|
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete |  | Author: Leonardo da Vinci
Publisher: Public Domain Books
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  12 reviews
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
ASIN: B000JQULUO
Publication Date: January 1, 2004
| |
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
 Check the Publisher carefully before you buy the printed version of "The Notebooks...." September 3, 2010
Kiwi (Mississauga, Ontario Canada)
Amazon associates reviews of a book with different versions of the same book from different publishers. Unfortunately for us customers, Amazon is seeing a growing plague of new Print-On-Demand Publishers who are specialising in reprinting copyright-expired books. Such as "The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci." Some of these publishers produce quite good quality books, some do not.
A classic example of the "not good quality" is the imprint of "The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci" published by General Books LLC.
The version published by General Books LLC is scanned in using OCR technology (and using pretty poor quality OCR scanning equipment and software from the look of their books), is overall of very poor print quality, automated reproduction with no index, no illustrations and an excessive number of typos. Also, there's no illustrations (which are pretty fundamental to any book on or by Leonardo Da Vinci)
To quote a few specifics from the publishers web site:
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos....
After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price....
Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....
We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....."
General Books LLC are flooding Amazon with these low quality publications (450,000+ listed under General Books LLC) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them. The product description is totally misleading for the buyer that's not aware of this publisher. IMHO this is unethical marketing.
A general rule of thumb for these Print on Demand publishers is to take a look at the cover - if it's a good quality illustration that reflects the content, there's a table of contents, and when you do the Look Inside thing there's no disclaimer saying you're looking at another book, and they've used facsimile reproduction technology (rather than OCR), it's usually a pretty safe bet. Conversely, if any of these are missing, you're taking a chance on the quality. I've bought a few based on my selection criteria above and they've been ggod quality. General Books LLC however, is a publisher to steer clear of at all costs.
book April 3, 2010
Mark Twain
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is not what I thought it would be when I ordered it. No pictures. Since I got it free, I can't complain about the price.
BUMMER!!!! March 2, 2010
LovesBooks
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I expected thoughts and drawings, but the Kindle version has no drawings and the entire format is ackward. I was hoping for something that would engage my imagination and entice my intellect, but not in this format. Skip the Kindle version.
Incomprehensible February 13, 2010
Dr. Terry Wright
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
A notebook without his drawings is like a belly with no intestines inside. Or maybe like a Mona Lisa with a frown instead. Huge disappointment. Complete, indeed!
 The first Renaissance man October 15, 2009
Michael A Neulander (VA)
13 out of 22 found this review helpful
Nothing of Leonardo DAVinci's sketchbooks were published until the 20th century. These are some of the most important documents of the Renaissance, and they did not become known until the 20th century. There are still people who do not know how important this work was. His anatomical studies were a watershed moment, because they introduced visual diagrams as the standard for communicating knowledge of the body and self. This was no more and no less than the conviction that the true knowledge of the shape of any body could only be arrived at by seeing it from different aspects. The truth of the body, the truth of the human being can only be discovered by looking at the body from multiple aspects, like; level, motion, perspective, transformation and growth. He opened up the body, it had always been closed, now its open. Now, what goes on inside the body is going to give us the essence of what it means to be human. It is the internal struggle, the self with the self, within .you. When you look at his sketchbooks, you see just one place where the whole world opens up.
What you have on Kindle are the notes from his sketch books.
Leonardo DAVinci invented the modern self. He invented the modern self precisely in this way, through the perspective of disappearance. What he tells reality and us about the self is that it only exists by that which is perceived by the eye. Reality is a product of nature; reality is that which we perceive by the eye. Reality is only that by which we can see. Moreover, in his notebooks he gives us another foundational belief about the human subject and its form. That the sound rules are the issue of sound experience and observation. Experience and observation can only be our best teacher. Of course, this is also, what Voltaire is telling us to by the way. The challenge comes when we realize that we are both to the subject observing and the object that is observed. In our search for self, we experience a kind of division between our constitutions as objects and our constitution as subjects. However, when we look at the human form, when we look at the self we find that the body is in harmony with nature, and that it is in harmony within nature. How does DA Vinci make these kinds of claims? Alternatively, how does he ground these kinds of claims with the function of the eye or the power of the eye? Well, one of the ways he does it is thru the camera obscura. Earliest record of use of camera obscura is in DA Vinci's writings. The camera obscura gave birth to the science of optics, the science of seeing. It is with DA Vinci, that the science of seeing became the foundation of self-representation, a representation called the self, thus the representation of the human form. Now DA Vinci embodied his own concept of the painter, as philosophers. He saw painters principally as natural philosophers. To him, nature was all important, absolute, the image of the eternal. In one very significant passage of his notebooks, he defines the relationship of art to nature and its process of evolution. "The painter will produce pictures of small merit, if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. If he will study from natural objects, he will bear good fruit, as was seen in the painters after the Romans always imitating each other until their art constantly declined from age to age. Therefore, this was paramount for him in some ways what he was doing, and thinking was very radical and revolutionary and in other ways, it was very traditional. He appears to be quite a traditionalist, he studied ancient sources, Greeks, medieval sources, he studied anatomy, and these traditions get him to compare the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the world. These analogies extend to everything that he attempted to trace, to record and to know about the human form. Comparisons between the arteries in the body and the underground rivers of the earth. The flow of blood to the head in relation to the circulation of water to the summits of mountains. How does blood get to your head? If you want to understand that then understand how water flows up to mountains. Blood when it bursts in the veins of your nose and water rushing out of a vein in the earth. Almost everything that occurs in the human body can be found in the natural world. His interest in these analogies becomes very evident in the notebooks and sketchbooks. Scholars argue that these microcosm and macrocosm analogies are more than outright comparisons that belong to a pre scientific age, they lead him to compare the study of the body and Ptolemy's study of the earth. Consequently to use Ptolemy's method in the geography as the starting point for his own systematic study of anatomy. Therefore, anatomy and geography here become one in DA Vinci's mind. The forms of the earth and those of the human body have a parallel. "Thus in 15 entire figures you will have set before you the microcosm on the same plan as was before me adapted by Ptolemy in his cosmology, and so I shall afterwards divide them into limbs as he divided the whole world into processes. Then, I will speak of the function of each part in every direction putting before your eyes a description of the whole form and substance of man as regards his movements from place to place by means of these different parts. Thus if it please our great author I may demonstrate the nature of men and their customs in a way I describe this figure." Therefore, within the human form and within the kind of intricate details of human anatomy he discovered a way of describing and recording, not only the geographical construction of the natural world, but of Divinity itself. And when you look more closely at the system he devised to study the body, the more carefully you look at his drawings of the human form the more clearly you begin to recognize how strikingly stunningly original it is.
Earlier authors had relied exclusively on verbal descriptions of the human body. The human body had been a verbal entity but he emphasis visual description and some of the illustrations he has to bring visual dimensions to the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle the descriptions put forward by these men he presents in visual terms in these kind of body scapes. In the course of 20 years, roughly from 1489 to the end of his life, he dissected about 19 corpses and became very much obsessed with dissection. He drew these parts of bodies in minute detail every part of the human anatomy, he would draw each piece separately, together and at different angles. He laid out bodies in his drawings to mime classical poses in painting. He is referencing the history of art with the poses and the visual representation of the human subject. It is presented to us that deeply challenge these values of human nature, of life and death of living form and the cadaver it really raises some profound questions. The problem is in order to get to those questions, in order to explore some of the deeper philosophical implications of his work you have to get past the gross factor and the moral and ethical questions that his work raises. He is an artist that works very consciously with the sense of the ethical lines that he is crossing; he is not an artist that wants to make you comfortable. He sees that blood gets in the way of his observations, so he advises that you make a model of the body part and then you draw it. Model making and scientific art go hand in hand for him. You have to reconstruct reality before you can represent it. Therefore, before you can draw what is real you have to make it yourself. One of the most striking features of the notebooks is the manner in which he presents his work to us. There are no criticisms of the shortcomings that he has discovered in earlier authors, he does not boast about his own accomplishments, his writing style is pedagogical, and he is writing a teaching manual with descriptions and advice. Therefore, if you want to draw a lung, here is how you should do it. What he is trying to do is to convey to a larger audience this method of presentation and by representing human form, he relies on diagrams, and his reliance apparently causes some serious problems for the printing presses of the day. It also caused real issues for publishers because of the graphic nature of the work.
This was very important for medicine. He shows us we can separate human emotions and passions from the human body in understanding human form, and what it means to be human. There is a purely clinical dimension and this other dimension of feelings and emotions, and they do not have to come together at all, this is radical.
Thus again, this inside outside, you see it everywhere in his work. Why are we fascinated with the painting of the Mona Lisa? Because of the question we always ask, what is going on inside? The study of the Mona Lisa, it seems to me has always been organized around precisely the question that drove DA Vinci in his research. All his sketches in this obsessive and fanatical devotion to drawing every part of the body in relationship to every other part of the body at multiple levels and multiple perspectives and in motion, outside inside. There is the outside, what is going on inside, isn't that why we are obsessed with this? This painting just demands that we try to find out what is going on underneath. The truth is underneath, behind her smile, something she is keeping from us. Yet she is revealing just enough of it to make us have to find out what is going on inside of her. It is that relationship once again between the inside and the outside.
I read this book for a graduate class in the Humanities. Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, art, and science.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
