Today, on what would have been Leonardo DaVinci’s 572nd birthday, is a good time to talk about the two times that I saw Lester Codex.
The Lester Codex is a folio that explains, with beautiful illustrations, various theories that Leonardo had about the physical world around us. Not surprisingly, many of his theories were absolutely correct, such as his surmise that the discovery of seashells on mountaintops suggested that those mountaintops were once at the bottom of the ocean.
Many years ago, soon after Bill Gates purchased the Lester Codex for sixty million dollars, he lent it to the NY Museum of Natural History for a public exhibition. The codex was presented together with interactive Microsoft software that let you interactively explore its contents. Not surprisingly, the software was for sale.
That exhibit, which was wonderful, helped the public to experience the greatness of Leonardo the scientist.
Soon after, Gates lent the Lester Codex to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The curators of that worthy museum put on a public exhibition in which they placed the codex in the context of many other works of art by Leonardo.
That exhibit, which was wonderful, helped the public to experience the greatness of Leonardo the artist.
I saw both exhibitions, and was struck by the implicit war at play. Two of our city’s greatest temples of culture — sitting across each other on opposite sides of Central Park — seemed to be fighting over the meaning of Leonardo’s life and work.
I also saw that this is far from a new battle. In the second exhibition, there was a letter written by an important personage of the day, which the museum curators helpfully translated from the Italian. He was complaining that Leonardo was wasting time in the frivolous pursuit of science, when he could have been spending more time on something actually important — making more paintings.
As C.P. Snow observed in his brilliant essay The Two Cultures, none of this should come as a surprise.