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Da Vinci's testimony concerning the people of the downstream time, their customs and theirmost marvellous devices

From a newly found letter addressed to Duke Ludovico Sforza, dated August 4th, 1498, and signed Leonardo da Vinci

Deciphered, translated and edited by Frederick TurnerTo his most learned and illustrious excellency, my lord Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan:I send this by a trusted servant in the cipher that we have agreed upon. I wish to inform your graceof a most wonderful visitation that it has been my fortune to undergo, and the more terrible warningthat I must convey to you.Let me say at once, beware of the King of France: he has designs against your state, and will, if what I have seen and heard has substance, seek your overthrow in the coming year. But I fear thatyou shall not find this warning credible unless I give an account of its origin; and the greatstrangeness of such an account is, I know, your good warrant to discredit it when you know it, andto consider your servant mad or deceived by a demon. Yet I offer the very wildness of this tale asproof of its veracity; since though as an artist of the brush I might imagine such a thing, I could notin words unless it were true.I was visited three nights ago in my chamber by the spectre of a woman most outlandishly dressed--and to my thought immodestly--who told me in very poor Italian that she came from a time twothousands of years in advance of ours. She and her fellow-alchemists had arranged this visit, tosolve some curiosity proposed by their scholars, whether that ancient painter Leonardo wouldwonder much at the engines and devices of a time five hundred years after his own--for theybelieved that the marvels of their own time might overwhelm my reason and thus bewray theirinquiry.Accordingly she attached to me--for what philosopher in the most bold court of Ludovico, even oneof paint and canvas, could refuse?--a curious apparatus, of which I give a sketch in my margin. Atonce I saw through the eyes of a man of the twentieth century after Christ, in the year, I learned, of 1999. He dwelt in that country recently discovered by Christopher Columbus, in a city called NewYork--for to my dismay it appeared that the English, and not our Italians nor even our allies theSpanish, had placed colonies in that land.

What marvels I saw I must reserve for a broader account. Yet I must make mention here of theirprodigious devices--flying machines that can carry four hundred people; boxes that show inmovement, life, perspective and color, pictures from far off or long ago; self-moving carriages;bridges and roadways of prodigious size; and buildings that, though in crude taste and style, andvery dully ornamented, touched indeed like the tower of Babel the very clouds themselves. I shallin my notebooks endeavour through the coming months to entertain your grace with pictures andplans of what I saw; though they use most marvellous materials such as I have never seen, like tosilver or ivory or perfect glass, which I shall not attempt to draw. There is one device that gave meespecial wonder, of which I shall give an account later.They have a very curious republic, in which each man is free to do almost anything he wishes; andyet they have a million laws; and their great liberty is external only, for they appear to have littlefreedom from the inner tyrannies of flesh and desire, and they can barely reason at all, so swayedare they by their wishes of the heart, their addictions, and their bodies. Though they are often of great age--I saw among them few children and youths, though they pay great worship to youth intheir pictured plays and vulgar art--they are in many ways like children. They clothe themselveswith easy garments that require no grace in the wearing, like peasants or boys. Their youththemselves wear rings and studs in their bodies, like the savages of Africa. Strangely, they are oftenquite pious in religion, but make little or no sacrifice of life for their faith, and a thousand creedsand rituals flourish without check. Their crafts and markets are most excellent; their poor are asrich as our prosperous citizens. They have had the most dreadful wars imaginable within livingmemory, but have forgotten them. There is a great weapon among them that can destroy a city; andthe fear of it has turned their youth away from martial exercises and the practice of virtu`.Each one knows much of the technical art or academic study at which thay labor, but little else--aseller of prosciutto in the Milan street knows more of other nations, of matters of history and state,of languages, letters, arts, and machines, of mathematics, of general philosophy, than for the mostpart do they; yet I--or the man whose mind I inhabited unawares--met a few persons of both sexeswith great wisdom and astonishing knowledge. Their state, I mused, is like an animal, each organspecialized to its task, but not like a city of complete souls in a civil society. Their great wealth hadoften rather limited them than opened to them the heights of the liberal arts. You, my lord, knowthe world as deeply as do any of them, though they have the advantage of half a thousand years.Their women are dressed and behave like our whores, without exception, but for a few that I saw of humbler condition who seemed to have come from Cathay or Cipangu; yet I am certain that in theirlives they are for the most part chaste and modest. They are very bold, and have mastered the art of avoiding pregnancy, so that they carry themselves like wealthy bachelors. In truth, when I became

accustomed to it, I found it not unpleasant; and their sodomite youth are likewise bold, open, andsometimes beautiful despite the crudity of their clothing.Their sciences are prodigious; they have plumbed the depths of the heavens and probed the mostinfinitesimal grains of matter; they have unlocked the secrets of life and marvellously investigatedevery corner of the human body. In this work I must confess myself simply humbled; yet how suchpeople, each knowing little except the details of his own expertise, can produce such wonders of understanding is not given to me to know.Their academic or court arts--they have no aristocracy, being a republic, but their universities takethe place of our courts--are to my mind simpleminded and foolish. Court paintings, whichcommand great prices, often represent no real thing, but are mere problems or diagrams of composition, proportion, or color, such as we of the Florentine or Milanese schools solve in oursketches and underdrawings, as parts of a full work. But their vulgar graphic arts, such asmerchants use to advertise their wares, are often subtle and excellent. (They have a fine paint,called acrylic, like that ingenious method I invented for my great wall-painting of the Last Supper.)Their court arts in general seem to affect a bitterness, a sarcasm or irony, that proves them in theireyes better than the mass of the people. Their court music, again, is without melody or harmony,and thus has no language to convey humanity or thought or feeling; but their vulgar music, thoughstrange and beating like a smith's anvil or cobbler's last, is full of life and vigor, and sometimesbeautiful; and the old music of a century or two before, which they marvellously recapture withsubtle devices, is more excellent and perfect than any I have heard in our own time. They also makevery splendid moving pictures, with actors that can move the heart and spirit, and fine music anddelightful landscapes.To sum them up: truly, my lord, if they could unite their technical excellence and wealth with ourhumanitas and wisdom, they could enjoy an era of greatness more perfect than that of the Romansand the Greeks themselves; they have at their disposal the powers to make this world into a gardenand them into new Adams and Eves. But since each one is but part of a full human being (I speak in general, for I met some with that roundness of education that we expect of the true gentleman), Ifear they must make altogether new schools or utterly change those that they have if their greatpromise is to come to fruit. What they lack, with their crude and ugly straight lines in thought andart, is that turbulence of natural richness, the curling and whorling of air and water and life: thequality of beauty.But in my account I neglect what I have learned that bears, my most gracious lord, upon your urgentsafety and welfare. They have among them the most marvellous machine of all, called a computer--all I met had one, and treated it as of little amazement. Yet these machines can speak instantly, allto each other over the whole world; they contain all the knowledge of mankind; they can show plays