1378.

On the 24th of June, St John’s day, 1518 at Amboise, in the palace of...

[Footnote:  Castello del clli.  The meaning of this word is obscure; it is perhaps not written at full length.]

XXII.

Miscellaneous Notes.

The incidental memoranda scattered here and there throughout the MSS. can have been for the most part intelligible to the writer only; in many cases their meaning and connection are all the more obscure because we are in ignorance about the persons with whom Leonardo used to converse nor can we say what part he may have played in the various events of his time.  Vasari and other early biographers give us a very superficial and far from accurate picture of Leonardo’s private life.  Though his own memoranda, referring for the most part to incidents of no permanent interest, do not go far towards supplying this deficiency, they are nevertheless of some importance and interest as helping us to solve the numerous mysteries in which the history of Leonardo’s long life remains involved.  We may at any rate assume, from Leonardo’s having committed to paper notes on more or less trivial matters on his pupils, on his house-keeping, on various known and unknown personages, and a hundred other trifies—­that at the time they must have been in some way important to him.

I have endeavoured to make these ‘Miscellaneous Notes’ as complete as possible, for in many cases an incidental memorandum will help to explain the meaning of some other note of a similar kind.  The first portion of these notes (Nos. l379—­l457), as well as those referring to his pupils and to other artists and artificers who lived in his house (1458—­1468,) are arranged in chronological order.  A considerable proportion of these notes belong to the period between 1490 and 1500, when Leonardo was living at Milan under the patronage of Lodovico il Moro, a time concerning which we have otherwise only very scanty information.  If Leonardo did really—­as has always been supposed,—­spend also the greater part of the preceding decade in Milan, it seems hardly likely that we should not find a single note indicative of the fact, or referring to any event of that period, on the numerous loose leaves in his writing that exist.  Leonardo’s life in Milan between 1489 and 1500 must have been comparatively uneventful.  The MSS. and memoranda of those years seem to prove that it was a tranquil period of intellectual and artistic labour rather than of bustling court life.  Whatever may have been the fate of the MSS. and note books of the foregoing years—­whether they were destroyed by Leonardo himself or have been lost—­it is certainly strange that nothing whatever exists to inform us as to his life and doings in Milan earlier than the consecutive series of manuscripts which begin in the year 1489.