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From the hand of Leonardo da Vinci came the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, among other art objects of intense reverence and even worship. But to understand the mind of Leonardo da Vinci,
one must immerse oneself in his notebooks, says Colin Marshall, Seoul-based essayist, broadcaster, and public speaker.
Totaling some 13,000 pages
of notes and drawings, they record something of every aspect of the
Renaissance man’s intellectual and daily life: studies for artworks,
designs for elegant buildings and fantastical machines,
observations of the world around him, lists of his groceries and his
debtors. Intending their eventual publication, Leonardo left his
notebooks to his pupil Francesco Melzi, by the time of whose own death
half a century later little had been done with them.
Photo: Open Culture
Absent a proper steward, Leonardo’s notebooks scattered across the world. Six centuries later, their surviving pages constitute a series of codices in the possession of such entities as the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the British Museum, the Institut de France, and Bill Gates.
In recent years, they and their collaborating organizations have made efforts to open Leonardo’s notebooks to the world, digitizing them, translating them, and organizing them for convenient browsing on the web...
Other collections of Leonardo’s notebooks made available to view online include the Madrid Codices at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Codex Trivulzianus at the Archivo Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, and the Codex on the Flight of Birds at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. (Published as a standalone book, his Treatise on Painting is available to download at Project Gutenberg.)
Source: Open Culture
