[455] The proverbial expression for quitting a digression, Revenons à nos moutons, is taken from this farce; which is at least short, and as laughable as most farces are. It seems to have been written not long before its publication. See Pasquier, Recherches de la France, l. viii. c. 59; Biogr. Univ., Blanchet; and Bouterwek, v. 118.
[456] Bouterwek, Gesch. der deutschen Poesie, ix. 357-367. Heinsius, Lehrbuch der Sprachtwissenschaft, iv. 125.
Mathematical works. 110. Euclid was printed for the first time at Venice in 1482; the diagrams in this edition are engraved on copper, and remarkably clear and neat.[457] The translation is that of Campanus from the Arabic. The cosmography of Ptolemy, which had been already twice published in Italy, appeared the same year at Ulm, with maps by Donis, some of them traced after the plans drawn by Agathodæmon, some modern; and it was reprinted, as well as Euclid, at the same place in 1486. The tables of Regiomontanus were printed both at Augsburg and Venice in 1490. We may take this occasion of introducing two names, which do not exclusively belong to the exact sciences, nor to the present period.
[457] A beautiful copy of this edition, presented to Mocenigo, doge of Venice, is in the British Museum. The diagrams, especially those which represent solids, are better than in our modern editions of Euclid. I will take this opportunity of mentioning, that the earliest book, in which engravings are found, is the edition of Dante by Landino, published at Florence in 1481. See Brunet, Manuel du Libraire, Dibdin’s Bibl. Spencer, &c.
Leo Baptista Alberti. 111. Leo Baptista Alberti was a man, who, if measured by the universality of his genius, may claim a place in the temple of glory he has not filled; the author of a Latin comedy, entitled Philodoxios, which the younger Aldus Manutius afterwards published as the genuine work of a certain ancient Lepidus; a moral writer in the various forms of dialogue, dissertation, fable, and light humour; a poet, extolled by some, though not free from the rudeness of his age; a philosopher of the Platonic school of Lorenzo; a mathematician and inventor of optical instruments; a painter, and the author of the earliest modern treatise on painting; a sculptor, and the first who wrote about sculpture; a musician, whose compositions excited the applause of his contemporaries; an architect of profound skill, not only displayed in many works, of which the church of Saint Francis at Rimini is the most admired, but in a theoretical treatise, De Re Ædificatoriâ, published posthumously in 1485. It has been called the only work on architecture which we can place on a level with that of Vitruvius, and by some has been preferred to it. Alberti had deeply meditated the remains of Roman antiquity, and endeavoured to derive from them general theorems of beauty, variously applicable to each description of buildings.[458]
[458] Corniani, ii. 160. Tiraboschi, vii. 360.
112. This great man seems to have had two impediments to his permanent glory: one, that he came a few years too soon into the world, before his own language was become polished, and before the principles of taste in art had been wholly developed; the other, that, splendid as was his own genius, there were yet two men a little behind, in the presence of whom his star has paled; men, not superior to Alberti in universality of mental powers, but in their transcendency and command over immortal fame. Many readers will have perceived to whom I allude,—Lionardo da Vinci, and Michael Angelo.
Lionardo da Vinci. 113. None of the writings of Lionardo were published till more than a century after his death; and, indeed, the most remarkable of them are still in manuscript. We cannot, therefore, give him a determinate place under this rather than any other decennium; but as he was born in 1452, we may presume his mind to have been in full expansion before 1490. His Treatise on Painting is known as a very early disquisition on the rules of the art. But his greatest literary distinction is derived from those short fragments of his unpublished writings that appeared not many years since; and which, according, at least, to our common estimate of the age in which he lived, are more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single mind, than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, and Kepler, and Mæstlin, and Maurolycus, and Castelli, and other names illustrious, the system of Copernicus, the very theories of recent geologers, are anticipated by Da Vinci, within the compass of a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe of præternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism, he first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of nature. If any doubt could be harboured, not as to the right of Lionardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century, which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which, probably, no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis, not very untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record. The extraordinary works of ecclesiastical architecture in the middle ages, especially in the fifteenth century, as well as those of Toscanelli and Fioravanti, which we have mentioned, lend some countenance to this opinion; and it is said to be confirmed by the notes of Fra Mauro, a lay brother of a convent near Venice, on a planisphere constructed by him, and still extant. Lionardo himself speaks of the earth’s annual motion, in a treatise that appears to have been written about 1510, as the opinion of many philosophers in his age.[459]
[459] The manuscripts of Lionardo da Vinci, now at Paris, are the justification of what has been said in the text. A short account of them was given by Venturi, who designed to have published a part; but, having relinquished that intention, the fragments he has made known are the more important. As they are very remarkable, and not, I believe, very generally known, I shall extract a few passages from his Essai sur les Ouvrages Physico-mathématiques de Léonard de Vinci. Paris, 1797.
En mécanique Vinci connaissait, entr’autres choses: 1. La théorie des forces appliquées obliquement au bras du levier; 2. La résistance respective des poutres; 3. Les lois du frottement données ensuite par Amontons; 4. L’influence du centre de gravité sur les corps en repos ou en mouvement; 5. L’application du principe des vitesses virtuelles à plusieurs cas que la sublime analyse a porté de nos jours a sa plus grande généralité. Dans l’optique il décrivit la chambre obscure avant Porta, il expliqua avant Maurolycus la figure de l’image du soleil dans un trou de forme anguleuse; il nous apprend la perspective aerienne, la nature des ombres colorées, les mouvemens de l’iris, les effets de la durée de l’impression visible, et plusieurs autres phénomènes de l’œil qu’on ne rencontre point dans Vitellion. Enfin non seulement Vinci avait remarqué tout ce que Castelli a dit un siècle après lui sur le mouvement des eaux; le premier me parait même dans cette partie supérieur de beaucoup à l’autre, que l’Italie cependant a regardé comme le fondateur de l’hydraulique.