Leonardo da Vinci and His Books

Leonardo grew up in a family where writing and books were quite at home. His father, ser Piero, was a notary, his grandfather Antonio a merchant who had traveled throughout the Mediterranean in his youth. In such a setting, in addition to business documents and official forms, there were books of memoirs and both moral and literary works, such as those composed by Leonardo’s step-brother, Lorenzo da Vinci. Leonardo’s own handwriting mimics that of all the writers in his family, the so-called “merchant’s hand”, or “mercantesca”.

Dante’s Divine Comedy is a constant presence throughout Leonardo’s work. The poem fascinated artists (from Botticelli to Michelangelo) for the stimulation it offers to the visual imagination. Dante’s epic poetry continuously challenges painting, as Leonardo will recall in his Paragone. But the poem is also an inexhaustible source of philosophical, medical, and scientific knowledge, mediated by commentaries such as the one by Cristoforo Landino.

In Florence the young Leonardo, grandson of a merchant, also attended an abacus training school; that is, a school of practical arithmetic. Among the names he marked down in his notes we find Benedetto dell’Abaco and Giovanni del Sodo. The young artist’s interests, however, soon expanded into theoretical mathematics, as he came into contact with scientists such as Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli.

Reading in Milan - The most fundamental documents for reconstructing Leonardo’s library are the lists of books compiled over the course of his life. In Milan in 1495, he listed the titles of approximately forty volumes, mostly literary texts and books on aspects of language. Reading in Florence - By the end of 1503, in Florence, his library had grown to 116 titles, with a significant presence of books on philosophy, geometry, science, astronomy, cosmography, and medicine, often in Latin.

While in Milan (starting in 1482), Leonardo decided to become a writer (that is, an “altore”). He began to seek out and purchase books—in Italian rather than Latin, and almost always in printed rather than manuscript form—which would have been for sale in print shops and at booksellers in Milan. He bought literary texts (epic poetry by Luigi and Luca Pulci; short stories by Poggio Bracciolini and Masuccio Salernitano) but also a treatise on the military arts by Valturio. His first notebooks, Manuscript B and the Codex Trivulzianus, witness his intimate relations with books, containing transcriptions of texts, drawings, and lists of thousands of words. Leonardo soon began to compose both treatises and literary works (such as fables), and, although already over forty years of age, he sought to teach himself Latin, using an elementary grammar text.

At least up until 1508, for Leonardo, macrocosm and microcosm were closely bound together. Among his books on the cosmos and the world we find the Sphere by John of Holywood, and Ptolemy’s Cosmography. This macrocosmic research was directly linked to his study of the microcosm: the human body, the “lesser world” about which Leonardo planned to create an anatomical atlas, with plates similar to those in Ptolemy’s book on the cosmos.

In his incessant hunt for books, Leonardo pursued some of the great ancient and modern masters who were crucial models for his research: Archimedes, Vitruvius, and Leon Battista Alberti. One of the modern masters, Sienese engineer Francesco di Giorgio Martini (translator of Vitruvius), became his friend. Leonardo intensively studied the two editions of Francesco’s Treatise, which is also the only surviving book from his library with marginal notes in Leonardo’s own hand. 

A passionate reader of history, Leonardo possessed Livy’s History of Rome, the Bible, and other compilations of universal history such as the Cronica (Chronicle) by Iacopo Foresti.

Some authors of Leonardo’s era are fundamental to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of optics, perspective, geometry, and the science of weights. In furtherance of his research, Leonardo acquired their works and transcribed texts and drawings into his manuscripts. A particularly interesting example is the Polish mathematician Witelo (who Leonardo called “Vitolone”), whom he “pursued” for many years, from Pavia to Florence.

After coming to Milan in 1496, friar Luca Pacioli became friends with Leonardo and his master teacher in mathematics and geometry. Using an edition translated from Latin into vernacular Italian, Pacioli helped Leonardo understand Euclid. Pacioli also took part in drafting the treatise Divine proportione (Divine Proportion), for which Leonardo drew his wonderful polyhedrons, and in a new edition of Euclid’s works.