| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,900,000)
Fiscal Year 1988: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 1987: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The aim of this research is to dispose about 1,200 folisos of the Codex Atlanticus in chronological order, to transcribe all the notes connected with the cosmology, and to trace the development of Leonardo's thought on the earth and on the universe.
During the first year, I gathered and classified the folios of his Florentine period (ca.1475-1482) and those of his Milanese period (1483-99), and reconstructed his initial thought on the cosmology. According to these data, I tried to describe young Leonardo's Cosmogonic theory and his curious Eschatological thought in Chapter 19 of my book "Mysteries of Leonardo da Vinci" (Iwanami-Shoten,1987). another study on 'the Earth as living organism in the development of Leonardo's Cosmology'(in"Italian Renaissance Culture", Kinokuniya-Shoten, 1988) is an attempt to reconstruct his thoughts on the earth in the Milanese period.
During the second year of the research, I tried to dispose chronologically the rest of his folios datable after 1500, but this work met with one difficult problem: his hand-writing varies clearly with the years before 1500, but the variations after 1500 are so slight that it is difficult to date the folios on the basis of the characteristics of his hand-writing. So I attempted to date them according to the variations of his spelling: he writes, for example, CA and CHA interchangeably, because the superfluous H doesn't alter the pronunciation of the syllable (ka). But the frequency at which H is inserted changes with the years. Applying this new criterion to the dating of the folios, I have disposed his notes after 1500 in chronological order and demonstrated that the conclusion of his Cosmology was the ending of the world by the submergence of the Continets under the Ocean.
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