Leonardo da Vinchi, 1452-1519 by V. P.

Zubov
Review by: Beverly S. Almgren
Isis, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Dec., 1962), pp. 525-527
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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 BOOK REVIEWS
hours," u' brings the s-u' -curves very
close together, but for u'=60? the
shadows are 2,29; 2,00; 1,81. This
means that 2? finger for a length of
5 palms is the change of altitude neces-
sary in the altitude of the cross bar,
which at d =0? must then have an
altitude of 2? palm -10 fingers, to
balance the influence of the sun's
changing declination. This might be
contained in the first lines of the
shadow clock text, as we can state, with
all the reserve necessary for such scanty
data, that above all one must know the
hour: whether it corresponds to the first,
second or third "landing" of the sun
in the different declination regions. At
the equinoxes the shadow lengths for
the different hours are: 0,309; 0,667;
1,155; 2,000. If one reduces this accord-
ing to " a law " by which the last mark
is at 30 units the lengths are: 4,64; 10;
17,32; 30, instead of 3,9,18,30. One can
remark, therefore, that but for the hour
near noon - the hot hours in Egypt -
the ratios are very precisely given and
are much nearer to astronomical reality
than the corresponding results obtained
by graphical methods by the authors:
3,7,13,29, which indeed are very bad.
Though my conclusion must be that
the present volume is very far from
the critical and definitive publication
the authors had in mind, we must be
very thankful to them for undertaking
this enormous task. We are now pro-
vided with a beautiful collection of
working material, easily available and
concisely given.
E. M. BRUINS
Amsterdam University
* * * his scientific terminology, the forms of
V. P. ZuBov. Leonardo da Vinchi, 1452-
1519. 372 pp., front., plates. Moskva-
Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk
SSSR, 1961.
Zubov's Leonardo da Vinchi is pri-
marily a study of Leonardo's intel-
lectual personality, in particular his
scientific interests, as revealed in the
text and drawings of the notebooks.
Zubov has organized his material
loosely around a number of themes
This content downloaded from 195.34.79.79 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:32:46 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
525
which he considers central to Leo-
nardo's thought, such as his view of
the noble role of the faculty of sight
and the superiority of painting to the
other arts; his essentially mechanistic
approach to scientific questions from
anatomy to mathematics; his persistent
effort to make the unique particular
represent the general; and his keen
sense of the destructiveness of time and
of the forces of nature.
The work is carefully documented
and displays an impressive command
of the source material and of recent
scholarly work on Leonardo, as well
as a fine sensitivity for the nuances of
Leonardo's thought. Zubov is careful
to place Leonardo's scientific ideas in
their historical context, pointing out
significant relationships without over-
stressing his role as "forerunner" or
"follower." Thus he compares Leo-
nardo's ideas on astronomy with those
of Nicolas of Cusa, his concern with
the tangible world with the Neoplaton-
ism of such contemporaries as Ficino,
and his dual role as scientist and artist
with Goethe. He gives considerable at-
tention to Duhem's work on the schol-
astic origins of Leonardo's thought,
agreeing in general with recent schol-
arly opinion that Duhem greatly over-
stated the case. A close analysis of
parallel passages from Leonardo and
Leon-Baptiste Alberti on painting and
architecture provides a concrete ex-
emple of the way in which Leonardo
treated themes he may have borrowed
from predecessors or contemporaries
but modified in accordance with his
own distinctive modes of thought.
Leonardo's use of language, especially
his reasoning, his concept of the " laws
of nature," and his empirical approach
to scientific questions are all carefully
analyzed, with ample illustrative ma-
terial from the notebooks. In general,
Zubov does an extremely effective job
of conveying the essential quality of
Leonardo's thought and of outlining
his main ideas in his various fields of
interest.
Biographical data is confined to the
first chapter, which gives a concise and
fairly standard account of Leonardo's
526 BOOK REVIEWS
life. Brief sketches of Florence (stress-
ing its textile manufacturing, its Neo-
platonic intellectual life, and the Savon-
arola episode) and Milan (stressing its
metal-working and arms making) pro-
vide background material, but there is
no explicit analysis of how this back-
ground shaped Leonardo's personality
or the direction of his creative work.
Neither is there any attempt to define
the Renaissance period as a whole and
relate Leonardo to it, nor to probe his
personal life in psychological terms.
Zubov does note briefly that although
Leonardo's mechanical inventions re-
flected the general technical develop-
ments of Renaissance Italy, his inquir-
ing, skeptical approach to natural phe-
nomena set him off from his intel-
lectual contemporaries and subjected
him to the " tragedy of every isolated
researcher."
Leonardo's artistic achievements are
considered chiefly as biographical facts
or as illustrations of certain trends of
his thought, rather than as significant
accomplishments in themselves. Thus
Zubov accepts the date of 1514-1515 for
the Mona Lisa and the identification of
the lady as a mistress of Giuliano de
Medici, and he quotes at some length
Pedretti's documentary evidence on this
point. But he gives no aesthetic an-
alysis or evaluation of this or other
paintings of Leonardo, although he
uses them as illustrations of Leonardo's
ideas on aerial perspective, his interest
in geological processes and his attitude
towards war.
Several short bibliographical chap-
ters at the end of the book give a de-
tailed description of the manuscript
sources and their history and a brief
list of the chief bibliographical works
on the subject of Leonardo. There is
unfortunately no critical bibliography
of recent scholarly work on Leonardo,
but the footnotes throughout the book
and many quotations in the text pro-
vide the careful reader with much
useful information in this area. A gen-
eral chapter on the manuscripts in the
main body of the book effectively de-
scribes the unique quality of Leonardo's
notebooks. Zubov agrees with E. Garin,
whom he quotes, that Leonardo's note-
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
books are not "fragments of a book "
or "material for a book" but "the
results of the intensely lived life of
an extraordinary man."
Zubov's account is almost completely
free from "citational Marxism" and
from specifically Marxist terminology.
For the most part it avoids overt judg-
ment of its subject in terms of a Marxist
view of history. The author takes issue
sharply with a previous Soviet biog-
rapher (Lazarev, Leonardo da Vinchi,
Moskva, 1952) who criticized Leonardo's
aesthetic ideal of harmony for its
silence on "all the social conflicts of
life " and for forgetting " that not all
in life is perfect and just." Zubov
counters with a convincing insistence
of Leonardo's deep tragic sense, as re-
vealed in passages on the value of
human life, on the destructiveness of
time, on war, the pazzia bestialissima
(epitomized in visual terms in "The
Battle of Anghiari ") and in his cata-
clysmic visions. Most of all Zubov finds
his tragic vision revealed in Leonardo's
"fables," to which he gives consider-
able attention. In them he finds "not
moral instructions or teaching, but
statements of what is " - a world where
the weak, and especially those weak
who are incautiously kind or trusting,
are sooner or later overpowered by the
strong. To relate such a vision of the
world to the conditions of Cesar Bor-
gia's Italy scarcely takes a Marxist frame
of thought. Zubov is content to point
out such a relationship, without forcing
Leonardo's cosmic insights into the
terms of class conflict.
In its exclusive concern with the con-
scious and cognitive aspects of Leo-
nardo's personality and in its stress on
Leonardo's interest in the material
world and his skepticism towards the
supernatural, Zubov's work does reflect
values characteristic of Soviet scholar-
ship, but without doing violence to the
material. It becomes tendentious only
in the last few pages, where Zubov
seems to find the essence of Leonardo's
character in the concept of "Homo
Faber." Man the Maker, in this view,
manages to " conquer the determinism
of his naturalism and mechanism" by
becoming "the creator of new instru-
 BOOK REVIEWS
ments, new things, which did not exist
in nature." Zubov recalls Leonardo's
persistent desire to conquer the muta-
bility of things, both by expressing
their eternal essence in art and by turn-
ing the often destructive forces of na-
ture to use by mechanical means. From
this, ignoring Leonardo's own silence
on social questions, he extrapolates to
claim that Leonardo must also have
believed in the possibility of a "new
world, created by man," where the dog-
eat-dog relationships of the world of
the fables would no longer exist. Zubov
provides no documentary support for
this claim, but it is upon this very
debatable interpretation that he closes
a work otherwise noteworthy for his-
torical insight and accuracy.
Zubov's book is useful both as an
authoritative, perceptive and readable
survey of Leonardo's intellectual life
and as a guide to the main lines of
recent scholarly investigation in this
field. As a significant contribution to
the literature on Leonardo, it deserves
to be translated.
BEVERLY S. ALMGREN
Brown University
* X * most entirely in manuscript. Conse-
THEOPHRAST VON HOHEN-
[PARACELSUS]
HEIM. Sdmtliche Werke. Zweite Ab-
und religions-
teilung: Theologische
philosophische Schriften. Kurt Gol-
dammer (Editor). Band IV: Ausle-
gung des Psalters Davids, Teil I. Kom-
mentar zu den Psalmen 75 (76) bis
102 (103). liii + 347 pp. Wiesbaden:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 1955. DM 48.
Band V: Auslegung des Psalters Davids,
Teil II. Kommentar zu den Psalmen
103 (104) bis 117 (118). xx + 260 pp.
1957. DM 28. Band VI: Auslegung
des Psalters Davids, Teil III. Kom-
mentar zu den Psalmen 118 (119) bis
137 (138). xxv + 240 pp. 1959. DM
28.
[PARACELSUS] THEOPHRAST VON HOHEN-
HEIM. Simtliche Werke. Erste Ab-
teilung: Medizinische, naturwissen-
schaftliche und philosophische Schrif-
ten. Karl Sudhoff (Editor). Register-
band bearbeitet von Martin Muller.
This content downloaded from 195.34.79.79 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:32:46 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
527
Redigiert von Robert Blaser. Nova
Acta Paracelsica. Supplementum. xii
+ 281 pp. Einsiedeln: Verlagsanstalt
Jos. 8c Karl Eberle, 1960.
[PARACELSUS] THEOPHRASTUS VON HO-
HENHEIM. Liber de Nymphis, Sylphis,
Pygmaeis et Salamandris et de caeteris
Spiritibus. Robert Blaser (Editor). Alt-
deutsche tbungstexte herausgegeben
von der Akademische Gesellschaft
Schweizerischer Germanisten. Vol. XVI.
62 pp. Bern: A. Francke, 1960.
R. BLASER. Himmel und Erde machen
den Menschen. Weisheit des Paracel-
sus: Aus dem Gesamtwerk des Theo-
phrast von Hohenheim ausgewihlt und
ubertragen. 185 pp., plates. Salzburg:
Residenz-Verlag, 1958.
KURT GOLDAMMER; KARL-HEINZ WEI-
MANN. Paracelsus: Vom Licht der
Natur und des Geistes, eine Auswahl.
205 pp. Stuttgart: Universal-Biblio-
thek, Nr. 8448/49.
Paracelsus was a keen theologian and
interpreter of the Bible. Indeed, a
large part of his written work was de-
voted to theology. Yet we know little
about it, as the source material is al-
quently an important aspect of Paracel-
sus has so far not had any proper atten-
tion. The picture of his life and work
as extant in the vast Paracelsus litera-
ture that we possess will remain incom-
plete until the Corpus of his theological
writings has been made accessible. Par-
acelsus represents the type of the Uomo
universale of the Renaissance - being
second in this respect perhaps only to
Leonardo. To understand him requires
a study of his work in all aspects.
Kurt Goldammer's new edition of
the theological and religio-philosophi-
cal works of Paracelsus can therefore
claim the full attention of the his-
torian. Sudhoff's critical edition pub-
lished in fourteen volumes between
1922 and 1933 contained the medical,
scientific, magic, and philosophical
writings, and only one additional vol-
ume edited by W. Matthiessen in 1923
offered some small theological treatises.
The new edition of which three vol-
umes have appeared since 1955,