Cesare says Leonardo is the greatest of the libertines. He has written a hundred and twenty volumes on matters of natural science, but all in fragments, in dispersed notes on flying leaves; and he keeps a MS. of over five thousand pages in such disorder that he himself cannot find anything in it.
Coming into my little room, he said: 'Giovanni, have you noticed that small rooms dispose the mind to profundity, large ones to breadth? And have you observed how the images of things, seen through the shadow of rain, are clearer than in the sunlight?'
Two days of work on the head of John the Apostle. But, alas! something has been lost through flies, pumpkins, cats, and the ear of Dionysius. He has again failed to complete the head, and now, disgusted with his paint-box, retired into geometry. He says that the odour of the paint nauseates him, and the sight of the brushes. Thus the days pass; at the caprice of chance, and submitting to the will of God, we, as it were, lie in port waiting for a wind. Fortunately he has forgotten the flying-machine or we should starve.
What to others appears perfection is to him teeming with error. He aims at the highest, at the unattainable, at what is for ever beyond the reach of the hand of man. Therefore his productions rest incomplete.
Andrea Salaino has fallen sick. The Master nurses him, sits up at night, watches by his pillow; but no one dare speak to him of medicine. Marco d'Oggionno surreptitiously introduced a pill-box, but Leonardo found it, and cast it from the window. Andrea himself desired to be bled, and spoke of a most skilled phlebotomist of his acquaintance; but the Master grew properly indignant, speaking of all doctors with epithets most injurious.
'Heed rather to preserve than to cure your health; and beware of physicians.' He added with a smile, good-natured yet malicious, 'Every man scrapes up his money only to give it to them, the destroyers of lives.'