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RSS feedsTwo notebooks that document the thoughts of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific investigations have been made available online following a landmark collaboration between the British Library (BL) and Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates.
The Codex Leicester, owned by Gates, the world’s richest man, and the Codex Arundel, a BL treasure, have been reunited on the web some 500 years after Leonardo drafted them as part of the library’s Turning the Pages digital books service.
“I am amazed by da Vinci,” said Gates. “He personally worked out how light worked. Every one of those notebooks is an amazing document.”
The Codex Arundel and Codex Leicester were dispersed in the 16th century. The notebooks contain da Vinci’s notes, diagrams and sketches of his studies of mechanics, optics and the moon.
“Nobody used visual material so brilliantly,” said Professor Martin Kemp , the world’s leading da Vinci authority.
Gates added: “The way da Vinci combined incomparable genius with the human determination to strive for knowledge and practical improvement is an incredible inspiration.”
Windows Vista technology is at the centre of the BL’s second-generation Turning the Pages application. Users can browse high-resolution images of the texts and compare both volumes side by side.
“The historian of science will be able to exchange ideas with the historian of art, the Leonardo biographer with the structural engineer, the aeronautics expert with the mathematician,” said Lynne Brindley, BL chief executive .
Notes on the texts can be added and shared online via Microsoft Vista and Turning the Pages.
Brindley added that Microsoft’s involvement would speed up the addition of research material to Turning the Pages. “Putting a book on used to take weeks,” she said. “Now it can be done in a few hours.”
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