What Art Did Leonardo Make Who Made the Printing Press
The technique of printing with moveable blazon was invented in Federal republic of germany in the decade before Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was born; as he reached his teens the new technology had already spread to Italy, thanks largely to the southwards emigration of German printers. Over the following decades increasing numbers of books were printed in a large number of cities and towns across the Italian peninsula. With his vast written output — it'due south estimated he produced 28,000 pages of writing, of which but about 25% survives today — Leonardo was a significant 'author' by whatsoever standards, but to what extent was he aware of printing? Did he ever intend to publish the diverse investigations he undertook throughout his career?
Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci attributed to his pupil, Francesco Melzi
Leonardo had an intense interest in machines of all kinds and spent a lot of his fourth dimension inventing new ones, both on newspaper and as actual constructions. It seems unlikely that the printing press, one of the dominant new technologies of the time, would have escaped his attention. The 2 cities where he spent his outset fifty years — Florence, where he trained as an artist and embarked on his career, and Milan, where he worked at the Sforza courtroom for nearly two decades — would have given him ample opportunity to visit printing shops and encounter how they organised their work. A drawing in the Codex Atlanticus shows usa his improved version of a press press, which would in issue take semi-automated the procedure and meant that simply ane 'pressman', rather than the normal pair, would have been needed to operate the machine. Curiously, there seems to be no reference in any of Leonardo'south work to Gutenberg's main invention of moveable type (the printing press itself was merely a variant of a wine or olive press, machines which had been familiar for many centuries). If Leonardo did ever visit a printing business firm, it is intriguing to speculate what might accept run through his mind as he watched compositors setting blazon line by line exactly as he himself wrote by hand, in 'mirror script', going from right to left, and reversing all the letters.
Clearer evidence of Leonardo's involvement in printed books comes from his library. The majority of volumes mentioned in his several surviving lists of the books which belonged to him at various points are printed ones. They are surprisingly eclectic — editions of chivalric romances and other contemporary vernacular literature, translations of Greek and Latin authors, religious texts, scientific treatises and manuals and introductory works on the subjects and topics which interested him or which he felt he needed to master every bit office of his scientific investigations. They besides reflect the widening range of the emergent publishing industry and its markets.
It is not known whether Leonardo e'er planned to produce printed editions of his writings on the various subjects on which he intended to write 'treatises', such every bit the 'Volume on H2o' which forms the core of the Codex Leicester recently displayed at the British Library. Just there's no prove that he wanted to go on them secret. His mirror script, once believed to be a kind of encryption, is now thought simply to reflect the way Leonardo, as a left-hander, found it most comfortable to write. In the more finished notebooks, such as Codex Leicester or many sheets in Codex Arundel, at that place is a clear attempt on Leonardo'southward part to design a clear and readable page layout, with a cake of text and a wide margin with drawings and other notes alongside or even keyed into the main content. Within that content, there is often an implied interlocutor or potential/eventual reader in the style he frames his discussion of a topic. It is more probable — and characteristic of Leonardo's working practices in general — that his notes on diverse subjects never attained the kind of order and arrangement which would accept been necessary if they were ever going to make the transition to published texts.
The spheres of manuscript and print continued to interact in unexpected means during what tin can be called the long afterlife of Leonardo's notebooks. Two items in the concluding section of the British Library exhibition gave an intriguing glimpse into the continuing complexities of this relationship equally far as Leonardo'due south writings are concerned, showing how interest in Leonardo's scientific thinking remained live over subsequent centuries thanks to various networks of scholars and collectors. Both texts relate to the work of arranging and compiling the notebooks co-ordinate to subject after Leonardo's decease in 1519, which was started by Francesco Melzi, the student to whom he had ancestral his manuscripts, and connected by other scholars after their dispersal following Melzi's death in 1570, most significantly in Rome (where many notebooks had ended upwards) at the start of the 17th century.
Del Moto e Misura dell'Acqua (Bologna: a spese di Francesco Cardinale, 1828)
Del Moto east Misura dell'Acqua ['On the Motion and Measurement of Water'] was published by Francesco Cardinale in Bologna in 1828, over 300 years after Leonardo'due south expiry, as part of a multi-volume collection of works by Italian authors on water. Cardinale worked from a copy of a manuscript which had been compiled in the 1630s for the collection of Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), the nephew of Pope Urban Viii, past the Dominican monk Luigi Maria Arconati, whose male parent endemic eleven manuscripts by Leonardo, today in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. In arranging his compilation of Leonardo's notes, Arconati found a model in a recent publication on the subject area, Bernardo Castelli's Della misura dell'Acque correnti, published in Rome in 1628 and defended to Urban 8 (Castelli, a Benedictine abbot, is described on the title-page as the Pope's official mathematician).
In the example of the second particular, Rex's MS 284, the thread of transmission from Leonardo'south originals is even more complicated. It contains what is perhaps the nigh important of these posthumous thematic compilations, the Trattato della Pittura or treatise on painting. This piece of work was initiated by Melzi, who, with collaborators, worked systematically through the notebooks in his possession; the resulting text, now Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270 in the Vatican Library, was never completed; but information technology became the source (although the manuscript itself disappeared from view for over 2 centuries) for numerous later abbreviated manuscript versions. It is one time again in Rome in the 1630s that a new wave of systematic piece of work on the text, following on from Melzi, was undertaken, once again cartoon on the collection of Arconati's father, in preparation for the publication of 2 printed editions, in the Italian original and French translation, in Paris in 1651. The British Library manuscript is a copy of this printed edition together with the illustrations based on Nicolas Poussin's drawings for the Paris edition.
These complex trajectories from manuscript to print and dorsum again reflect and continue what tin be seen as the intrinsic complications of Leonardo'southward relationship every bit a writer to publication and to his readers.
Stephen Parkin
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Source: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2019/09/leonardo-da-vinci-from-manuscript-to-print.html
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