Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, draftsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, to name but a list of his most widely agreed upon professions. When we think of the ideal of a “Renaissance man”, it is he who comes to mind more than anyone else. Today it is considered less practical than in 15th century Italy, but the constant quest for both scientific knowledge and artistic perfection implied by its title never completely ceases to appeal. One of the most enduring sources of inspiration for the aspiring modern Renaissance man is Leonardo’s own notebooks, filled with backwards-written explorations of realized and unrealized ideas that move unpredictably from one intellectual realm to another.
That last quality seems to have displeased the sculptor pompeo leoni Leonardo’s notebooks were passed on to his last pupil, Francesco Melzi, and eventually came into his possession. Leoni “got off his horse, cut out the folio, and divided the material into two albums.”
At his own discretion.” The Italian Embassy in London points out:“large parts for technical and scientific topics”, small parts for “artistic and figurative works of Leonardo”.
In the early 17th century, Leoni’s son-in-law sold an earlier album, now known as “The Album.” Atlantic Codexto a count, who donated it to the Veneranda Library Ambrosiana. The latter was in the Royal Collection of England by around 1670. They have now finally reunited thanks to a project called. leonardoteca.
The culmination of 10 years of work involving the Veneranda Ambrosiana Library, the Leonardo Library and the Royal Collection Trust. leonardoteca After four centuries, these albums will be digitally recombined. This work also involved rebuilding 50 individual pages that had long been separated and replacing them with their original context. The notes combined “decades of anatomical research, flying machines, landscapes, and grocery list-adjacent musings, all as intertwined as the workings of Leonardo’s mind.” Anastasia Scott at Discover. However, he “probably did not intend to separate art and science from the beginning. One page might have had machines, horses, and poetry. And Leoni broke the connection that the artist had purposefully made.” With these connections restored, here in the 2020s, a time plagued by doubts about the relationship between what we now call “the humanities” and “STEM,” we can once again see how the true Renaissance spirit was at work. Please enter leonardoteca here.
via Kottke
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
