Art: Empirical Queen of the Sciences

"Let no man who is not a mathematician read my work," Leonardo da Vinci once wrote—a warning that applies to the 50 pages of his drawings, mostly "technical," on view at the National Museum of History and Technology in Washington, D.C., this month. It is the largest group of Leonardos yet seen in the U.S., or indeed anywhere in the world since the miraculous show of the royal family's Leonardo collection at Buckingham Palace in 1969. It accompanies an ambitious publishing project—the McGraw-Hill five-volume facsimile of the so-called Madrid codices: two recently discovered Leonardo notebooks, edited and translated by the late technological historian Ladislao Reti, to be published this month at $400 the set ($750 de luxe) and bound, rather bathetically, in red vinyl morocco. The codices themselves are incomparable.

Kenneth Clark called Leonardo "the great Sphinx of art history," but he was also its great Rorschach blot. The past century has seen almost as many Leonardos as there have been léonardistes. Magus, "Renaissance man," supergay, world's first nonlinear thinker —the parade of stereotypes marches on. At one moment he struck the Victorians as a prototype of the engineer-hero, a 15th century Brunel or Edison who lacked only the omnipotent semen of capital to make his projects real. At the next, the English 19th century aesthete Walter Pater wrote of his mechanical inventions as mere "dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and laboring brain."

If Anything Got Done. No exceptional mind has ever been more elusive, harder to interpret, or more vulnerable to posthumous cliche. He was unquestionably the greatest observer of the real world in his time, and the breadth of his inquiries would be inconceivable in ours; but this is the same Leonardo who, on cutting a pen, scribbled as his customary test sentence some variant on the melancholy words, "Dimmi, dimmi se maifufatta cosa alcuna "— "Tell me, tell me if anything ever got done."

Leonardo's inaccessibility has a great deal to do with his absolute distaste for disclosing himself. We still know miserably little about Leonardo the man. Though a great deal is known about his work, it survives only in fragments. Twenty-seven of the 46 Leonardo manuscripts that went to Spain in the 16th century are lost; and so the discovery of a few battered pages by Leonardo's hand, let alone two complete codices in mint legibility (348 leaves in all), is a rare event in art and human history. The Madrid notebooks have expanded the known writings of Leonardo by 20%.

On a personal level, the Leonardo of the Madrid codices is as frustratingly hermetic as ever. But in terms of his work, the notes are priceless. They shed little new light on his painting, but this is made up for by the richness of detail in Codex Madrid II on his great sculptural project, the equestrian bronze of Francesco Sforza— Il Cavallo, as Leonardo called it, the full-size clay model for which was shot to rubble by French crossbowmen after the conquest of Milan in 1500. It would have been the largest bronze group in recorded history, 23 ft. high, cast upside down in one continuous pour of 158,000 lbs. of metal.