A general introduction

I wish to work miracles;--it may be that I shall possess less than
other men of more peaceful lives, or than those who want to grow
rich in a day. I may live for a long time in great poverty, as
always happens, and to all eternity will happen, to alchemists, the
would-be creators of gold and silver, and to engineers who would
have dead water stir itself into life and perpetual motion, and to
those supreme fools, the necromancer and the enchanter.

[Footnote 23: The following seems to be directed against students of
painting and young artists rather than against medical men and
anatomists.]

And you, who say that it would be better to watch an anatomist at
work than to see these drawings, you would be right, if it were
possible to observe all the things which are demonstrated in such
drawings in a single figure, in which you, with all your cleverness,
will not see nor obtain knowledge of more than some few veins, to
obtain a true and perfect knowledge of which I have dissected more
than ten human bodies, destroying all the other members, and
removing the very minutest particles of the flesh by which these
veins are surrounded, without causing them to bleed, excepting the
insensible bleeding of the capillary veins; and as one single body
would not last so long, since it was necessary to proceed with
several bodies by degrees, until I came to an end and had a complete
knowledge; this I repeated twice, to learn the differences [59].

[Footnote: Lines 1-59 and 60-89 are written in two parallel columns.
When we here find Leonardo putting himself in the same category as
the Alchemists and Necromancers, whom he elsewhere mocks at so
bitterly, it is evidently meant ironically. In the same way
Leonardo, in the introduction to the Books on Perspective sets
himself with transparent satire on a level with other writers on the
subject.]

And if you should have a love for such things you might be prevented
by loathing, and if that did not prevent you, you might be deterred
by the fear of living in the night hours in the company of those
corpses, quartered and flayed and horrible to see. And if this did
not prevent you, perhaps you might not be able to draw so well as is
necessary for such a demonstration; or, if you had the skill in
drawing, it might not be combined with knowledge of perspective; and
if it were so, you might not understand the methods of geometrical
demonstration and the method of the calculation of forces and of the
strength of the muscles; patience also may be wanting, so that you
lack perseverance. As to whether all these things were found in me
or not [Footnote 84: Leonardo frequently, and perhaps habitually,
wrote in note books of a very small size and only moderately thick;
in most of those which have been preserved undivided, each contains
less than fifty leaves. Thus a considerable number of such volumes
must have gone to make up a volume of the bulk of the '_Codex
Atlanticus_' which now contains nearly 1200 detached leaves. In the
passage under consideration, which was evidently written at a late
period of his life, Leonardo speaks of his Manuscript note-books as
numbering 12O; but we should hardly be justified in concluding from
this passage that the greater part of his Manuscripts were now
missing (see _Prolegomena_, Vol. I, pp. 5-7).], the hundred and
twenty books composed by me will give verdict Yes or No. In these I
have been hindered neither by avarice nor negligence, but simply by
want of time. Farewell [89].

Plans and suggestions for the arrangement of materials (797-802).