Leonardo Da Vinci Read Online Free PDF Page B

the city cleaner, healthier. Milan’s streets were narrow, filthy, and overcrowded, intersected by canals from which frogs chirped nightly, but that also carried human waste. The drinking water was contaminated. When people took baths at all, they shared water at public bath-houses.
    For Leonardo, the plague must have caused two years of great anxiety, grief at losing friends, and daily trauma. He soothed himself by constructing, on paper, his version of an ideal city. Clean and efficient, it would stretch both horizontally and vertically—to two levels. The rich nobility would live above, in open spaces with parks. (Leonardo was a man of his time in believing that the rich were better people than the poor.) The streets would be very wide, to allow for fresh air and sunlight. The lower, darker level was for the less fortunate, with homes for the shopkeepers and—significantly, reflecting their status in society—artisans.
    His detailed plans provided for plumbing, drainage, transportation of animals and people, and waste disposal. He had devices to wash the streets, and chimneys that blew smoke high above roofs. To stop people from using dark street corners as toilets, he planned bathrooms whose ceilings had many holes for ventilation, and even designed toilets with swiveling seats.
    He wrote out rules for good health: “Visits to the toilet should not be postponed. Eat only when hungry and let light fare suffice. Chew your food well. . . .”
    And speaking of food, in addition to the other things that set him apart—and unlike just about every other fifteenth-century Italian—Leonardo was a vegetarian. (He believed that any creatures that moved felt pain.) He despised people who shot birds for sport. He thought that men who ate meat were walking tombs and that someday people would no more murder animals than they would kill other people. In an era known for rich foods and serious feasting, he stuck to minestrone soup, peas cooked in almond milk, green salads, fruit, wine, and bread.
    After the Black Death had passed, the city didn’t rebuild itself according to Leonardo’s designs. He had no authority to put his ideas into practice, and it’s not clear whether he even showed them to anyone. But Milan, freed from overwhelming death, was reenergized. Now Sforza and other officials poured money into constructing new buildings, remodeling old ones, and staging festivals and masques—much activity to keep Leonardo busy.
    But not too busy. Leonardo also spent a great deal of time alone, either walking around the countryside or sitting all day in his studio. “If you are alone, you will be your own man,” he once wrote. He never stopped observing, questioning, or reading. When most people considered comets and eclipses and similar phenomena alarming messages from beyond, Leonardo considered them events in nature. He even devised devices for studying a solar eclipse without eye damage.
    For years he had been in the habit of writing down his ideas—doodles, observations, to-do lists—on stray scraps of precious paper. But now, in Milan, he got serious, especially about his interest in the natural world, and began his famous series of notebooks.
    Into these notebooks went all of his nature drawings, experiments, and theories about the world. He worked by candlelight, sometimes all through the night. With the intense curiosity of a small child, he asked questions about everything : What is milk? What causes tickling or vomiting or sneezing? Why is the sky blue? What kind of machine could fly? Where do tears come from? Why do we urinate and defecate? What exactly is drunkenness, madness, dreaming . . . ?
    These are not diaries, though every once in a while a morsel of personal detail slips through. The notebooks are professional, businesslike (for him). Leonardo listed the subjects that were of most passionate interest to him—and came up with twenty. They included botany, optics, hydraulics, astronomy, geology, physics,