Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester returns to Italy

Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester returns to Italy after 20 years: the Uffizi Gallery in Florence will host the codex and put it on display from October 2018, on the occasion of the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the death of the brilliant Leonardo, until January 2019.

This manuscript has as its theme “Of the nature, weight and motion of waters” and is a kind of “notebook” that combines art and science. It contains 360 drawings and notes on observations and studies of hydraulics, particularly the regulation regime of rivers (including theArno and the danger of flooding in Florence), geology, paleontology, mechanics and astronomy.

Incredible insights for the technology of the time are described there, including a reference to the submarine and diving mask. For Leonardo, the codex was a kind of filing cabinet to which he periodically added sheets, placing pages with writings or drawings on the same subject side by side. The name “Leicester Codex” comes from Thomas Coke, later to become Duke of Leicester, who had acquired it in 1719.

The Codex has been missing in Florence since 1982: in that year, the city where Leonardo in 1506 had begun its drafting, later completed in Milan in 1510, housed it in the Palazzo Vecchio at the behest of its then owner, American oilman and art enthusiast Armand Hammer, who had purchased it from Christies for 5.6 billion lire in 1980. The Codex still holds the record as the second highest sale price ever shelled out for a book: the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, secured it at a Christie’s auction on Nov. 11, 1994, for a sum that today would correspond to nearly $50 million. Some of the pages were then digitized and distributed as “wallpapers” in a version of the Windows 95 operating system.

The return to Italy, explains Uffizi director Eike Schmidt, was possible thanks to an agreement, “which has been worked on intensively since 2015, when the Codex was exhibited in Minneapolis in the U.S.” The work, Schmidt anticipates, will be displayed in the Gallery as part of a project curated together with Museo Galilei and with the support of Fondazione Cassa di risparmio Firenze.

Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester returns to Italy

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