#000148
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. II
Leonardo da Vinci
This is the second volume of Dover's two-volume edition of *The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci*, continuing the great gathering of the master's own writings compiled and translated by Jean Paul Richter (1883) and reissued by Dover in 1970 with parallel Italian text. Where the first volume concentrates on art, Volume II ranges across the astonishing breadth of Leonardo's curiosity: anatomy, botany, geography and the movement of water, architecture and engineering, astronomy, and the philosophical and personal notes that close the collection. Illustrated throughout with his own diagrams and sketches, it shows the scientist and engineer standing beside the painter. For readers who want the full sweep of Leonardo's mind — not just his art but his relentless investigation of the physical world — this volume completes the picture.
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The author
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is remembered as a painter, but his notebooks reveal an investigator who treated the whole natural world as his subject. Jean Paul Richter's 1883 edition, reprinted here by Dover, was the first great scholarly attempt to bring order to these scattered, mirror-written manuscripts and make them readable.
The book
The second volume collects Leonardo's notes on the sciences and beyond: human and comparative anatomy, botany, the flow of water, geology, geography, astronomy, architecture and engineering, and finally his more philosophical, prophetic, and personal jottings. As in the first volume, the Italian appears alongside the English, with many of Leonardo's own diagrams reproduced.
How to read it
Like its companion, it is a volume to graze in rather than march through. Some of Leonardo's science has been superseded, of course, but the astonishing quality of his observation and the reach of his questions remain the whole attraction.
For more context
Read alongside the first Dover volume for the complete selection; Walter Isaacson's biography is a good modern guide to how the art and the science fit together.
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 0-486-22573-9