The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete


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towards supplying this deficiency, they are nevertheless of some  
importance and interest as helping us to solve the numerous  
mysteries in which the history of Leonardo's long life remains  
involved. We may at any rate assume, from Leonardo's having  
committed to paper notes on more or less trivial matters on his  
pupils, on his house-keeping, on various known and unknown  
personages, and a hundred other trifies--that at the time they must  
have been in some way important to him.  
I have endeavoured to make these 'Miscellaneous Notes' as complete  
as possible, for in many cases an incidental memorandum will help to  
explain the meaning of some other note of a similar kind. The first  
portion of these notes (Nos. l379--l457), as well as those referring  
to his pupils and to other artists and artificers who lived in his  
house (1458--1468,) are arranged in chronological order. A  
considerable proportion of these notes belong to the period between  
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490 and 1500, when Leonardo was living at Milan under the patronage  
of Lodovico il Moro, a time concerning which we have otherwise only  
very scanty information. If Leonardo did really--as has always been  
supposed,--spend also the greater part of the preceding decade in  
Milan, it seems hardly likely that we should not find a single note  
indicative of the fact, or referring to any event of that period, on  
the numerous loose leaves in his writing that exist. Leonardo's life  
in Milan between 1489 and 1500 must have been comparatively  
uneventful. The MSS. and memoranda of those years seem to prove that  
it was a tranquil period of intellectual and artistic labour rather  
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