The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete


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8
.
The order of your book must proceed on this plan: first simple  
beams, then (those) supported from below, then suspended in part,  
then wholly [suspended]. Then beams as supporting other weights  
[Footnote: 4. Leonardo's notes on Mechanics are extraordinarily  
numerous; but, for the reasons assigned in my introduction, they  
have not been included in the present work.].  
General introductions to the book on Painting (9-13).  
9
.
INTRODUCTION.  
Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or  
pleasing--since the men who have come before me have taken for their  
own every useful or necessary theme--I must do like one who, being  
poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing  
himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers,  
and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then,  
will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected  
merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to  
distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns,  
taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth. [Footnote: It  
need hardly be pointed out that there is in this 'Proemio' a covert  
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