Free Leonardo Da Vinci by Kathleen Krull

bothered him, especially the selling of indulgences—a way to receive pardon for one’s sins in return for giving the church money. In 1517, the year Leonardo moved to France, Martin Luther condemned this same practice in Germany. Thus began the Protestant Reformation—and more than a century of violent wars over which religion would get a person to heaven.
    Leonardo died at the very beginning of the movement. He never wrote about heaven. But before he died, he dictated that his last rites and burial be carried out according to Christian practice.
    The end came in 1519, at age sixty-seven. As Melzi, his most loyal friend, nursed him, Leonardo died, no doubt while describing his symptoms and diagnosing his condition.
    His will gave half of a vineyard to Salai, a fur coat to his housekeeper, and Uncle Francesco’s property to his half brothers. Leonardo left everything else to Melzi—including the notebooks.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    What Happened Next?
    THE FATE OF the notebooks is not a happy tory.
    Francesco Melzi dutifully brought the thousands of notebook pages back to Italy. But as much as Melzi idolized his friend, he didn’t fully comprehend the meaning of all that he’d inherited. He did hire two assistants to assemble Leonardo’s theories on painting. However, the book of theories was not published until 1651.
    Melzi tried to organize the rest of the notebooks for publication, but with little to show for it. Instead, he set aside a special room at his family’s villa just for the notebooks, where invited visitors could view them. The visitors sometimes took pages with them as souvenirs—and so it began.
    The notebooks gradually . . . disappeared.
    After Melzi’s death in 1570, it got worse. Having no idea of their importance, or not caring, his son Orazio stashed Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts randomly in chests in the attic. The Melzi family tutor made off with thirteen books for himself. Word spread that the family was giving sheets away or selling them cheaply. Strangers showed up at the Melzi front door. They weren’t seeking scientific information. They were savvy art collectors, coveting the exquisite drawings.
    Just as no one had valued Leonardo enough as a child to educate him, now no one valued his manuscripts enough to protect them. That tricky backward writing didn’t help, either.
    Nor did any biographer bother to do research on Leonardo’s life until years after he had died. This explains why we have so few details about his life, especially his childhood—why there are so many maybes in this story.
    Notebook pages were scattered in libraries and monasteries and private collections across Europe. One chunk ended up in Spain at the court of the king. In 1630, a sculptor named Pompeo Leoni decided he was up to the task of organizing Leonardo’s work. First he wanted to pull out all the lessons on how to draw, and separate them from pages on science. So what he did was cut and paste Leonardo’s pages to create two separate collections. Parts of both collections journeyed to Italy, then to France. Some science pages remained undiscovered until 1966, when they were found—accidentally—in Madrid.
    Until 1883, when notebook extracts were finally published as a book, much of Leonardo’s scientific work was unknown to the public. The book, however, had the misleading title of The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci —as if no one knew quite what to make of the material. In fact, the word scientist had been coined in 1834 in part to explain thinkers like Leonardo. The first exhibitions of Leonardo’s scientific and technological work took place in the 1890s.
    By the early twentieth century, people such as the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were hailing Leonardo as “the first modern natural philosopher . . . to investigate the secrets of nature, relying entirely on his observation and his own judgment.”
    Finally, official commissions were established to try to reconstruct the original