Florence's Museo Galileo reconstructs Leonardo da Vinci's library

From June 6 to September 22, 2019, the Museo Galileo in Florence is hosting the exhibition Leonardo and His Books. The Library of Universal Genius, which aims to answer a specific question: how did Leonardo work? The best answer is provided by his manuscripts. Contrary to popular belief, Leonardo was not an “omo sanza lettere,” and direct instruction from the teacher Nature was not enough for him: he also needed dialogue with authors, ancient and modern. Over time, he had become an avid reader and collector of books. And books, for him, were not just objects: they were fascinating mental ’machines’, to be built and dismantled, with their gears (words, thoughts, images). By the end of his life, he would come to own almost two hundred volumes: an extraordinary number for an engineer-artist of the 15th century.

Leonardo’s library is one of the least known aspects of his workshop, because it is a ’lost’ library: only one book has so far been identified, Francesco di Giorgio Martini ’s treatise on architecture and engineering preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, with autograph postilles by Leonardo.

For the first time, the exhibition at the Museo Galileo in Florence will attempt the reconstruction of this library, in a chronological path that recounts Leonardo’s encounter with the world of books and the written word: the documents of the Da Vinci family, the first great books of the young Leonardo(Dante, Ovid), the great masters(Alberti, Toscanelli, Pacioli). Manuscripts and incunabula identified with the texts used by Leonardo will be on display, flanked by multimedia applications that will allow them to be leafed through and compared with autograph codices. Leonardo’s study with the writing and drawing instruments he used will also be reconstructed. Leonardo’s entire library, thanks to the work of an international team of specialists, will be published online in the Museo Galileo’s digital library and will be an invaluable resource for the development of Leonardo studies.

The exhibition, curated by Carlo Vecce, is organized by Museo Galileo in collaboration with the Commission for the National Edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Manuscripts and Drawings, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, as part of the FISR research project "Science, History, Society in Italy. From Leonardo to Galileo to the ’houses’ of innovation, " promoted and supported by the Ministry of Education, University and Research.

For all information you can call +39 055 265311 or visit Museo Galileo’s official website.

Source: press release

Florence's Museo Galileo reconstructs Leonardo da Vinci's library

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