#000147
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. I
Leonardo da Vinci
This is the first volume of Dover's classic two-volume edition of *The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci*, the great compendium of the Renaissance master's own writings. Drawn from thousands of pages of mirror-written manuscripts, the selection was compiled and translated by the scholar Jean Paul Richter in 1883 and reissued by Dover in 1970 with the original Italian printed alongside the English. Volume I gathers Leonardo's thoughts on the disciplines closest to his art — the theory and practice of painting, proportion, light and shade, perspective, and the human figure — illustrated with his own drawings. To read it is to eavesdrop on one of history's most restless minds thinking on the page. For anyone serious about Leonardo, art, or the Renaissance imagination, it is a primary source of the first rank.
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The author
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled notebook after notebook, in his famous mirror script, with observations on everything that caught his inexhaustible attention. He never organized them into finished treatises; what survives is the raw record of his thinking. The nineteenth-century scholar Jean Paul Richter first sorted and translated a large body of these notes, and it is his 1883 compilation that Dover reprints.
The book
This first volume concentrates on the arts, presenting Leonardo's writing on the theory and practice of painting, on proportion, perspective, light and shade, and the depiction of the human figure. Richter's edition prints Leonardo's Italian beside the English translation and reproduces many of the accompanying drawings, so the reader sees word and image together.
How to read it
It is best browsed rather than read straight through — a book to dip into, following Leonardo from one arresting fragment to the next. The scholarly apparatus is dated in places, but the words are Leonardo's own, and that is the point.
For more context
It is completed by the second Dover volume, which turns from art to Leonardo's scientific and engineering investigations; biographies by Kenneth Clark and Walter Isaacson offer wider framing.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Publisher
- Dover
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1970
- Edition
- Dover edition (1970); orig. 1883
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
ISBN 0-486-22572-0