Leonardo Da Vinci* by Kathleen Krull

Author:Kathleen Krull [Krull, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Retail, Ages 8+
ISBN: 9781101098691
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2005-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Fabulous Notebooks

AT THE TIME Leonardo’s mules were schlepping the notebooks around Italy, the pages were valuable only to their author. Today they are among the most precious things on the planet. The notebooks, the core obsession of Leonardo’s life, are what place him among the giants of science, not specific discoveries he made or new inventions he created.

So what are they, exactly?

We call them “notebooks,” but they are not bound like a typical notebook. Mostly they are loose sheets of paper casually gathered together and wrapped with different fabrics. Some pages are large. Others are only two or three inches square; these must be from the tiny blank notebooks he always kept tied to his belt.

Leonardo went out of his way to make the notebooks difficult for any other person to read—tremendously out of his way. The main roadblock is his famous mirror-image script. His tiny writing goes backward, reading from right to left. The drawings aren’t backward, just the words.

What was he thinking?

Although he could draw with both hands, Leonardo remained left-handed. Was it simply easier or faster for him to write this way? Less smudging of the ink? Or was this eccentricity a function of his fear of scrutiny? Sometimes his work challenged church teachings. That could be dangerous. Was he worried that the notebooks could be used to incriminate him?

We know he lived in fear of having his ideas stolen and published. Although there is no evidence that anyone ever tried to steal his work, he dreaded that someone else would take credit for his beautiful brain flashes.

Sometimes he worried about “the evil nature of men”—that bad guys would misuse his inventions. For example, he invented a diving suit but worried that people would use it to stay underwater long enough to drill holes and sink the ships of their enemies. He didn’t trust many people.

He could also have been merely following common practice. Many astrologers and alchemists of the day wrote in code. The famous French seer Nostradamus, whose life overlapped with Leonardo’s and who had run-ins with religious authorities, encoded all his predictions about the future.

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