Leonardo’s

Library
The World of a Renaissance Reader

paula findlen

with essays by
J. G. Amato
Veronica S.-R. Shi
Alexandria R. Tsagaris
Carlo Vecce

The Stanford Libraries

Stanford, California
Published by the Stanford Libraries
in conjunction with the exhibition
Leonardo’s Library
The World of a Renaissance Reader
commemorating the five-hundredth anniversary
of the death of Leonardo da Vinci

May 2–October 13, 2019

Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda
Green Library, Stanford University

Significant support provided by the Suppes Endowment

in the History of Science, Patrick Suppes Center for the History
and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Stanford University.

Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees

of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Essay authors retain copyright to their individual contributions.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

isbn : 978-0-911221-63-3

PAGE ii Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation, ca. 1472 (detail; see fig. 60).
Contents

Foreword paolo galluzzi vi

Preface john e. mustain vii
Acknowledgments paula findlen viii

INTRODUCTION Leonardo’s Library paula findlen

The World of a Renaissance Reader 1

Omo (quasi) sanza lettere veronica s.-r. shi

Leonardo’s Quest to Teach Himself Classical Latin 28

The Moral Paradoxes of Reading j. g. amato

How Leonardo Grappled with Difficult Ideas 42

Leonardo in the Age of Gutenberg paula findlen

Between the Manuscript Codex and the Printed Book 56

Reading the City, Reading the Body alexandria r. tsagaris

The Architectural Education of Leonardo 80

Inside Nature’s Mind paula findlen

Leonardo’s Scientific and Medical Books 98

E P I L O G U E “Old Friends” carlo vecce

Leonardo’s Books (before the Library) 128

books & manuscripts in the exhibition 143

Leonardo’s Lists of Books paula findlen and carlo vecce 183

Bibliography 187
 E P I L O G U E

“Old Friends”
Leonardo’s Books (before the Library)

carlo vecce

hat were books for leonardo , and

W in Leonardo’s age? Rare and expensive objects,

to be kept jealously and flaunted proudly to visitors
and friends, but not necessarily to be read? Exterior
signs of belonging to a select élite, whether cultural,
social, political, or religious? Tools of torture in the hands of the gram-
mar magister teaching children and illiterate adults to read? A differ-
ent (and better) answer comes from one of the books that Leonardo
browsed with special interest, the De re militari, the military treatise
composed by Roberto Valturio (1405–1475), a humanist born in Rimini
who worked at the service of the prince Sigismondo Pandolfo Mala-
testa (1417–1468). Valturio, of course, wrote it in Latin, the main lan-
guage for high culture in the Renaissance, and published it in 1472,
dedicating it to his lord. In 1483, in Verona, the printer Bonino de
Bonini published a new double edition, with more accurate woodcuts:
in one volume, the Latin text revised by the humanist Paolo Ramusio
(the father of the famous Giambattista, the most important collector
of travel literature in the sixteenth century), on February 13; in the
other volume, the vernacular translation, also accomplished by Ramu-
sio, on February 17, with a new dedication to Roberto Sanseverino,
the general captain of the Republic of Venice.
In that year, 1483, Leonardo was over thirty and recently settled in
Milan. It was not an easy time for him. Recently migrated (or escaped?)

128
from Florence, he was trying to find some support from local col-
leagues, the brothers Evangelista and Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis,
or from religious institutions, such as the Franciscan convent of
San Francesco Grande, where, on April 25 of the same year, the con-
tract for the Virgin of the Rocks was signed by Leonardo and the de
Predis brothers.
Even in Milan, Leonardo could have maintained ties with the
friends of his youth in Florence, such as the poet Luigi Pulci, the
author of the parodistic poem on the giant Morgante, who was in
the service of Sanseverino in the Veneto during that same period.
The intermediary between Pulci and Leonardo was the Florentine
merchant and traveler Benedetto Dei, whom duke Ludovico il Moro
brought to Milan. Benedetto (quoted in Codex Atlanticus as the
intended recipient of a mock letter in which Leonardo told of an imag-
inary journey to the East, and the terrific encounter with a giant like
Morgante) must have been Leonardo’s adviser or supplier for some
of the first books he acquired or bought in Milan: Luigi and Luca
Pulci’s poems, Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino, and Poggio Brac-
ciolini’s Facetie, the latter two published in Milan in 1483 by the same
printer, Cristoforo Valdarfer.1
These were all literary books. Why, then, did Leonardo acquire a
military treatise? The duke Ludovico was planning the military rein-
forcement of Milan, and the best way to obtain a job from him was to
demonstrate considerable knowledge in warfare and in military engi-
neering. As an apprentice in Florence, young Leonardo had learned
a bit of everything, first from his master Andrea del Verrocchio, and
then on his own. In some sheets of the Codex Atlanticus datable to
1478–1481, he began also to study and draw military machines and tech-
niques for siege warfare, fortified architecture, mobile bridges, and
mostly the new technological inventions used in warfare—weapons,
guns, cannons, and bombards. Times were hard after the Pazzi
conspiracy resulted in the assassination of Giuliano de’ Medici in
1478, and the war was threatening to destroy Florence and the Medici.
Young Leonardo was probably involved in some fortification works,
or in real battles and sieges, as in Colle Val d’Elsa in 1479. When I look
at the Adoration of the Magi left unfinished by Leonardo, I feel that
the symbolism of violence emerging so strongly from the painting
(“terribly sinister,” as it is called in Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie The Sacri-
fice) is clearly the product of a time of fear and destruction.
Nevertheless, Leonardo could not call himself a professional in this
1 Codex Atlanticus, fol. 852r ex
field; moreover, he felt the lack of the necessary cultural and linguistic 311ra. See Vecce, La biblioteca
training that would have enabled him to introduce his projects and his perduta, 133–136.

“ old friends ” 129


2 Codex Atlanticus,
fol. 1082r ex 391ra.
3 Vecce, La biblioteca perduta,
128–132.
4 “Advenendo qualche fiata
gli tempi et hore in le quale
et da tale cose di bataglia sia
nicessario vacare, quando
non sempre si facia le bataglie,
et tutti gli giorni et notti
qualche spacio habino nil
quale a casa esser tenuto et
cum l’antichi amici cioè libri
possi esser separatamente”:
Valturio, Opera de facti e
precepti militari, fol. b1r;
emphasis added.
130 leonardo ’ s library: the world of a renaissance reader
ideas to a prince or a sponsor with the right words. Perhaps, in 1483,
Leonardo had not yet gained access to the ducal court, and Valturio
arrived just in time. This beautiful book, with a lot of illustrations of
machines derived from the original manuscripts, influenced the com-
position of Leonardo’s famous letter of self-presentation to the duke,
which survives, tellingly, not in autograph, but written down by a
friend of his.2 Valturio’s De re militari also suggested to him the idea of
becoming an “author,” of improving his language and his vocabulary,
and collecting his ideas, texts, and drawings in his own treatises. This
change of direction is apparent in the contents of Paris Manuscript B
and the Codex Trivulzianus, Leonardo’s earliest surviving notebooks,
which were practically composed by holding Valturio’s book open on
the same desk, right next to his notebooks.3
So Valturio was a teacher not only of warfare but also of language
and style. Leonardo carefully read even the very rhetorical introduc-
tion and the first books of De re militari, which in fact did not deal very
much with the technical problems of contemporary warfare. The
beginning of the treatise, enriched with many literary and historical
examples, aimed to demonstrate how necessary, even for a captain
or a warlord, a wide humanistic training was in all liberal disciplines:
literature, poetry, history, philosophy, astronomy and astrology, music,
law, and so on. A modern condottiero, Valturio affirmed, must have
the same culture of a humanist, and be a literate and learned man.
In other words, his Renaissance warrior should be a “universal man”
(omo universale), a phrase that often described the general aim of this
humanistic age as much as it later came to define Leonardo. Similar
recommendations were made in the same years for other fields, such
as architecture and painting (Leon Battista Alberti), law and philosophy
(Lorenzo Valla, Ermolao Barbaro), politics, and medicine.
Here, in the beginning of the third chapter of the First Book (enti-
tled De le littere et de gli capetani gli quali a quelle hano dato opera molte
cose digne di memoria, “Of learning and of captains that have produced
many memorable things”), Leonardo found the best answer to his
question: what are books?
Since sometimes it is necessary to step away from war to catch
your breath, because battles do not go on forever, captains must
have some space every day and night to spend time apart at
home with old friends, that is, books (fig. 58).4
The books are l’antichi amici, “old friends” (in the Latin text, cum
veteribus amicis, idest libris), the faithful companions of life, the authors
F IG .
58 In the third chapter of the first book of De re militari, Valturio described books
as “old friends.” From Roberto Valturio, De re militari [Italian] Opera dell’ arte militare.
Translated by Paolo Ramusio, sig. b1r (Verona: Bonino de Bonini, 1483).

5 Machiavelli, letter to
Francesco Vettori, December
13, 1513, in Machiavelli and His
Friends, 262–265.
6 Vasari, Lives of the Artists,
284–285.
7 Florence, Archivio di Stato,
Notarile Antecosimiano, 16912,
fol. 105v. See Vecce, Leonardo,
19–20.
132 leonardo ’ s library: the world of a renaissance reader
who teach the right way to live and understand the world. They were
the same friends whom Niccolò Machiavelli used to attend, in the
moments of rest in his country house, as he famously describes in 1513:
When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the
threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and
dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out
appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients,
where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that
food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am
unashamed to converse with them and to question them about
the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kind-
ness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom,
I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not ter-
rified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.5
When did Leonardo’s friendship with books begin? I think very
early, when he was a lonely child in the family house in Vinci, the small
town in the country between Florence and Pisa. We know very little
about his childhood. He was born in 1452, the illegitimate son of a
young notary, ser Piero da Vinci, and a mysterious girl called Caterina.
Immediately after his birth, Piero married another woman, Albiera
Amadori, the daughter of a notary, and moved to Florence, while
Caterina was married to a humble and coarse worker, Antonio, nick-
named the Quarrelsome (Attaccabriga). The evidence of early docu-
ments (the record of Leonardo’s birth and baptism, the tax declaration
in 1458) suggest that Leonardo remained in Vinci with his grandfather
Antonio da Vinci, who was probably responsible for his initial educa-
tion. Only after Antonio’s death, around 1462, did Piero, according
to Giorgio Vasari, try to give his son some regular education in Latin
grammar and practical arithmetic (erudizione e principi delle lettere [. . .]
abbaco), but the restless boy, continuously attracted by other interests,
did not progress very much.6
Leonardo’s family had been a family of notaries since the begin-
ning of the fourteenth century. In the Middle Ages, notaries were the
veritable guardians of literacy, of a written culture that at the same
time was the guarantee of the legal validity of public acts, such as the
sale and purchase of property, loans, leases, marriages, testaments, and
inheritances. Antonio was not a notary, but he carefully kept the regis-
ter of his own father, ser Piero di ser Guido, using the last page for the
most important records of his life—the births of his sons and finally
of his grandson “Lionardo” (fig. 59).7 This was the very first “book”
(that is, an object made of several sheets of paper bound together and
covered by a continuous succession of small, dark signs) seen by the F IG . 59 Antonio da

curious boy who was Leonardo: the first evidence of the power and the Vinci recorded the birth
of Leonardo in the last
importance of writing, of letters and literacy, of the social and cultural
paragraph of Antonio’s
divide between literates and illiterates, between different social classes, father’s registry.
patricians, merchants, artisans, and peasants. The writing was the
typical handwriting of the Florentine and Tuscan middle class, mostly
composed by merchants, and therefore called mercantesca. This family
account book was also the first model for Leonardo to imitate, while
learning to read and write in his autodidactic education; and, as he
was left-handed, to reverse what he saw in the mirror writing that
he cultivated in the following years, which filled thousands of pages
of his manuscripts.

“ old friends ” 133

 We don’t know anything specific about the other books in Antonio’s
house, but we should assume that the small library of the da Vinci fam-
ily was not very different from the many other contemporary examples
belonging to the same social milieu. All of these books, of course, were
manuscripts. In the ideology of family dominant in fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century Tuscany, books were precious objects, transmitted
from generation to generation, recorded in last wills and postmortem
inventories. They often bore proud signs of ownership and of the
transmission of these valuable artifacts to heirs; their owners often
inscribed their possession, at the beginning or end of the volume,
in the usual form: “This book belongs to . . . and to his descendants.”
The central book of any Renaissance library, the most important to
bequeath to sons and descendants, was the same “book of records” or
“book of family” (libro di ricordi, libro di famiglia), a very private object
in which the merchant became writer and author, recording his own
experiences of life and moral teachings for posterity. Alternatively, such
books became a personal anthology (zibaldone) of his most beloved
readings, or simply a mix of these two genres. As books were expen-
sive, merchants and others from the middle ranks of society often
personally copied the works they liked best from manuscripts lent by
friends and family, using, of course, the usual mercantesca writing. This
was how many of Leonardo’s Florentine contemporaries, including the
Benci, the Pucci, and the Manetti families, formed their libraries. Their
books were far more humble than those in princely libraries, being
inscribed on paper rather than parchment, with drawings made with
pen and watercolor by the same scribe rather than expensive illumina-
tions made by professional masters. Sometimes, copying manuscripts
in this less-than-professional manner became a modest source of
additional income, allowing one to alleviate debts, stabilize precarious
finances, get out of jail, or win manumission from slavery.
What were these books? They were not the books of learned
humanists such as Leonardo Bruni or Ambrogio Traversari, let alone
the rare Latin and Greek codices of the classical authors. Instead, we
find them containing the masterpieces of the modern vernacular, the
“Three Crowns” of Florentine literature, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccac-
cio—primarily the Divine Comedy, the Canzoniere and Trionfi, and the
Decameron. Then, we find some religious and devotional books, always
in the vernacular—such as the Bible, the Psalms, the Fiore di virtù,
collections of moral exempla and proverbs, the lives of the saints, and
the mystery plays (sacre rappresentazioni); and some popular texts of
philosophy and natural science—Dante’s Convivio, the work of Ristoro

134 leonardo ’ s library: the world of a renaissance reader

d’Arezzo, and Johannes de Sacro Bosco’s Sphaera mundi. We also see
the importance of contemporary literature in the form of chivalric
epic poems and novels (Antonio Pucci, Andrea da Barberino), playful
sonnets (Burchiello), short stories and jests (Franco Sacchetti, Poggio
Bracciolini, Piovano Arlotto), chronicles and histories, and, of course,
fables (Aesop). In addition, there were books associated with certain
professions: merchants ought to have abacus books, while lawyers and
notaries should have Latin grammars and juridical books.
It is important to recall that many of these vernacular texts also
circulated widely through oral transmission, in the context of reli-
gious events (the sermon, the mystery play, the simple reading of
scripture and the psalms during the Mass), of public feasts (the ballad
singer in the middle of the piazza, recalling by heart the feats of
the ancient knights), or at home (telling stories and tales in the long
winter nights). Even Dante’s Divine Comedy was often memorized and
recited in public. Many years later, comparing painting and poetry,
Leonardo considered poetry a predominantly oral activity, because
the main confrontation is between the eye (“the window of the soul”)
and the ear.8
I imagine that the first storyteller (and “initiator,” if not actually a
teacher of reading and writing) in Leonardo’s life was his old grandfa-
ther, Antonio. Born around 1372, Antonio was not a notary, and until
recently nothing was known about his life and why he did not continue
the family tradition of becoming a notary. In his tax declaration of 1427
he strangely declared: “I am 59 years old, without any training and any
appointment.”9 Who was Antonio? A quiet country squire disgusted by
the turbulent life of the city? Absolutely not. Antonio was an extraor-
dinary man who had a lot of amazing stories to tell the small Leo-
nardo. The unexpected discovery of new documents reveals that, at the
beginning of the fifteenth century, Antonio migrated to Barcelona, in
Spain, where he joined his uncle, ser Giovanni da Vinci, and his cousin,
Frosino, and became a merchant. He lived a life of adventure, naviga-
tion, and trade all over the Western Mediterranean, from the Balearic
Islands to the harbors of North Africa.10 Could Antonio have shown
Leonardo books or papers written in Arabic (from right to left), or
8 Leonardo, Libro di pittura,
navigation charts and portolanos of Mediterranean routes, upon which 142–143, chapter 19; Leonardo,
the boy would have nourished his boundless imagination? On Painting, 20–21.

Perhaps it is not by chance that the first incredible landscape painted 9 Florence, Archivio di Stato,
Catasto, 795, fols. 502–503.
by young Leonardo in Florence is the view of an exotic town stretched See Vecce, Leonardo, 26.
along the sea with its harbors and its towers, beneath an immeasurably 10 Vezzosi and Sabato, Il DNA
tall mountain shrouded in mist. In the same painting, we can actually di Leonardo, 49–109.

“ old friends ” 135

 “see” the first of Leonardo’s books, even if we
cannot read its pages. It stands in front of our
eyes, over an elaborate reading desk, with the
consistency of a revelation. It is a sacred book:
the book that the Virgin Mary is reading in the
Annunciation (ca. 1472; fig. 60).
In the iconographic tradition of the Annun-
ciation, the book was a crucial and necessary
detail. What was Mary doing when the Arch-
angel Gabriel arrives? The Gospel does not
address the question, but an artist must depict
it. In the eastern Byzantine world, Mary is
busily engaged in domestic, everyday female
duties, appearing humble and even subaltern
as she fills a pitcher with water or spins with a
hand spindle. By contrast, in the Christian West,
the prevailing image of Mary shows her with a
F IG . 60 The Virgin Mary reads a sacred book
book: open or closed, in her hand, on her knees,
(see also page ii). Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation, or resting on a reading desk. During the Middle
ca. 1472, oil on wood, 90 × 222 cm (detail). Ages, a period that largely subordinated women
in the religious and social structures of society,
Mary the reader was the symbol of an extraor-
dinary exception, representing the possibility of women’s active par-
ticipation in the intellectual sphere. In a world in which most women
barely learned to read and write, if at all, this image stood out.
Why did young Leonardo choose the Annunciation for his first paint-
ing? There could be many reasons. It was a very popular subject among
contemporary painters, and Leonardo could have already admired the
masterful paintings made in former decades by Simone Martini, Beato
Angelico, Filippo and Filippino Lippi. The sacred book is always there,
but Leonardo’s book is unique, inimitable, different from all others, and
unheralded. His book appears to be almost alive, liquid, flowing, trem-
bling, because it is moving. With an extreme realism, Leonardo tries
to catch the precise instant when Mary stops her reading and raises her
eyes to gaze upon the angel, while leaving her fingers inside the book as
they continue to browse the pages, floating in the air. It is a marvelous
gesture, similar to that of the Annunciation by Antonello da Messina.
Moreover, the book is very carefully painted, with the microscopic
precision of a miniature, typical of the style of Flemish painters and
of Antonello. This precision allows us to propose an almost complete
codicological description of the painted book, which suggests that
Leonardo depicted a real object, an actual book in front of his eyes.

136 leonardo ’ s library: the world of a renaissance reader

It is a large parchment codex bound in red leather. It is possible to
distinguish almost twenty-eight sheets, probably organized in three
quires of eight sheets, and a final quire of four sheets. The handwriting
flows over the page without guidelines or division into columns, with
almost thirty lines per page and small margins. The ink is black, with
red for the rubrication. The characters are lowercase, well separated,
with abbreviations and signs of punctuation. Most of them belong to a
Latin alphabet (we can distinguish the vowels i e o, and the consonants
c l m n p q s) and are repeated in a meaningless series that nonetheless
gives the impression of a kind of Hebraic writing, with small overlying
dots: an experiment of a secret, esoteric writing. Of course, the book
read and meditated upon by the Virgin ought to be a sacred book:
a prophetic book of the Bible (Isaiah), or the Psalms.
Until now we have failed to consider that the choice of the subject
of the Annunciation was, for Leonardo and many Renaissance painters,
a direct confrontation with Dante. The Annunciation is, in fact, the first
example of “visible speaking” (visibile parlare), a speech perceivable not
by the ear but by the eye, proposed by Dante in Canto 10 of Purgatory,
by means of the ecphrastic description of amazing reliefs created by
God on the rock of the mountain as examples of humility. Implicitly,
Dante’s aim was to demonstrate the superiority of words and poetry
in describing images over images and the visual arts. Young Leonardo
did not agree at all, and began to conceive of his paintings (Annuncia-
tion, Ginevra, Adoration) as ultimate examples of “visible speaking” that
would demonstrate the primacy of painting over poetry and all other
human disciplines and arts. It was a clear challenge to Dante. Leonardo
renewed this challenge twenty years later in Milan, when he composed
some introductory texts for a Book on Painting, all of them regarding
the issue of the comparison of the arts (Paragone delle arti).11 Thus, the
extraordinary representation of the book in the Annunciation had addi-
tional meaning: it is not a still life but a living creature, interacting with
the fingers of the Virgin, in the very middle of the act of reading.
To be sure, Dante was among the first readings of young Leonardo,
and we can easily find Dantesque quotations in his manuscripts. The
Divine Comedy (together with ancient commentaries) was widely read
as an encyclopedic warehouse of knowledge belonging to virtually
every discipline, from philosophy to astronomy and medicine, made
accessible to everyone, including those who were not well educated in
Latin. The same could be said for Dante’s Convivio, the source of the
celebrated sentence, “It is impossible to paint a figure, if the painter is 11 See Farago, Leonardo
not able to be that figure” (Chi pingie figura se non pò esser lei non la pò da Vinci’s Paragone.
purre), quoted by Leonardo in Paris Manuscript A around 1492.12 12 Paris, Ms. A, fol. 113v.

“ old friends ” 137


13 Codex Atlanticus,
fol. 42v ex 12va.
14 Codex Atlanticus,
fol. 611rb ex 915ra.
138 leonardo ’ s library: the world of a renaissance reader
When we consider Leonardo’s vision of Dante, we should recall
that the painter Domenico di Michelino was among Leonardo’s
acquaintances in Florence in the 1470s. His name is recorded in what
appears to be the first list of books (or people?) written by Leonardo
around 1478: “quadrante di Carlo Marmocchi / meser Francesco
Araldo / ser Benedetto da Cieperello / Benedetto de l’Abaco / mae-
stro Pagolo Medico / Domenico di Michelino / el Calvo de li Alberti /
meser Giovanni Argiropolo.”13 All of these names referred to people
Leonardo could have met in person and consulted directly, but they
were also the authors or the owners of important books, such as
a treatise of the Florentine engineer Carlo Marmocchi, who was
appointed to recalibrate the big clock in the Palazzo Vecchio. Francesco
Filarete (friend of Cristoforo Landino) was the herald of the Signo-
ria and organizer of the public feasts and ceremonies. Also included
were the notary ser Benedetto da Cepparello (friend of ser Piero?);
maestro Benedetto d’Antonio, an esteemed author of abacus treatises;
the mathematician and astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (friend
of Brunelleschi and Alberti); a member of the same Alberti family,
perhaps Bernardo, cousin and heir of Leon Battista (died in 1472), and
promoter of the diffusion and the publication of his works (as De re
aedificatoria); and the Byzantine scholar Giovanni Argyrop0ulos, trans-
lator of Aristotle. Two sheets from an autograph codex by Toscanelli
seem to survive among Leonardo’s pages, with diagrams and Latin
texts derived from De speculis comburentibus by Alhazen and Johannes
Regiomontanus.14
Domenico di Michelino, who was also acquainted with Brunelle-
schi, is the only painter in the list. He is the painter of another book
and the creator of another example of “visible speaking” in his amaz-
ing visual synthesis of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the famous fresco
inside the Florence cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (1465). The
figure of the divine poet stands alone, in the middle, looking at his
beloved Florence on the right—quattrocento Florence, with the dome
of the cathedral conceived by Brunelleschi almost complete. On the
left and above are the three otherworldly kingdoms, Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise. Surely, young Leonardo, just arrived in Florence, would
have admired this newly finished painting, the beauty of the city in the
splendor of the Renaissance, the frightening procession of the damned
behind the gates of Hell, the gyrating movement of Purgatory, the
gradations of blue in the celestial archways of Paradise. And, in the
middle, the book. A codex of the Divine Comedy is open in Dante’s left
hand, in a gesture not of reading but of solemn presentation, displayed
like a sacred book or a relic. On the two open pages, it is possible to
read the beginning of the poem, in monumental uppercase characters, F IG . 61 Dante holds

“nel mezo dil chamino di nostra vita mi ritrova[i] per vna selva an open codex of
the Divine Comedy.
[o]scvra” (fig. 61).
Domenico di Michelino,
Probably the most important books in Leonardo’s youth were Dante and the Three
Dante’s Divine Comedy, edited by Landino in 1481 (with an imposing Kingdoms, 1465, fresco
commentary and some engravings coming from Botticelli’s drawings); on canvas, 2.3 × 2.9 m
Pliny’s Natural History (especially the vernacular translation by Landino (91.3 × 114.1 in.) (detail).
published in 1476); and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While the first two could
have been printed books, the third must have been a manuscript. The
evidence for this is found in one page of Leonardo’s notebooks written
around 1478 (fig. 62).15 It is a little collection of literary quotations that
includes a few lines from Luca Pulci’s Epistles and Petrarch’s “Triumph
of Love,” and also two fragments from the Metamorphoses: first, the
beginning of Book 13, the speech of Ajax against Ulysses for the posses-
sion of Achille’s armor; and second (repeated three times with slight
differences), a passage on the invincible power of Time to consume
and destroy everything, even the divine beauty of Helen of Troy, who,
in her old age, used to weep while looking at her wrinkles in a mirror.
The latter text comes from the fifteenth and final book of the Metamor-
phoses, a long speech by the ancient philosopher Pythagoras, affirming 15 Codex Atlanticus,
the universal laws of Nature in terms very similar to the materialistic fol. 195r ex 71ra.

“ old friends ” 139

F IG .
62 Leonardo transcribed quotations from Ovid, Luca Pulci, and
Petrarch in one of his notebooks. Codex Atlanticus, fol. 195r ex 71ra.
Epicurean philosophy that had become very popular in the Renaissance
following the rediscovery of Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura.16 Every-
thing is in perpetual movement; creatures and things continuously
exchange their shapes, and Time is the unique lord and master of all.
Death does not exist, but is only a passage from one form to another.
Other parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, read together with Pliny’s Natu-
ral History, influenced Leonardo’s own contemporary texts about the
vision of a marine monster, a mysterious cave, and the law of Nature.17
In fact, the Metamorphoses was Leonardo’s great book of Nature in
his youth—the fabulous history of the world, the gods, and human-
kind, from the primal chaos and creation until the fatal corruption
brought on by the same process of civilization that removed man from
the primitive state of natural innocence. Moreover, the book pro-
vided Leonardo with the core ingredients of many mythological tales
that often recurred in his works: the legends of Medusa, Perseus and
Danae, Leda and the Swan, Orpheus, Venus and Adonis.
Leonardo’s quotations from Ovid are in the vernacular, not in
Latin. Earlier generations of scholars thought that they were rough
essays of translation, revealing the uncertainty of someone not profi-
cient in Latin. Recent research instead reveals that Leonardo was not
translating but simply transcribing (or writing by heart) the text of a
fourteenth-century Tuscan translation by Arrigo Simintendi da Prato.
Around 1478, the translation would have been available only in manu-
script, since it was not published until the nineteenth century.18 Tell-
ingly, below these quotations from Ovid, Leonardo also transcribed
the ex libris of the former owner of the book (lent to Leonardo, and
perhaps never returned?): “This book belongs to Michele, son of Fran-
cesco Bernabini, and his descendants.”19 Unfortunately, no surviving
manuscript of this translation of Ovid preserves this exact inscription 16 See A. Brown,
Return of Lucretius.
of ownership, but most of them have the same features that the book
17 Codex Atlanticus,
read by Leonardo probably had: mercantesca writing and the identity of fol. 715r–v ex 265ra–va;
the scribe and the owner recorded in the book. They would have circu- Codex Arundel,
fols. 155r–156v.
lated among Florentines belonging to the middle ranks of society that
18 See Nanni, “Ovidio
was the world of the young Leonardo. Metamorfoseos.”
When Leonardo moved to Milan in 1482, he already knew what 19 Codex Atlanticus,
books were. A few of them accompanied him on the decisive journey fol. 195r ex 71ra.
of his life. Like old, good friends.

“ old friends ” 141