Resumen de Lo specchio di Leonardo. Scritture e libri del genio universale , by Marco Cursi
Leonardo had a complex and, in some cases, contradictory relationship with writing. Convinced of the superiority of drawing over words, however, he was engaged throughout his life to record in writing, with his characteristic left- handed orientation, annotations relating to all forms of thought, studies, projects, activities, daily events, memories, and accounts. The relationship he had with writing was therefore visceral. The importance of palaeography is such that in the 1980s Carlo Pedretti organized seminars in the Art History Department at ucla every winter quarter, calling on the expert palaeographer, Gino Corti, of the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, to teach them. Again in 2005, Pedretti pointed out the lack of a palaeographic study of Leonardo’s writing in his essay Paleografia vinciana in Leonardo da Vinci. La vera immagine: doc- umenti e testimonianze sulla vita e sull’opera, edited by Vanna Arrighi, Anna Bellinazzi, and Edoardo Villata. Despite the milestone studies of Gerolamo Calvi, and those by Luca Beltrami, Augusto Marinoni, and Pedretti himself, what was still lacking was an exhaustive and detailed study that aimed to place Leonardo’s writing within the graphic panorama of that time. Also necessary is a comprehensive study of his favourite techniques; an attempt to explain the two different scripts that Leonardo used—the mirror one from right to left and the regular one from left to right—and, consequently, whether Leonardo conducted these writings with the right hand or with the left; and to circum- scribe the relationship that Leonardo had with writing and, more in general, with books. The author succeeds perfectly in the investigation of these funda- mental points.
