Architects From Italy

"Studying Leonardo... will not only allow us to recognize his science as a solid body of knowledge. It will also show why it cannot be understood without his art, nor his art without the science."

"For Leonardo, painting is both an art and a science..."

"Leonardo is the hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for ourselves."

"The genius of Leonardo as a painter came through unfolding the mystery of life..."Look at the grace and sweetness of men and women in the street," he wrote. The most ordinary functions of life and nature amazed him most. He observed of the eye how in it form and colour, and the entire universe it reflected, were reduced to a single point. "Wonderful law of nature, which forced all effects to participate with their cause in the mind of man. These are the true miracles!" Elsewhere he wrote again: "Nature is full of infinite reasons which have not yet passed into experience.""

"He conceived it to be the painter's duty not only to comment on natural phenomena as restrained by law, but to merge his very mind into that of nature by interpreting its relation with art... The whole world was full of a mystery to him, which his work reflected. The smile of consciousness, pregnant of that which is beyond, illumines the expression of Dino Lisa."

"Leonardo had found a refuge in art from the pettiness of material environment. Like his own creations, he, too, had learned the secret of the inner life. The painter, he wrote, could create a world of his own, and take refuge in this new realm. But it must not be one of shadows only. The very mystery he felt so keenly had yet to rest on a real foundation; to treat it otherwise would be to plunge into mere vapouring. Although attempting to bridge the gulf which separated the real from the unreal, he refused to treat the latter supernaturally. That mystery which lesser minds found in the occult, he saw in nature all about him."

"His art took, thus, its guidance in realism, its purpose in spirituality. The search for truth and the desire for beauty were the twin ideals he strove to attain. The keenness of this pursuit saved him from the blemish of egoism which aloofness from his surroundings would otherwise have forced upon him. For his character presented the anomaly, peculiar to the Renaissance, of a lofty idealism coupled in action with irresponsibility of duty. He stood on a higher plane, his attitude toward life recognizing no claims on the part of his fellowmen. In his desire to surpass himself, fostered by this isolation of spirit and spurred on by the eager wish to attain universal knowledge, he has been compared to Faust; but the likeness is only half correct. He was not blind to the limitations which encompassed him, his very genius making him realize their bounds. Of the ancients he said that in attempting to define the nature of the soul, they sought the impossible. He wrote elsewhere, "It is the infinite alone that cannot be attained, for if it could it would become finite.""

"He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep."

"Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to revelations about how the brain works."

"Incredibly endowed both physically and mentally, he achieved greatness as a linguist, botanist, zoologist, anatomist, geologist, musician, sculptor, painter, architect, inventor, and engineer. Leonardo made quite a point of distrusting the knowledge that scholars professed so dogmatically. These men of book learning he described as strutting about puffed up and pompous, adorned not by their own labors but by the labors of others whose work they merely repeated... they did not deal with the real world."

"Leonardo did believe in the combination of theory and practice."

"Reading Leonardo one finds many statements suggesting that he was a learned mathematician and a profound philosopher who worked on the level of a professional mathematician. ...To pass beyond observation and experience there was for him only one trustworthy road through deceptions and mirages—mathematics. ...On the basis of such pronouncements, no doubt, Leonardo is often credited with being a greater mathematician than he actually was. When one examines Leonardo's notebooks one realizes how little he knew of mathematics and that his approach was empirical and intuitive."

"What thinker has ever possessed the cosmic vision so insistently? He sought to establish the essential unity of structure of all living things, the earth an organism with veins and arteries, the body of a man a type of that of the world."

"I sometimes dwell on the fact that there's one thing that time and humankind will not be able to take away from me, leaving me rich, richer than Croesus: the bliss that I derive from a Heine poem, from a Beethoven sonata or a DaVinci painting."

"The more the manuscripts of Leonardo are studied, the more one begins to see him not so much as a transcendent artist, but primarily as a man of science, whose skills and commissions as an artist and engineer enabled him to support his fascination with nature."

"Leonardo da Vinci commented, "By the ancients man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed because, inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire his body resembles that of the earth.""

"I know that many will call this useless work."

"Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing — since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme — I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers, and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth."

"The Book of the science of Mechanics must precede the Book of useful inventions."

"I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion."

"Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics."

"Human subtlety...will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous."

"Necessity is the mistress and guardian of Nature."

"It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."

"Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind."

"Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory."

"Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker."

"Tristo è quel discepolo che non avanza il suo maestro. (Modern Italian)"

"Tristo é lo discepolo che non avanza il suo maestro."

"Life well spent is long."

"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death."

"Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work."

"3 miglia più in là si trova li edifici della vena del rame e dello argento, presso una terra detta Pra Santo Petro e vene di ferro e cose fantastiche. (Ancient Italian)"

"truovasi di miglio i(n) miglio bone osteriee. (Ancient Italian)"

"Subito salse in me due cose: paura e desiderio: paura per la minacciante e scura spelonca, desiderio per vedere se là entro fusse alcuna miracolosa cosa. (Ancient Italian)"

"Su per lago di Como di ver Lamagnia (Alemagna, cioè Germania) è valle di Ciavenna dove la Mera fiume mette in esso lago. Qui si truova montagni sterili e altissime chon grandi scogli ... In queste montagnie li uccielli d’acqua dette maragoni. Qui nasscie abeti, larici eppini, daini, stambuche, chamoze e teribili orsi. Non ci si pò montare se none a 4 piedi. Vannoci i villani a tempi delle nevi chon grande ingiegni per fare trabochare gli orsi giù per esse ripe. Queste montagni strette metano i(n) mezo il fiume. Sono a destra e assinistra per isspatio di miglia 20 tutti a detto modo."

"Fa vini potenti e assai, … e ‘l vino vale el più uno soldo il boccale e la libbra della vitella un soldo e ‘l sale 10 dinari, e ‘l simile il burro, ed è la loro libbra 30 once, e l’ova un soldo la soldata. (Modern Italian)"

"It is the infinite alone that cannot be attained, for if it could it would become finite."

"As a day well spent makes sleep seem pleasant, so a life well employed makes death pleasant. A life well spent is long."

"Thou, O God, sellest us all benefits, at the cost of our toil...."

"Look at the grace and sweetness of men and women in the street..."

"The painter strives and competes with nature...There is nothing in all nature without its reason. If you know the reason, you do not need the experience..."

"Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener."

"Experience shows us that the air must have darkness beyond it and yet it appears blue. If you produce a small quantity of smoke from dry wood and the rays of the sun fall on this smoke, and if you then place behind the smoke a piece of black velvet on which the sun does not shine, you will see that all the smoke which is between the eye and the black stuff will appear of a beautiful blue colour. And if instead of the velvet you place a white cloth smoke, that is too thick smoke, hinders, and too thin smoke does not produce, the perfection of this blue colour. Hence a moderate amount of smoke produces the finest blue."

"The variety of colour in objects cannot be discerned at a great distance, excepting in those parts which are directly lighted up by the solar rays."

"A luminous body will appear more brilliant in proportion as it is surrounded by deeper shadow."

"I find that any luminous body when seen through a dense and thick mist diminishes in proportion to its distance from the eye. Thus it is with the sun by day, as well as the moon and the other eternal lights by night. And when the air is clear, these luminaries appear larger in proportion as they are farther from the eye."

"Of several luminous bodies of equal size and brilliancy and at an equal distance, that will look the largest which is surrounded by the darkest background."

"A luminous body when obscured by a dense atmosphere will appear smaller; as may be seen by the moon or sun veiled by fogs."

"A dark object seen against a bright background will appear smaller than it is. A light object will look larger when it is seen against a background darker than itself."