Sneezing, Yawning, Falling

Charles Nicholl on the writings of Leonardo da Vinci

The list of Leonardo da Vinci’s accomplishments is long and famously various – painter, inventor, anatomist, mathematician, musician and so on – but it seldom includes the word ‘writer’. This is curious considering his enormously prolific output. His extant manuscripts and notebooks run to something like seven thousand pages (though some of them are very small) and this is only a part, perhaps about two thirds, of the total. Leonardo is the writer of this mighty hoard of pages, but in most of them he is not a writer in a literary sense. Rather, he is a writer-down of things: a recorder of thoughts and observations, an inscriber of lists and memoranda. Though he makes some brief excursions into consciously literary forms, the overall tone of his writing is terse, colloquial, practical, laconic. In painting he is a master of nuance, but as a penman he tends to the workmanlike. He is, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s, a ‘carpenter of words’.