,Thereza Wells

Tags: #History, #Fiction, #General, #European, #Art, #Renaissance, #Leonardo;, #Leonardo, #da Vinci;, #1452-1519, #Individual artists, #Art Monographs, #Drawing By Individual Artists, #Notebooks; sketchbooks; etc, #Individual Artist, #History - Renaissance, #Renaissance art, #Individual Painters - Renaissance, #Drawing & drawings, #Drawing, #Techniques - Drawing, #Individual Artists - General, #Individual artists; art monographs, #Art & Art Instruction, #Techniques

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This shall be placed in the hand of Ingratitude. Wood nourishes the fire that consumes it.
⁴⁰

Not to disobey.
⁴¹

A simile for patience

Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more garments as the cold increases, the cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great injuries, and they cannot vex your mind.
⁴²

A felled tree which is shooting again.

I am still hopeful.

A falcon. Time.
⁴³

Nothing is so much to be feared as Evil Report.

This evil report is born of Vices.
⁴¹

Pleasure and pain

[
With a drawing.
]

Pleasure and pain are represented as twins, since there never is one without the other; and as if they were joined together back to back since they are contrary to each other.

If you choose pleasure, know that he has behind him one who will deal you tribulation and repentance.

This is pleasure together with pain and they are represented as twins because one is never apart from the other. They are made with their backs turned to each other because they are contrary to one another; they exist in one and the same body because they have one and the same foundation, for the origin of pleasure is labour with pain, and the origins of pain are vain and wanton pleasures. And therefore it is represented here with a reed in his right hand, which is useless and without strength, and the wounds made with it are poisoned. In Tuscany reeds are placed to support beds, to signify that here vain dreams come and here a great part of life is consumed, here much useful time is wasted, namely that of the morning, when the mind is composed and rested and the body therefore is fitted to resume new labours. Here also many vain pleasures are taken, both with the mind imagining impossible things, and with the body taking those pleasures which are often the cause of the failing of life.
⁴⁴

Truth and falsehood

Fire destroys falsehood, that is sophistry, and restores truth, driving out darkness. Fire is to be put for the destroyer of every sophistry, as the discoverer and demonstrator of truth; because it is light, the banisher of darkness, which is the concealer of all essential things.

Truth

Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold. Truth in the end cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is useless, Dissimulation is frustrated before so great a judge.

Falsehood puts on a mask.

Nothing is hidden under the sun.

Fire is put for truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for falsehood and lying, the concealer of truth.
⁴⁵

Truth was the only daughter of Time.*
³⁶

[
With a drawing of two figures, one pursuing the other with bow and arrow.
]

A body may sooner be without its shadow than virtue without envy.
⁴⁴

When Fortune comes, seize her in front with a sure hand, because behind she is bald.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.
⁴⁶

[
With a drawing of butterflies fluttering round a flame
.]

Blind ignorance misleads us thus and delights with the results of lascivious joys.

Because it does not know the true light.

Because it does not know what the true light is.

Vain splendour takes from us the power of being. . . .

Behold how owing to the glare of the fire we walk where blind ignorance leads us.

O wretched mortal, open your eyes!
⁴⁷

[
With drawings of compass and plough.
]

He turns not back who is bound to a star.

Obstacles do not bend me.

Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.
⁴⁸

Obstinate rigour.
⁴⁹

VI. IMAGINATIVE DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE
1. THE WHALE

The discovery of the fossilized remains of a whale gives rise to reflections on the transitory nature of even the strongest creature.

Like a whirling wind scouring through a sandy and hollow valley which with speeding course drives into its vortex everything that opposes its furious course. . . .

Not otherwise does the northern blast whirl round in its tempestuous progress. . . .

Nor does the tempestuous sea roar so loud, when the northern blast dashes it in foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli nor Mount Etna when their pent-up sulphurous flames send and burst open the mountain fulminating stones and earth mingled together in the issuing flames. Nor when Mount Etna’s inflamed caverns vomiting the ill-restrained element and thrusting it back to its own region, driving before it whatever obstacle withstands its impetuous rage. . . .

And drawn on by my eager desire, anxious to see a great multitude of varied and strange shapes made by formative nature, having wandered for some distance among overhanging rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern before which for a time I remained stupefied having been unaware of its existence, my back bent and my left hand supported on my knee while with my right I made a shade over my lowered and contracted eyebrows. And repeatedly bending first one way and then another, to see whether I could discern anything inside, from this I was prevented by the deep darkness within. And after remaining there for a time, suddenly there arose within me two emotions, fear and desire—fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there might be any marvellous thing therein. . . .
⁵⁰

O powerful and once-living instrument of formative nature, thy great strength not availing thee thou must needs abandon thy tranquil life to obey the law which God and time gave to creative nature. To thee availed not the branching, sturdy dorsal fins wherewith pursuing thy prey thou wast wont to plough thy way, tempestuously tearing open the briny waves with thy breast.

Oh, how many a time the terrified shoals of dolphins and big tunny fish were seen to flee before thy insensate fury, and thou lashing with swift, branching fins and forked tail, didst create in the sea mist and sudden tempest with great buffeting and submersion of ships: with great wave thou didst heap up the uncovered shores with terrified and desperate fishes which escaping from thee, were left high and dry when the sea abandoned them, and became the plenteous and abundant spoil of the neighbouring people.

O Time, consumer of things, by turning them into thyself thou givest to the taken lives new and different habitations.

O Time, swift despoiler of created things, how many kings, how many peoples hast thou undone, how many changes of states and of circumstances have followed since the wondrous form of this fish died here in this cavernous and winding recess. Now destroyed by time thou liest patiently in this closed place with bones despoiled and bare serving as a support and prop for the mountain placed over thee.
⁵¹

2. MOUNT TAURUS

The following drafts of letters gave rise to the belief that Leonardo may have travelled to the Near East and gone to Armenia on a special mission for the Defterdar of Syria, the representative of Kait Bey, Sultan of Egypt. There is, however, no definite proof and the passages here quoted may have been drafts for an imaginary tale.

The divisions of the book

The preaching and persuasion of faith.

The sudden inundation to its end.

The destruction of the city.

The death of the people and their despair.

The hunt for the preacher and his release and benevolence.

Description of the cause of this fall of the mountain.

The havoc that it made.

The avalanche of snow.