Word: leonardo
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...Leonardo's inaccessibility has a great deal to do with his absolute distaste for disclosing himself. We still know miserably little about Leonardo the man. Though a great deal is known about his work, it survives only in fragments. Twenty-seven of the 46 Leonardo manuscripts that went to Spain in the 16th century are lost; and so the discovery of a few battered pages by Leonardo's hand, let alone two complete codices in mint legibility (348 leaves in all), is a rare event in art and human history. The Madrid notebooks have expanded the known writings...
...personal level, the Leonardo of the Madrid codices is as frustratingly hermetic as ever. But in terms of his work, the notes are priceless. They shed little new light on his painting, but this is made up for by the richness of detail in Codex Madrid II on his great sculptural project, the equestrian bronze of Francesco Sforza- Il Cavallo, as Leonardo called it, the full-size clay model for which was shot to rubble by French crossbowmen after the conquest of Milan in 1500. It would have been the largest bronze group in recorded history, 23 ft. high, cast...
...Leonardo proposed to carry out this unprecedented and technically almost unimaginable project has long been a mystery. But his Madrid notes set down the method in full detail. He invented a revolutionary system of doing it in one piece, designing special furnaces and bracing systems and winches for it, and even a way of casting it buried upside down in the marshy Milanese soil without cracking the mold. It becomes clear that Leonardo, despite Michelangelo's bitching about his ineptitude as a sculptor, knew exactly how to make the horse and was prevented from executing his plan only because...
...Though Leonardo was, as everyone knew, chemist and physicist, mechanical engineer, musician, architect, anatomist and botanist as well as painter, it is not wholly possible to draw a dividing line between art and science in his work. Painting was to him a method of inquiry into the world's structure; it was the empiricism of sight itself. He tended to regard it as the queen of the sciences. His scientific work (on water, wind and their catastrophic powers, for instance) was presented in drawings of ravishing subtlety. Their purely descriptive intent in no way affects their aesthetic power...
Precise Images. Most of Codex Madrid I is filled with exquisitely fine engineering drawings: designs for self-releasing hoist grapnels, frictionless bearings, clock escapements, wire-making machines, worm drives and so on. For Leonardo, the drawn image was more precise than the written. One of the striking things about the machines in the Madrid notebooks is how they prefigure the future history of formal engineering draftsmanship without becoming schematic diagrams. They are conceptions rather than blueprints, but conceptions that one could take to a factory and have built tomorrow. More over, they are conceived as a series...