6 Chapter 5 Wandering

Chapter 5 Wandering In 1499, when the French attacked, the duke lost his power. He fled Milan. Then, later on, he was captured. He died a prisoner in France. In December of that year, Leonardo left Milan, too. Salai went with him. So did another old friend. Leonardo did not have a real home again for sixteen years. He took very little with him as

he traveled from place to place. Only the most important things did he keep with him. Like his notebooks. In Milan, he had started keeping notebooks full of drawings and ideas. Leonardo kept filling up notebooks for more than thirty years. His plan was to write an encyclopedia about everything. Like the horse statue, this was another great big project. And like the horse statue, it was a job he never completed. However, the notebooks are still priceless treasures. The pages are illustrated with beautiful drawings of everything that had

interested Leonardo. They are among the most beautiful drawings in the world. There probably were a total of about thirteen thousand notebook pages. But after his death, many pages were torn out and sold. Some notebooks were cut apart; some disappeared. Some were rediscovered hundreds of years later. Today, there are ten different collections of

Leonardo's notebook pages. Only half the pages—about six thousand pages—are known to exist. They are in different places all over the world. There is always the hope that someday more notebook pages will turn up. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, bought one collection of pages. It is all about water. It is called Codex Atlanticus. Sometimes it is displayed in museums. In it are drawings of waves and currents, drawings of ripples in water, drawings of a drop of water as it splashes into a puddle. (Leonardo's eyes were so sharp, he could see all

by himself what today's high-speed cameras can reveal.) There are experiments that Leonardo did with water.

In all the notebooks, his handwriting is reversed. This is called mirror writing. A mirror must be held up to the writing before it reads correctly. Why did Leonardo write this way? Nobody knows. He was left-handed. So maybe writing this way came most easily to him. Or he may have wanted to make it hard for anybody else to read the pages. Maybe he worried that other people might steal his ideas. Maybe he just wanted to keep his ideas secret. Leonardo's interest in water went all the way back to his childhood, from the storms he saw. But water was only one of the subjects he planned to cover in his encyclopedia. He wanted to understand and explain light—what was it made of? He wanted to understand how eyesight works, why birds can fly, and all the different parts of the human body. He came up with a list of about twenty big subjects. Just one page of a notebook might have little drawings of bird wings and feathers, along with thoughts about music and ideas for new weapons or sketches on building dams. Leonardo never stuck to one subject. He'd go back and forth among many. The notebook pages are crammed with writing and