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It occurs to me that I've never seen the complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci before now, but only individual sketches or pages. I would have thought that so

It occurs to me that I've never seen the complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci before now, but only individual sketches or pages. I would have thought that something like that should be easily found; after all, you can easily get the complete works of Shakespeare. I did a cursory check on Amazon where it seems that many of the books that claim to be notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci are not actually full reproductions of all his work, but selected pages plus lots of commentary. Perhaps there were difficulties in assembling a complete set (such as museums not displaying all pages or permitting photographs)?

fsloth 8y ago
"you can easily get the complete works of Shakespeare" Leonardo was not a publisher. The works you could describe "complete" were either individual works of art or reproductions (by him or others). e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine And so on. Leonardo kept notebooks for himself, and are filled with miscellanious topics as paper was expensive. The so called codices (Codex Atlanticus and the referred Codex Arundel, etc.) are collections of his notes. The only published work that was graced by Leonardo's pen was the book "Of Golden ratio"[0] by Leonardo's friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, for which Leonardo provided illustrations of solids. You can find a digitized version here https://archive.org/details/divinaproportion00paci https://archive.org/details/divinaproportion00paci The solid illustrations start at page 140. While to modern eyes Leonardo's work may appear 'ordinary' it is infact groundbreaking - he innovated many of the things in visual presentation which we now accept as 'standard' or 'common'. And to a physicist it is most astounding that he came up for example with Newton's third law and the law of friction in his studies hundreds of year before they enter the historical knowledgebase. Sadly he may have been history's greatest inventor and artist but he was also a procrastinator extraordinaire. He planned many books but never completed single one. Yeah, Isaacson's biography of Leonardo was pretty awesome [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_divina_proportione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_divina_proportione [1] https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1501139150 https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/150...

fsloth 8y ago

"you can easily get the complete works of Shakespeare" Leonardo was not a publisher. The works you could describe "complete" were either individual works of art or reproductions (by him or others). e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine And so on. Leonardo kept notebooks for himself, and are filled with miscellanious topics as paper was expensive. The so called codices (Codex Atlanticus and the referred Codex Arundel, etc.) are collections of his notes. The only published work that was graced by Leonardo's pen was the book "Of Golden ratio"[0] by Leonardo's friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, for which Leonardo provided illustrations of solids. You can find a digitized version here https://archive.org/details/divinaproportion00paci https://archive.org/details/divinaproportion00paci The solid illustrations start at page 140. While to modern eyes Leonardo's work may appear 'ordinary' it is infact groundbreaking - he innovated many of the things in visual presentation which we now accept as 'standard' or 'common'. And to a physicist it is most astounding that he came up for example with Newton's third law and the law of friction in his studies hundreds of year before they enter the historical knowledgebase. Sadly he may have been history's greatest inventor and artist but he was also a procrastinator extraordinaire. He planned many books but never completed single one. Yeah, Isaacson's biography of Leonardo was pretty awesome [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_divina_proportione https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_divina_proportione [1] https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1501139150 https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/150...