Leonardo da Vinci’s Visionary Notebooks Now Online: Browse 570 Digitized Pages

The beau­ti­ful side of genius.

Leonar­do not pub­lish­ing his notes does­n’t make him a lud­dite. A lud­dite is a per­son who destroys machines because they threat­en his job. Secre­cy was, in Leonar­do’s day, the equiv­a­lent to a pat­tent. It was not his respon­si­bil­i­ty to share his knowl­edge, as Johnathan Jones implies. It WAS his respon­si­bil­i­ty to insure his secrets did not fall into the wrong hands, as they were a mat­ter of nation­al secu­ri­ty. Renais­sance design­ers were the engi­neers who also built the machines of war. He was the equiv­a­lent of a DARPA sci­en­tist, only hun­dreds of years beyond his con­tem­po­raries.

Would be very hap­py to know more about any oth­er activ­i­ties you do.

A lud­dite? Weird char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a man who was con­tin­u­al­ly design­ing new tech­nolo­gies. And what exact­ly do you think pub­lish­ing con­sist­ed of in DaVin­ci’s day? How would you sug­gest he should have “pub­lished” his work?

Agreed David W

Very well put and you note sev­er­al aspects of Note­book Work. Keep­ing Note­books over decades, leav­ing space to go back to pages and adding to them, doc­u­ment­ing the time, place, con­text of dif­fer­ent entries, tak­ing care to make the pages a work of art as well as the hold­er of con­tent, using tools and media that engage the hand and mind does bring about an unique med­i­ta­tive state… this is how the me of yes­ter­day can have a dia­log with the me of tomor­row and the me of today. This can pro­vide true feed­back a crit­i­cal means to self-cov­er­ance.

You speak with an inci­sive tongue sir!

To Mike Massen Thank you for the inspi­ra­tion about jour­nalling. It had not dawned on me that using tech­nol­o­gy (typ­ing) in rela­tion to art could restrict the flow of cre­ativ­i­ty. This is an excit­ing rev­e­la­tion to me I can’t wait to get start­ed!! :)
I also want to say thank you for inject­ing your intel­li­gent and delight­ful humour, sad­ly a rare com­mod­i­ty, at least in my present world.

Rick Chase says:
To think, if only a few of the demon­strat­ed actions of Leonar­do’s obser­va­tion were taught to com­pelling young minds, how much the world would change. The pur­suit of knowl­edge is the only way the human exis­tence will sur­vive.

Thank you for shar­ing, as I have nev­er known these books where avail­able.

I’d like the Eng­lish Audio edi­tion with dia­grams.

Leornar­do was a “Lud­dite” because he did­n’t seek to pub­lish his notes? This is one of the most igno­rant state­ments I’ve ever seen on the sub­ject of the great artist. A man whose inter­ests includ­ed draw­ing, paint­ing, sculp­ture, archi­tec­ture, inven­tion, music, math­e­mat­ics, engi­neer­ing, lit­er­a­ture, anato­my, geol­o­gy, astron­o­my, botany, pale­on­tol­ogy, and car­tog­ra­phy was a Lud­dite. OK. I’m flab­ber­gast­ed with the lev­el of flawed analy­sis by the author of this arti­cle. Could any­one be more wrong about any­thing?

So.. any­body know if Leonar­do ever went back to look at his notes? For that mat­ter, how many of the rest of us go back and look at our old work­ing notes?

An absolute­ly amaz­ing per­son with unbe­liev­able gifts!