Victoria and Albert Museum publishes online Leonardo da Vinci's taccuni from the Forster Codex I

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has published online the contents of two of Leonardo da Vinci ’s (Vinci, 1452 - Amboise, 1519) notebooks: an important operation ahead of the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, which will come in 2019.

The first of these notebooks is the Forster Codex I consisting of two notebooks that were bound into one volume after Leonardo’s death. It contains both the earliest (from folio 41, c. 1487-90, Milan) and the latest notebooks (up to folio 40, 1505, Florence) that were part of the V&A collections. The name of the collection is intended to pay homage to collector John Forster, who bequeathed them to the museum along with his library in 1876.

The Victoria and Albert also has three additional notebooks, bound in two volumes, named Forster Codex II and III. “We are planning to make them fully accessible online in 2019 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s passing,” Catherine Yvard, curator of special collections at the V&A Library, explained to The Art Newspaper .

“The notebooks,” she pointed out, “remind us that Leonardo was more of an engineer than an artist. When he wrote in the early 1980s to Ludovico Sforza, the then lord of Milan, to offer his services, Leonardo introduced himself as a military engineer, mentioning only briefly his artistic skills at the end of the list.” The notes contained in the Forster I Codex start from the time when Leonardo was active at the Milanese court and had focused on hydraulic engineering works, designing tools for digging canals and moving water. In addition, the Codex includes a treatise on geomatics and the measurement of solids. These are extremely fragile sheets, as Yvard again explains, “If we want to make them survive for another five hundred years and more, we have to make sure that we don’t handle them too much, and make sure that their fascinating contents can be accessed in other ways, so that they are not damaged.” The digital version fully hits the mark: the reproductions are in fact highly accurate, have an advanced zoom function, and are designed especially for researchers. Everyone can visit and “explore” them, as the museum suggests, on the appropriate section of the V&A website.

Victoria and Albert Museum publishes online Leonardo da Vinci's taccuni from the Forster Codex I

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