Leonardo da Vinci: i documenti e le testimonianze contemporanee

"I always emphasise primary sources . If you teach Leonardo, you are faced with this enormous amount of material. My Leonardo library is too big for my house; it’s in the research hall of the history faculty, and there are bigger libraries than that obviously in professional libraries. So, what do you do? The answer, for me, is go to the primary sources as your first port of call: get a sense of them, naturalise yourself in this extraordinary ability he has to cross boundaries, to move fluidly from the motion of hair to the motion of water and so on, and get a feel for that. Obviously, you need to have an interpretive framework. Historians and accounts that one can recommend range from something like Kenneth Clark’s very beautiful biography which is about Leonardo as an artist – it doesn’t do more than that – to works which tackle different aspects of his intellectual legacy. What has tended to be missing, at least when I did my first synoptic book on Leonardo da Vinci, was a synthetic gathering together of all these things. We’ve got really good material on Leonardo as an anatomist, Leonardo as a geologist, Leonardo’s optics, Leonardo’s perspective etc., but he became a plural or dissembled figure of Leonardo as this or Leonardo as that… . My mission has been an attempt to put Leonardo back together again and say – what is the core of this person’s thinking? What is the core of this person’s artistic personality? And how far is it common across all this enormous range of diverse pursuits?"