Gates … I thought that sounded silly,” the businessman and philanthropist explained on his blog in a May 2018 review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo. At its most basic, a codex is a handwritten book. For Leonardo, these were of two kinds. First, there were small leatherbound notebooks — Renaissance Moleskines, if you like — that he would hang from his belt and jot notes in when on the road or up a mountain examining fossils. Second were those made up of the loose sheets he covered in notes, drawings, calculations and speculations when working at home. Some of these, like the Codex Leicester, were bound together by the artist himself. Others were assembled long after Leonardo’s death by Leoni, like the collection of more than 550 drawings and notes currently in the Queen’s collection at Windsor Castle. These are the only two surviving codices in private hands; 21 others are in public museums or libraries. In the codices, you feel the raw force of Leonardo’s creativity and thirst for knowledge flowing onto the page. As Isaacson puts it in his bestselling biography, the notebooks “allow us to marvel at the beauty of a universal mind as it wanders exuberantly in free-range fashion over the arts and sciences”. When I talked to him recently, Isaacson told me that his equivalent of my drink-stain moment was when he realised with a thrill that he could actually “see the compass point Leonardo put in the navel of Vitruvian Man”. What makes the Codex Leicester so important, Isaacson told me, is that “the pages still exist in the order Leonardo wrote them. Other notebooks were broken up and sold in pieces, but the Codex Leicester remained intact”. As a result, it offers a rare chance, the biographer believes, to “see Leonardo’s mind at work and the scientific method being born”. As an example, Isaacson pointed to Leonardo’s tussle with the question of how mountain springs are formed: “Is the water siphoned upward in the earth? Does it get pumped up from the centre of the Earth like blood gets pumped to a human’s head?” He explores these and other explanations, Isaacson continued, testing and discarding hypotheses until finally “he gets to the correct conclusion, that water is evaporated and condensed and comes down as rain that forms mountain springs”. A s a preview of the worldwide events planned for this year to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, the Codex Leicester went on display in the 18 plexiglass mounts in which the 72 pages were encased in the early 1980s, shortly after Hammer purchased them. It was accompanied by the Codescope, a digital aid developed by Corbis Productions to allow visitors to explore the codex page by page, enlarge details, turn Leonardo’s mirror handwriting around, and read English Filippo, left, and Niccolo Ricci of Stefano Ricci, the Florence-based fashion brand that sponsored the Uffizi exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci codices, pose at their silk factory with looms designed by the artist translations. Exhibition curator Paolo Galluzzi, director of the neighbouring Museo Galileo, also developed an innovative series of multimedia supports with his museum’s design lab. Visitors, found themselves “walking on water”, he said, thanks to video-projected enlargements of sketches and observations of the aqueous element that obsessed Leonardo – and that gave the exhibition its title, Water as Microscope of Nature. Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester. Stefano Ricci was brought on board as a sponsor by the Uffizi’s German director, Eike Schmidt, who swept away plenty of bureaucratic cobwebs, and has encouraged private investment in this state-run gallery, since his appointment to one of Italy’s top museum jobs in November 2015. But the company’s connection to Leonardo goes back to 2010, when it took over a piece of Florentine manufacturing history: a venerable silk factory and textile workshop called the Antico Setificio Fiorentino, in the Oltrarno, the city’s traditional artisans’ quarter. This warren of rooms is filled from wall to wall with ancient weaving machines – deftly operated by 15 female staff members – including an orditoio, or weft winder, built in the early 1800s according to a design by Leonardo. Resembling a scaled-down, revolving wooden gasworks, it looks like something that might have been in one of the classrooms at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Little was known about the history of the orditoio when Stefano Ricci acquired the Antico Setificio. Research promoted by the company’s creative director, Filippo Ricci, helped to uncover Leonardo’s original drawings, which were conserved in Windsor Castle. For Ricci, the company’s sponsorship of PHOTOS FEDERICO CIAMEI; PREVIOUS PAGE: VENERANDA BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES 70 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
the four Ambrosiana folios was an extension of that research, a further “tribute to Leonardo’s greatness … and to the connection with Florence that is in our DNA”. As the Antico Setificio machines clatter away behind him, Ricci points out that the Uffizi exhibition will mark “the first time in over five centuries that these disparate Leonardo manuscripts have been reunited under the same roof in Florence”. It’s not only the Codescope and the bells-and-whistles exhibition that is presenting the Codex Leicester in a new light. Leonardo expert Domenico Laurenza, who is working with Kemp on a new four-volume edition of the Gates-owned notebook, due out this year, presented research in the exhibition catalogue that links the radical geological theories in the pages of the codex with the geographical discoveries made by Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci. Laurenza believes that Leonardo was likely to have been privy to information, then circulating in letter form, about the 1501–02 expedition to the New World by the explorer who lent his name to America. Leonardo may still be, for many, the “Mona Lisa guy”, but Kemp, who has been studying the world’s original Renaissance Man for more than 50 years, pointed out that even this famous painting can be illuminated by a better understanding of the codices. In his book, Leonardo by Leonardo, due out in May, he shows how the Tuscan artist-scientist’s “remarkable sense of the world as a kind of organism that had undergone vast changes” – an idea developed in the Codex Leicester – is intimately connected with the Louvre’s most celebrated artwork. Mona Lisa sits in front of a valley in which one can see a snaking river and two large lakes. Leonardo, Kemp argues, was painting the radical geological theories of the Codex Leicester – including his intuition that the Earth is much older than the Bible would have us believe – directly into the picture. “Monumental but unstable,” Kemp writes, the watery scene in the background “deeply embodies … how landscapes bear witness to aeons of time, past, present, and future”. That’s not all: the studies of water flows and eddies that Leonardo sketched in the margins of some of the Codex Leicester’s most beautiful sheets are reflected, Kemp believes, in Mona Lisa herself, in the “watery cascades of her fine hair, the little rivulets of silk falling from her neckline, and the spiralling currents of her silken shawl”. Isaacson concurs. The spirit of inquiry that Leonardo indulged in the codices “enriched his life and made his art deeper”, he says. “If he had ignored science, if he had never dissected human faces or studied how light registers in the eye, he may have painted more paintings, but I doubt he would have ever accomplished the Mona Lisa.” LEONARDO IN FOCUS The essential exhibitions in 2019 of da Vinci’s notebooks, artwork and more MILAN Castello Sforzesco The vast citadel is home to more than a dozen museums and will host three notable Leonardo exhibitions, led by the unveiling of a newly restored mural by the master in the Sala delle Asse. milanocastello.it; from 2 May through to Jan 2020 Biblioteca Ambrosiana A cycle of four exhibitions at this venerable institution, itself more than 400 years old, focuses on the codices (the Codex Atlanticus is a permanent resident there), while the final exhibition examines Leonardo’s drawings. ambrosiana.it to Jan 2020 Museo Poldi Pezzoli The Madonna Litta will travel from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg to be the focus of the exhibition Around Leonardo, which focuses on the works of his students, including Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. museopoldipezzoli.it; 8 Nov – 10 Feb Stelline Foundation The Last Supper After Leonardo is a tribute to one of Leonardo’s best-known works which involves an exceptionally diverse array of contemporary global artists, including Anish Kapoor, Robert Longo, Wang Guangxi and Nicola Samori. stelline.it, 2 April – 30 June Palazzo Reale The Last Supper is the focus here, too, as the first tapestry version of the work, dating from the early 16th century, is newly restored and shown for the first time in centuries at Leonardo’s Last Supper for Francis I. palazzorealemilano. it; 7 Oct – 12 Jan TURIN Biblioteca Reale Leonardo’s red chalk drawing of an old man, widely thought to be a self-portrait, will be given a rare showing at its permanent home as part of the Leonardo de Vinci: Designing the Future exhibition, set in the Royal Palace of Turin. museireali.beniculturali.it; 16 April – 14 July PARIS Louvre A landmark exhibition from the museum that possesses nearly one-third of the artist’s known works, including most famously the Mona Lisa. Louvre Abu Dhabi bought Salvator Mundi for 0.3m in 2017 and there are rumblings that it might make an appearance here. louvre.fr; autumn 2019 LONDON Queen’s Gallery A dispersed exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing, features 144 drawings (from among 550 that the Queen owns) on simultaneous display in 12 venues across the UK, highlighted by a collective show of 200-plus in the capital. rct.uk; 24 May – 13 Oct in London British Library Three of the artist’s codices are on view, including the full Codex Arundel, the full Codex Forster and sheets from the Codex Leicester, in an exhibition called Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion. bl.uk; 7 June – 8 Sept CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 71
