VINCI, LEONARDO DA - The Mystery of Leonardo’s Notebooks

                Five hundred years ago, when the city of Florence in Italy was the home of the greatest artists in the world, a young boy went there to study art.


                He was handsome and strong and clever at everything he did. Not only could he paint and draw and make statues, but he could also sing and play musical instruments. And he was a wonderful mechanic. Soon everyone was talking about this boy, Leonardo da Vinci.

                “He will grow up to be the greatest painter in Florence,” people said. They looked forward to seeing the beautiful pictures he would make.

                When he became a young man, people heard that he was starting a painting for the altar of a church. They waited eagerly for him to finish.

                But the painting went very, very slowly.

                It went slowly because if Leonardo wanted to draw a man or a horse, a plant or a rock or a cloud, he had to know everything there was to know about it. He had to know what the man’s muscles were like under his skin and what his bones were like under his muscles.

                He made hundreds of drawings in his notebooks. He went to mountains and to swamps and drew the plants and the rocks. He went to the seashore and drew the ocean. He looked at the sky and drew the sun and the stars.

                People began to shake their heads sadly.

                “He can do everything, but he will never do anything,” they said. “He never gets started. He is always making notes in his notebooks.”

                When Leonardo died as an old man, he left two paintings that are famous to this day – the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. But he left few paintings, and most of them were not even finished.

                He did leave a great many notebooks, but they were written in a language that seemed impossible to read. The books had some pretty drawings in them of birds and plants and faces and arms and legs, but they were also filled with strange drawings no one could understand.

                Some people thought he hadn’t amounted to much.

                But finally it was understood that Leonardo’s notes were simply written backward and could be read with a mirror.

                Then everyone was amazed at what they read!

                Leonardo had not been wasting his time making endless notes.

                The drawings of birds were not just pretty drawings. They showed how birds could fly – how their wings moved, how they used their tails to guide them, and how they cut down their speed to land smoothly and safely. And the strange drawings were of future inventions that Leonardo had thought of – drawings of an airplane, a helicopter, and a parachute. They were all ideas he had gotten from watching the birds. Many other things we have today – air conditioning, automobiles, diving snorkels, spinning wheels, machine guns, and tanks – were thought of by Leonardo 500 years ago.

                Before anyone else knew how rocks were formed or how the blood circulated in the body, Leonardo knew.

                Perhaps no one man ever thought of so many new things that later became part of the world we live in.