Leonardo's notebooks
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Leonardo kept a series of journals in which he wrote almost daily, as well as separate notes and sheets of observations, comments and plans which were left to various pupils and were later bound. Many of the journals have survived to illustrate Leonardo's studies, discoveries and inventions. Most of the journals were written backwards in mirror script. His journals were later published, 165 years after his death.
In a famous passage from Leonardo's notebooks he says: "The act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions".
Alternatively translated as "The act of coition and the members employed are so ugly that but for the beauty of the faces, the adornments of their partners and the frantic urge, Nature would lose the human race." (Leonardo Da Vinci quoted in Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality, translation by Mary Dalwood).
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