#codex leicester

[thraveenperera]

Leonard Da Vinci’s studies of the illumination of the moon (Leic.1A (1r))

[conformi]

Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912 VS Leonardo Da Vinci, Waterfalls I Codex Leicester (Codex Hammer), 1504-1508

[tiggersmoke]

May the 2nd we celebrated the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. But I like it  more to think that we can cherish his life and extraordinary personality everyday,simply by ampliating our consciousness and knowledge about our environment,and the technologies we use.

[autodidact-adventures]

100 Documents: Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci lived from 1452-1519, and was the greatest Italian Renaissance polymath.  Not just an artist, he had endless creativity and curiosity, and a “feverishly inventive imagination”, with insights on a huge number of diverse topics - babies in the womb; plant biology; helicopters and submarines and other machines; city planning!

He would begin working out his ideas on loose sheets of paper, making quick sketches, sometimes using tiny pads of paper that he kept in his belt.  Later, he’d arrange the notes according to theme, and file them in his notebooks.

Water-wheel designs.

But he didn’t want his ideas stolen, or to set those in power against him.  So he often used a backwards-lettered cursive script (perhaps influenced by his left-handedness) - the “da Vinci code”.  Intruders were bamboozled and infuriated by it.

When da Vinci died, Francesco Melzi (his companion & student) received 50 of his notebooks, with 13,000 pages in them.  He took them to Milan, but when he died, many of the notebooks were sold off, and some were lost.  Many were bound, and became known as the “da Vinci Codex” (a codex is a bound book made up of separate pages).

The notebooks ended up in various museums and libraries, including the Louvre, the British Library, and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which has the Codex Atlanticus: the largest notebook, consisting of 1,119 pages, which da Vinci complied between 1478-1519.  There is only one privately-owned notebook, the Codex Leicester, bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million.  It is written on 72 loose sheets of linen paper (1506-10), and is mostly on hydrology.

Codex Atlanticus.

[dejarutland]

Activity 4.2: The Codex of Leicester

The purchase of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester by Bill Gates in 1994 represents a fascinating intersection between art, ownership, technology, and public access to cultural heritage. While at first glance this $30.8 million acquisition might appear to be another example of art being absorbed by private wealth, Gates’s stewardship of the manuscript demonstrates how private ownership can, in some cases, support preservation and accessibility rather than hinder it. The Codex Leicester, a 72-page manuscript filled with Leonardo’s scientific observations and sketches on water, astronomy, and the natural world, is not merely a piece of art—it’s a record of human genius. The fact that one individual could purchase such a significant cultural artifact raises valid concerns about who should own humanity’s intellectual and creative history. In the art world, when priceless works fall into private hands, they often disappear from public view, held in vaults or personal collections. This limits scholarly study, public exhibition, and collective cultural engagement.

However, Gates has largely taken the opposite approach. Rather than hiding the Codex, he has loaned it to museums around the world, allowing millions to view it through rotating exhibitions. He also digitized the manuscript, producing interactive versions that allow viewers to virtually turn the pages and even reverse Leonardo’s famously mirrored handwriting. Through these efforts, Gates has effectively used his resources to merge technology with art preservation, broadening global access to da Vinci’s ideas in ways that public institutions alone might not have been able to fund or implement at the time.

That said, his ownership still highlights a systemic issue within the art market—the growing concentration of cultural treasures in the hands of billionaires. Such purchases drive up prices for works of art, making it even harder for public museums to compete at auction. The recent sale of da Vinci’s small drawing, Head of a Bear, for $12 million demonstrates how private transactions can dramatically inflate market value. As the worth of these works skyrockets, they risk becoming less cultural artifacts and more commodities—assets traded for prestige and profit. In this sense, Gates’s acquisition is both helpful and problematic. It helps the arts by ensuring the Codex Leicester is preserved, digitized, and widely shared. Yet it also reinforces a market dynamic in which access to art depends on private wealth and individual goodwill rather than collective or institutional stewardship. The future of art, ideally, should not rely on benevolent billionaires but on systems that safeguard cultural heritage as a shared human legacy.

Ultimately, the Codex Leicester reminds us that art is not only about ownership—it’s about stewardship. Gates’s handling of the manuscript sets an example of how private collectors can use their resources responsibly to expand access, but it also underscores the need for a more equitable structure in the art world—one that keeps cultural treasures within reach of everyone, not just those who can afford them.

Sources:

Bill Gates Owns One Of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Manuscripts. Here’s How Much It’s Worth

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

A study of the Moon's brightness in relation to the Sun, from the Codex Leicester (c.1508-1510)

Leonardo believed that the Moon's surface was covered in water, reflecting sunlight.

[yooahinfeed]

Yoo Ah In Donates Da Vinci Codex Exhibition Tickets Worth 40 Million Won to Children Foundation

Yoo Ah In Donates Da Vinci Codex Exhibition Tickets Worth 40 Million Won to Children Foundation

Yoo Ah In, as the founder of Studio Concrete, is appointed as the public relations ambassador for Da Vinci Codex Exhibition. He participates in  the Da Vinci Codex Exhibition Audio Guide Narration to help the visitors to interpret the meaning of this exhibition. Da Vinci Codex or The Codex Leicester (also briefly known as Codex Hammer), is a collection of famous scientific writings by Leonardo da…

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[dr-archeville]

Think you know Leonardo da Vinci? Reconsider the original Renaissance man through one of his notebooks at the North Carolina Museum of Art

Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester and the Creative Mind runs at NCMA through Jan. 17.

By turns a scientist, inventor and artist, Leonardo da Vinci has been called the greatest mind in history.  His Codex Leicester (named for the Earl of Leicester, who bought it in 1717), a handwritten notebook of 36 two-sided pages now on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art, allows entry into that mind, revealing its foundation in observation and deduction and its motivations in general curiosity and practical needs.

Compiled between 1506 and 1513, while da Vinci was living in Milan, the notebook was a staging area for a large treatise on the behavior of water that da Vinci wasn't able to undertake before his death in 1519.   All of his lifelong questions and interests about the physical world are here — the workings of oceans and rivers, the planet's internal functionality and relationship to other astronomical bodies, the origins of fossils, the best ways to build canals, measure water pressure or redirect water's flow.

It's a reading-heavy exhibit, of course, but its organization and display provide many access methods.  Each page, covered in da Vinci's neat, dense blocks of backward Italian with illustrative sketches and drawings in the margins, is shown in a kiosk with some brief explanatory text.  Every page has two folios — the verso (left side) and recto (right side) — which are not consecutive, since they were part of a bound book in their day.  So page 15 contains folios 15v and 22r, each of which address different topics.

The folio numbers are particularly useful for two excellent, interactive "Codescopes" that provide translations of da Vinci's text, thematic and structural navigation methods through it and much supplemental information.  It's worth the effort to discover something on a folio and head to a Codescope to drill down into the content through its touch screen.

Da Vinci's prose ranges from logical explanation to poetic metaphor.  In folio 24r, he sketches a river's current to show how the insertion of variously shaped obstacles would alter that current, as a possible means toward protecting riverbanks against erosion.  Other pages catalog and describe all manner of river erosion — folio 5v goes as far as a geometric analysis of that process.

But his poetic moments are just as instructive, if not more so, in their fusing of art and science into inspired inquiry.  On folio 34r, da Vinci's efforts to understand the planet's subterranean workings produce a conception of the earth as a body.  The soil is flesh; strata of rock are bones and cartilage; rivers are veins and water, blood; the ocean is the heart; volcanic heat is the soul.  Passages like this bring together the inventor of the helicopter with the painter of the "Mona Lisa."

Although da Vinci never explicitly writes about politics or religion, you can feel the pressure of unscientific beliefs and conditions upon pages of the codex.  His refutation of the Biblical flood theory about mountaintop fossils (folios 8v and 9v) is one example.  But in many other passages, you can almost hear da Vinci arguing against a lazy popular belief or unconsidered religious-based explanation for something in the world.

Raleigh is lucky to be the only East Coast venue for this exhibit, which has otherwise visited only Phoenix, Arizona and Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Bill Gates, who now owns the Codex Leicester and is lending it out for this limited tour, chose NCMA because it's a strong museum surrounded by reputable university and scientific communities.

Regardless of this prestige, the real joy of the exhibit is in getting to lean close to these pages, like their author did.  It's a thrill to scrutinize da Vinci's sketches and diagrams, some of which simply illustrate an idea like a science textbook, while others are miniature works of art unto themselves.

Wait, Bill Gates owns a da Vinci notebook?

IS THAT HOW MICROSOFT BECAME SUCH A TECHNOLOGICAL POWERHOUSE?