Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Madrid I: The creation of the self as author
Abstract
My work analyses Leonardo's authorial strategy in Codex Madrid I, a densely drawn treatise on theoretical and applied mechanics. I argue that Leonardo constructs himself as a scientific author primarily on the basis of his draftsmanship. Besides being the foundation of painting, in Leonardo's thought drawing is a fundamental instrument for the exploration of the natural world and for the acquisition of knowledge. Furthermore, it is to be favored as a means to divulge scientific knowledge since it presents its arguments visually with greater immediacy and clarity than words. I therefore base my reading of Codex Madrid I on Leonardo's art theory and on the dispute between painting and poetry played out in the “Paragone.” After a detailed description of the manuscript, I relate Leonardo's ideas on drawing and writing to the tradition of the architectural treatise from Vitravius to Alberti, to the writers-engineers of the early Renaissance, Tar-cola, Filarete, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Finally, I study the two most significant personae assumed by Leonardo in the course of Madrid I, namely that of divine artifex and that of scribe of God. My analysis is again centered on Leonardo's use of drawing to reproduce on the page the direct experience that he claims as his sole teacher. In conjunction to his use of the verb “creare,” this suggests that Leonardo presents himself as divine author in so far as his writing, like the divine verbum, is primarily a writing of objects that are first brought into being in the drawings to eventually find material existence as actual machines. ^
Subject Area
Literature, Romance|Art History|History of Science
Recommended Citation
Marina Della Putta Johnston,
"Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Madrid I: The creation of the self as author"
(January 1, 2000).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI9965465.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9965465
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