Everything associated with the name of the great Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci has always aroused great interest in society. For example, one of his notebooks with notes - the so-called Code of Leicester - was sold at Christie's in 1994 for $ 30.8 million. Leonardo's notebook was acquired by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Leonardo's paintings and drawings are considered not only masterpieces of the visual arts, but also an excellent investment. Even a scrap of paper with the handwritten notes of the genius of the Renaissance can be sold and bought at a fantastic price. What can we say about the artist's notebooks, in which he entered his thoughts on a variety of occasions, accompanying his reflections with drawings and mathematical calculations! So in the ranking of auction prices, the name of Leonardo is in the first place.
Sword anatomy
Leonardo da Vinci was not only a talented artist. His mind was keenly interested in all branches of human knowledge. In those days, the only science that attracted artists was anatomy. And it is clear why: she helped painters to correctly depict the human body. But most artists limited themselves to a small excursion into the "subcutaneous" structure of man. More they still relied on their own vision and painted their characters from customers or models. Leonardo, on the other hand, studied the interaction of bones and muscles so carefully and painstakingly that he left us drawings that can be called anatomical atlases. He even investigated what would hardly have helped him in painting - the stages of development of the fetus inside the uterus. To do this, he opened more than one pregnant woman (of course - dead). He considered the work of muscles and bones more like an engineer and even carried out measurements and mathematical calculations. In a word, for the great Florentine man was the same mechanism as a drawbridge or a ballista. Looking at how an athlete lifts weights, he thought not about the beauty of the movement itself, but about how perfectly the leverage system works inside the human body, and developed artificial mechanisms that could repeat the creation of nature. Animals, birds, insects, running water in rivers and streams, moving clouds in the sky caused him not only aesthetic pleasure, but also a desire to penetrate beyond the visible, to understand how it all works. For the time in which Leonardo lived, such a mood of mind was considered seditious. It is not surprising that the artist had to hide his thoughts,- even the usual anatomy of the dead was considered then sedition, for which one could go to the fire. Leonardo wrote down his reflections, but tried to make them inaccessible to a random person who inadvertently looked in his notebooks. He used the method of mirror writing and brought it to complete automaticity. To the uninitiated, his notes seemed unreadable. True, they were almost always supplemented with drawings, and an attentive reader could easily figure out what secrets were hidden in the text, but he would not have been able to find out the secrets themselves without decoding. To the uninitiated, his notes seemed unreadable. True, they were almost always supplemented with drawings, and an attentive reader could easily figure out what secrets were hidden in the text, but he would not have been able to find out the secrets themselves without decoding. To the uninitiated, his notes seemed unreadable. True, they were almost always supplemented with drawings, and an attentive reader could easily figure out what secrets were hidden in the text, but he would not have been able to find out the secrets themselves without decoding.
Treatise on water, earth and heavenly bodies
For several years - from 1506 to 1510 - Leonardo was absorbed in the study of the nature of water, air, minerals and celestial bodies. Reflections on this topic made up the so-called Code of Leicester - a set of encrypted notes and drawings on 18 large sheets, written on both sides and folded so that a notebook of 72 pages was formed.
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The genius called his notes so: "A treatise on water, earth and heavenly affairs." A person knowledgeable in encryption could read in this treatise Leonardo's thoughts about the structure of the world and get answers to questions about why water moves in rivers, what the strange fossils that are found in the lime deposits along their banks mean, and how these fossils were formed, why the moon does not shine as bright as the sun, and if the moon itself does not emit light, where does its glow come from, what is the role of air in the structure of the human world and how the human body corresponds to the ideal proportions inherent in nature. Of course, Leonardo's explanations correspond to the scientific criteria of that time: the artist calls the air the soul of the world, the earth - the body of the world, and water - its blood. The world, nature, in his opinion, is a huge living mechanism in which everything is interconnected and purposeful. The body of nature should feed on the life-giving juices that water gives, and the air allows this body to breathe and live. And the work of nature, like the work of other mechanisms, can be improved. Therefore, on the pages of his notebook, Leonardo develops improvements that are useful for the world order - the arrangement of artificial canals, the construction of bridges, dams and locks, that is, the use of engineering structures. The scientist's reasoning, despite the medieval terminology, is based on many experiments that he conducted with water and air, and these experiments are also described in detail by him. Leonardo's observations led him to the conclusion that the mountain ranges were previously the bed of the seas, as evidenced by the fossilized remains of marine life, and then the earth rose, carrying these fossils to a great height. He connected the force of water flows and the pressure of water with the height of the cliff,from which the water descends, and took notes on how to build bridges, taking into account the movement of water and traces of erosion on the coastal rocks. True, thinking about the nature of moonlight, Leonardo made a mistake, quite understandable for his time: if the Earth is cut by rivers and covered by seas and oceans, he thought, then the Moon should have a similar structure. The moon is also covered with water, which is why it glows - after all, sunlight is reflected not from dry land, but from the water surface. However, waves move along this water surface, which is why the Moon shines much weaker than the Sun. He also drew attention to the fact that the dark part of the lunar disk has a faint glow, and a century before Kepler he decided that this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the dark part of the disk receives reflected light, but not from the Sun, but from the Earth.considering the movement of water and traces of erosion on coastal rocks. True, thinking about the nature of moonlight, Leonardo made a mistake, quite understandable for his time: if the Earth is cut by rivers and covered by seas and oceans, he thought, then the Moon should have a similar structure. The moon is also covered with water, which is why it glows - after all, sunlight is reflected not from dry land, but from the water surface. However, waves move along this water surface, which is why the Moon shines much weaker than the Sun. He also drew attention to the fact that the dark part of the lunar disk has a faint glow, and a century before Kepler he decided that this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the dark part of the disk receives reflected light, but not from the Sun, but from the Earth.considering the movement of water and traces of erosion on coastal rocks. True, thinking about the nature of moonlight, Leonardo made a mistake, quite understandable for his time: if the Earth is cut by rivers and covered by seas and oceans, he thought, then the Moon should have a similar structure. The moon is also covered with water, which is why it glows - after all, sunlight is reflected not from dry land, but from the water surface. However, waves move along this water surface, which is why the Moon shines much weaker than the Sun. He also drew attention to the fact that the dark part of the lunar disk has a faint glow, and a century before Kepler he decided that this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the dark part of the disk receives reflected light, but not from the Sun, but from the Earth.if the Earth is cut by rivers and covered with seas and oceans, he thought, then the Moon should have a similar structure. The moon is also covered with water, which is why it glows - after all, sunlight is reflected not from dry land, but from the water surface. However, waves move along this water surface, which is why the Moon shines much weaker than the Sun. He also drew attention to the fact that the dark part of the lunar disk has a faint glow, and a century before Kepler he decided that this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the dark part of the disk receives reflected light, but not from the Sun, but from the Earth.if the Earth is cut by rivers and covered with seas and oceans, he thought, then the Moon should have a similar structure. The moon is also covered with water, which is why it glows - after all, sunlight is reflected not from dry land, but from the water surface. However, waves move along this water surface, which is why the Moon shines much weaker than the Sun. He also drew attention to the fact that the dark part of the lunar disk has a faint glow, and a century before Kepler he decided that this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the dark part of the disk receives reflected light, but not from the Sun, but from the Earth.that the dark part of the lunar disk has a faint glow, and a century before Kepler he decided that this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the dark part of the disk receives reflected light, but not from the Sun, but from the Earth.that the dark part of the lunar disk has a faint glow, and a century before Kepler he decided that this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the dark part of the disk receives reflected light, but not from the Sun, but from the Earth.
The fate of the manuscript
Leonardo died in 1519. "Treatise on water, earth and heavenly affairs" passed by inheritance to Francesco Melzi, then he went to the student of Michelangelo Giovanni della Porta, and from him came to the Roman artist Giuseppe Ghezzi. In 1717, the manuscript was bought by Thomas Cock, Earl of Leicester, and from that time, almost to the present day, Leonardo's notebook was owned by the Count's heirs. It was thanks to the eminent owners that the treatise began to be called the Code of Leicester.
However, in 1980, the treatise was put up for auction and sold to the famous millionaire and art lover Armand Hammer for $ 5.1 million. For more than 400 years, the manuscript has fallen into disrepair. Hammer immediately hired Carlo Pedretti, an expert in the restoration of ancient manuscripts, to bring the codex to its original form. In addition, Hammer wanted a complete English translation of the treatise.
Dr. Pedretti devoted the next seven years to this complex work, and by 1987 Leonardo's work was restored and provided with a translation. Three years later, the new owner of the manuscript died, and the Codex Leicester was soon put up for auction again. It was there that he was sold to Bill Gates.
Gates immediately scanned the manuscript and converted it into electronic form. Since then, both the text and drawings from Leonardo's notebook have become available to any Internet user. Drawings made by the great artist, with the light hand of Bill Gates, turned into screen savers and desktop wallpapers. Moreover, the Windows installation discs came with a set of images of the scanned code. And to popularize the creation of Leonardo, Bill Gates organized wide screenings of the Codex Leicester in major museums.
The demonstration of the code takes place once a year in one of the cities around the world. The first exhibition took place in 2000 in Sydney, Australia. The Codex has traveled to France (Chambord Castle), Japan (Tokyo), Ireland (Dublin), and is shown every year at exhibitions dedicated to Leonardo's genius in the United States itself. True, Bill Gates prefers to show not a precious manuscript, but its electronic copies - this way it is safer for a manuscript, which is harmful to daylight, crowds of tourists and the encroachments of robbers who dream of getting the most expensive book in the world.
Mikhail ROMASHKO