The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 2
1496
These are the private notebooks of a man who could not stop thinking. Written across decades, they capture Leonardo da Vinci in his most intimate mode: not the court artist presenting finished masterpieces, but the curious mind wrestling with questions that had no boundaries. Volume II focuses on sculpture, particularly his obsessive work on the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, but what emerges is something larger than any single project. Here is the actual process: clay models, proportion studies, failed experiments, brilliant observations about light and movement, and the relationship between what a hand can make and what an eye can see. Leonardo writes about casting techniques and architecture with the same restless energy he brought to dissecting corpses or imagining flying machines. The notes reveal both genius and struggle, the technical frustrations of monumental bronze work and the theoretical frameworks that guided all his artistic thinking. For anyone who has ever wondered how a mind like Leonardo's actually worked, these pages offer something no biography can: direct access to the thought process itself, unpolished and exhilarating.
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“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“Men fight wars and destroy everything around them. The earth should open and swallow them up. He who does not value life does not deserve it. Never destroy another life through rage, or through malice.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.Life, if well spent, is long.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
“It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.””
— da Vinci Leonardo
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Leonardo, da Vinci. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 2. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-notebooks-of-leonardo-da-vinci-volume-2-f66a69ae-5534-4fc5-ada1-ce1872526ab0.Leonardo, D. V. (1496). The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 2. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-notebooks-of-leonardo-da-vinci-volume-2-f66a69ae-5534-4fc5-ada1-ce1872526ab0Leonardo, da Vinci. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Volume 2. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-notebooks-of-leonardo-da-vinci-volume-2-f66a69ae-5534-4fc5-ada1-ce1872526ab0.
