Codex Arundel – A collection of papers written by Leonardo da Vinci | Hacker News Reader

Codex Arundel – A collection of papers written by Leonardo da Vinci

bl.uk

71 pointselasolova9 comments

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)?

"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

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

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 [1] https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-Isaacson/dp/150...

Found it quite enjoyable just to flip through it for a bit. On the last page bottom right, I was bit surprised to see a sketch of a penis in various degrees of tumescence, done in overlay sort of like The Vitruvian Man. Call it The Virtuvian Phallus I guess.

remember Da Vinci was into a lot of things, including anatomy and made quite some discoveries in that field as well. Quoting http://www.discoveringdavinci.com/sex-uality/ (which is a great site BTW):

   "Leonardo was the first to realize the function of the pubic bone. Before da Vinci people believed that the penis was erected by “magic air” he realized that it was actually filled with blood. He also was probably the first to document erectile malfunction and said that penises seems to have a mind of their own."

I would love to read the content if it were translated into English but with the illustrations intact.

Are all of these pages mirrored? Seems to me like the writing is facing the wrong way.

"A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left) (...)"

Hm interesting, I read that he had some quirks regarding his writing and some crypted texts, I glanced over the papers and didn't see that particular sentence.

Are the images down? Getting a 'no images found' response.

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