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| Anchiano, Italy |
With the Eyes of a Child
New words seem to hatch all the time, and this seems to be their spawning time of year. Supposedly, it keeps language fresh and
rejuvenated. There is also a downside to
this prolific hatchery for it seems many of the words I use grow out of vogue,
and like me, enter retirement. For starters, the twenty volume Oxford
English Dictionary once hosted 171K new and 47K obsolete words. Continually being disarmed, I’m left with
such a limited bag of utterances that I can be accused of speaking dated English. It’s hard to keep up with hip fresh takes like
femtech, aphantasia, and then there is that confusion, woke. Look out Scrabble players! As for grammar, I only want to say that
including “those ones” in a sentence (ex: “Those ones come with fries.”) or ending
a sentence with “at” (“Where is it at?”), to me, is like hearing fingernails being
scratched across a blackboard. Whenever
I hear them used, my ears, like radar, perk-up and it gets my off-putting attention. I just had to get that out.
Here is an example of what may be a word
in retreat, one the average person may not be familiar with. The word is “codex”. It is nowhere as familiar as the far more frequently
heard term, especially of late, “dossier”.
Good old Webster defines dossier as a “gathering
together of various documents relating to the affairs of an individual.” As for the seldom used word, codex, its sound
alone engenders a dusty technical air. It’s another word extracted from French, circa 1665, and before that Latin. The 3rd and 4th centuries A.D., saw codex begin
to replace the scroll as the preferred layout for long manuscripts. Unlike the scroll, this creation permitted
writing on both sides of a sheet. Codices
were usually written on parchment, the specially prepared skin of animals, or papyrus,
the predecessor of paper. The codex
became the model for all books to follow, the term usually used to denote hand-written
manuscripts, journals, and notebooks. We might think of it as a book written on a
subject (codex) rather than a person (dossier).
There is one particular codex, its subject matter dating
to the late 13th century, known today as "Codex Leicester”. It is the only codex today
not in a European museum. Like that
fascinating little bauble, The Hope Diamond, it has changed hands many times. I find its last and most current owner
especially interesting. Here is the genealogy
of Codex Leicester’s ownership and related dates:
Giovanni della Porta, died 1577, he may have been one of Michelangelo's students
Giuseppe Ghezzi (in possession until 1717), an Italian Baroque period
painter
Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (1717–1759)
The Leicester Estate (1759–1980)
Armand Hammer (1980–1990)
The Estate of Armand Hammer (1990–1994)
Bill Gates (1994–Present), co-founder of Microsoft Corp
The Codex Leicester is a collection of scientific writings named after Thomas Coke, the 1st Earl of Leicester, who purchased it in 1719. It was
acquired at auction from the Leicester estate in 1980 by wealthy industrialist
and art collector Armand Hammer for $5.1 million ($15.8 million in 2019 dollars), who later renamed
the notebook Codex Hammer.
Hammer had the
loose pages of the codex compile back into its original form. A little online checking revealed that over
the next seven years each page was translated to English.
It then passed in ownership to Bill Gates. Just as we are like to
make a purchase over the phone from Amazon or Apple, Bill picked up the phone and
bought it. He purchased it on 11
November 1994 in New York City at Christie's auction house for $30,802,500 (equivalent to $53,222,898.79 in 2019). At the time it commanded the record for the
highest purchase price of any book. Today, this codex holds the record for the third-highest price ever
paid for a book or manuscript. It follows
#1, The Book of Mormon and #2, Letter from Zeng Gong.
After
Bill Gates bought what
is essentially a historic diary, he had its
pages scanned into digital image files. Why
not, it’s Bill Gates after all. Later he
distributed some of the pages as screen saver and wallpaper files on a CD-ROM as part of a desktop theme for Window Operating system updates.
He also had the codex unbound and each page individually mounted
between glass panels. Since then it has
been put on public display in different cities for all to enjoy around the
world, ranging from Sydney, France’s Chateau de Chambord, Tokyo in 2005, Seattle, Dublin, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Raleigh, North
Carolina in 2016.
What did Bill get for his money? When it was intact the codex was bound
in leather and consisted of 18 sheets of paper, each folded in
half and written on both sides, forming a 72-page
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| A Look Inside Codex Leicester |
document. What makes this
document so sought after and valued across the world? Why could such a relatively thin notebook, hand
scrawled by whomever, command such worth, about $740K per page, and make people
the world over clamor to see it? You
would think it was The Last Supper or the Mona Lisa. Not exactly, but it is by the same hand. Its creator was none
other than Leonardo da Vinci.
Though only 72 pages in its entirety, you’d think it was an easy account to read. It wasn’t his Italian that was the
problem. Leonardo used a curious writing
technique to capture his musings.
It was written in an unusual script known
as mirror writing - written backward with the writing running in the
opposite direction from normal, with individual letters reversed. The script will appear normal only when it is
reflected in a mirror. As to why he chose
this approach he never said, and it remains a topic of debate to this day. He was left-handed (lettera
mancina). Left-handed myself, I can
vouch for how easy it is to smear ink moving left-handed
from left to right
across a page. Writing in
reverse, from the right side of a page to left, would prevent such smudging. Today, the use of pencils
and fast-drying ink pens helps alleviate the problem, though my early teachers
tried their best to break me of this supposed impediment. As an extremely primitive form of a cipher, mirror writing may have
also addressed a concern for security, making it harder for others to read or copy his
material. The solution he chose, in
addition to writing from the right of a page to its left, was to write
backward. He apparently could read and write
backward quite naturally.
Attempt writing some yourself and see how
far you get, then imagine the brilliance of the mind that could do it quickly
as he walked along the streets of Florence jotting down notes. Honestly, if I were ever stopped while
driving and asked to recite the alphabet backward, even while stone sober, I’d
have difficulty pulling it off. It would
certainly take me a while. Beyond
writing mirror script, reading it is just as difficult. With the help of my cellphone camera and
laptop, I used a mirror to craft an example (see here). It wasn’t easy to generate, and it’s
certainly
not easy to read. To hopefully help
decode it, I used a familiar pangram, a sentence that contains every letter of
the alphabet at least once, written in mirror script. To help just a bit more, here’s a hint. The sentence I’ve cobbled together has been
used by typing teachers for years to ensure students can cover all the keys
(solution below). A common modern usage
of mirror writing can be found on the front of ambulances in Europe, where the word "AMBULANCE" is
often written in very large mirrored text so that drivers see the word
correctly in their rear-view mirrors.
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| A Sample of Leonardo's Mirror Writing |
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| My Mirror Script Example |
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| Mirror Script in Use Today |
His codices, said to be thirty in number and comprising 7200 pages, provide insight
into the inquiring mind of the Renaissance's most creative thinker, artist, scientist, engineer, as well as the
one person of that time to demonstrate the link between the arts and science. Another creative genius, this one of our day, Steve
Jobs, who took Pixar from the trash heap of commercial failure to a mega empire said it best in 2003. He was insistent that computer scientists work
together with artists and designers - that the best ideas emerge from the intersection of
technology and the humanities. As Jobs put it, “One of the greatest
achievements at Pixar was that we brought these two cultures together and got
them working side by side.” Back at
Apple in 2011, he referred to this magic amalgam again when he said,
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| Steve Jobs at the Intersection of Technology and Art |
“It
is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married
with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that
make our heart sing.”
In striking similarity, the curious genius of Leonardo relied on scientific
observation combined with his artistic abilities, philosophy, imaginings, and even
fantasy to understand the world around him.
His mottos, these in particular, guided his ever-inquiring mind:
“All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.”
“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fail. Some work. You do more of what works. If it works big,
others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing
something else,”
How
alike Leonardo and Jobs appear in their approach to innovation, the combination
of technology and art.
Unlike da Vinci’s other manuscripts, usually covering
many topics, Codex
Leicester
is mainly dedicated to his study of water. However,
it doesn’t take the form of an undeviating script but is rather a mix of
Leonardo's observations and theories. Not willing to waste an inch of precious
paper, he was known to return to a codex sometimes years later to add
additional entries. This practice has
added confusion as to the chronology of his investigations, what he was working
on when. This helps explain why this
notebook, in addition to addressing
the movements of water, quickly expands into
astronomy (because Leonardo believed the moon’s surface was covered in water), to rocks, and fossils, air,
how reflected sunlight makes the moon glow in the night sky, properties of shade, and mechanics as he investigated aspects of impetus, percussion
(Newton’s “inertia” and “momentum” respectively), and wave action in the
movement of water, all supported by copious drawings and diagrams.
Da Vinci used
his extensive skills as an artist to create detailed illustrations of
everything from mechanical gears to the complex anatomy of heart valves. I may be spit-balling here just a bit but just
imagine if he could have seen one of those graphic 3D design workstations from
Pixar. Try to visualize his initial
shock, wonder, and eventual delight at the appearance of high-resolution images.
Based on the world as he knew it, he
would likely have thought they were paintings.
I can imagine him reaching forward attempting to touch the screen, feeling
for the paint. With movement in a scene,
might he try to catch Dory or Buzz Lightyear as they moved across the screen? Leonardo would certainly marvel at the rapid
changes in viewing angles, colors, and the accurate presentation of
perspective. Using modeling tools, the
tour de force might prove to be the quick real-time rendering of designs and then
with a click, see them in operation, a process that took months if not years for
him to accomplish. I’d wager he would
quickly come to the conclusion that this was not devil’s work, sorcery, or the
result of alchemy, but see it for what it was, the fruits of the sciences he’d dedicated
his life studying. Throw a 3D printer
into the demonstration, place the resulting prototype in his hands, and I’d
expect him to soon pray in thanks to Morpheus, the god of dreams.
Throughout his life, Leonardo made observations on such diverse subjects as the journey of
a rising water bubble, the swirls and eddies formed by water as it moved around
obstacles, why he found fossilized seashells and the bones of whales on
mountaintops, the nature of celestial light, to why the sky appeared blue. Even the tongue of a woodpecker intrigued him. Wondering how the brain of a woodpecker could continuously withstand
hard blows, he discovered that the tongue of a woodpecker acted as a cushion by wrapping itself around
its brain. While we have helmets and concussion
protocols for football players, Mother Nature’s built-in approach naturally
protected the woodpecker’s brain from shock.
With everything to see and explore, it could be
said that he had a child’s eye. As a
child might certainly wonder and sometimes ask “Why is the sky blue?” so did
Leonardo, although his question would have gone more along the lines, “Perchè
il cielo è azzurra?” (Why is the sky azure?).
However, going beyond just asking, he went about searching for the answer. There had to be a reason. Combining his interests in geology,
astronomy, hydrodynamics, and an artist’s understanding of colors, he developed
many theories, long before the scientific method arrived on the scene, to
eventually come up with an answer. Climbing
mountains to get higher in the atmosphere, conducting experiments with smoke
and colors, and harnessing his grasp of the properties of water, he was able to
conclude that the blue sky came down to water and the role it played in the
atmosphere. While he was stymied on what
caused rainbows, he was largely correct when he concluded in Codex Leicester
that, “The air takes the azure through the corpuscles of humidity, which catch
the luminous rays of the sun.” Traipsing
through the mountains he theorized, hundreds of years before plate tectonics became accepted scientific theory, that
mountains had previously been sea beds which had been gradually lifted until
they formed mountains. His observations
of the heavens led him to theorize one hundred years before Johannes Kepler would prove it, that the pale glow on the dark portion of a crescent moon is caused by sunlight reflected from the Earth, a phenomenon Leonardo
coined as “planetshine.”
These are only a few of his discoveries.
His was a nonlinear mind, not limited to one dimension, that
would shift here and there almost daily, leaping from one subject to another. He apparently couldn’t deal with the mundane conditions of clientage, contracts,
production, and delivery. He might work in one area only to be
distracted by something new and move on to that newfound interest. Painting led him to want to precisely
understand human musculature down to understanding the emotional expressions of
his subjects. This fixation on facial
expressions led him to dissection which in turn brought on his interest in human
anatomy and led him to breakthrough discoveries about the heart hundreds of
years before others would uncover the truths he’d found. Over time, his curiosity and passion for
knowledge allowed him to accumulate vast amounts of breakthrough scientific
information which unfortunately proved useful only to Leonardo. All along, his intent was to share his
discoveries but unfortunately, he was not overly driven to do it. It wasn’t that he was selfish or egotistical,
simply that there was so little time - so much to learn about nature and the
physical world and so little time to present his findings for others to draw upon.
His genius was hundreds of years ahead
of his time. Years earlier, he’d
paraphrased what Newton would address in his Third Law of Motion concerning
equal and opposite forces, Bernoulli’s Principle of less pressure the faster a
fluid flows, or the birth of fluid dynamics with his insight that while air can
be compressed, water cannot. While Leonardo’s
notebooks expressed his intentions to eventually compose treatises and write
essays explaining his discoveries, going so far as to include index layouts and
entries on how to compose and explain what he’d learned, he completed very few.
If he had any flaw, it was that he abandoned
many projects and seldom delivered, especially on commissioned works of art where a client’s specifications and schedules proved thorny. It seemed that once he had
conceptualized a painting or nearly finished it, he seemed to lose interest. Because his world lay at the intersection of
science and art, seldom was anything sufficiently completed to his satisfaction to declare
it complete and make delivery. If we
had to give this shortcoming a name, perhaps his was a “just right” obsessive
compulsiveness.
Art, da Vinci believed, was indisputably connected with
science and nature. For example, some
new discovery concerning light or swirling water might add just the expression
or sense of movement he was looking for in a painting. We might be correct to categorize him as a perfectionist, hampered by a
tendency to lose focus and a touch of attention deficit. As an example, he carried paintings with him
for years, never feeling they were complete to his satisfaction. These included one of “St John the Baptist”,
“The Virgin and Child with St Anne”, and painted on a plank of poplar said
to be the most alive portrait ever created, his masterpiece, “The Mona Lisa”. To think, we talk about face work today using
dermal facelift fillers, Botox and the like.
He worked on Lisa for 16 years adapting new techniques gleaned from
his study of light and nature. He’d sit hours
on end looking at it only to administer a single brushstroke. Mona Lisa del Giocondo was 24-years old, wife
of a family friend and silk merchant when she sat with Leonardo for the
portrait. To think, she was 40 when da
Vinci passed and never received or even saw her portrait.
Lately,
I’ve been fascinated
by this man. To me, he represents the
embodiment of the Renaissance. His
humble beginning and early life may help explain his later success. Leonardo was born in 1452 in Anchiano, Italy, a hamlet lying
in the Tuscan hills in about 3 km from the town of Vinci and about 40 km by
road from Florence. In fact, 2019 marked the 500th anniversary of his death in 1519. Because he was born out of
wedlock, in census records recorded as “non legittimo”, he wasn’t really
a part of his father’s family. Caterina
Lippi, his sixteen-year-old mother, was an orphaned local peasant girl. The circumstances of his birth may have been
fortunate for Leonardo and posterity because he was not expected to follow in
his father’s footsteps and become, like him, a notary. Instead, in the care of his stay at home uncle
and grandfather, his insatiable curiosity was free to
explore the fascinating world around him. This fate of birth freed him from being hamstrung by medieval dogmas,
allowing him to pursue the logic of an original thinker. Denied a formal education, he was essentially
self-taught. His math skills which never
reached the level of algebra lay mainly in geometry. At the age of 14, his father apprenticed him
to his friend, Andrea del Verrocchio, himself a Florentine artist and engineer.
After reviewing some of Leonardo’s
sketches provided by his father, Verrocchio was
reportedly astonished at his talent and snatched him up into his studio. Going beyond art, Leonardo’s engineering
abilities are best described as those of a
mechanical engineer evidenced by the
wealth of imaginative contraptions he conceived from tanks, flying machines, devises
to grind lenses, to bearings made of wood.
As described earlier, his interests were all over the map and crossed
many disciplines. His repertoire included
invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, city planning, science,
music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy,
botany, paleontology, and cartography.
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| Leonardo's Birthplace |
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| Wooden Ball Bearing |
We usually see Leonardo portrayed as a wizened old man, his face presented as a blend of contemporary
images of Santa Claus, God the Father, and old Methuselah. Thick overgrown eyebrows crown contemplative eyes,
while below a slightly hooked nose, his downturned mouth, lacking any hint of a
Mona Lisa smile, caps a beard extending to
mid-chest. There were probably many like him on the
streets of Florence, Milan, and Paris.
Yet if you met
him when he was a young man, you’d have noticed him. He was genial and a gentleman in every
respect. Handsome with golden curls and
a muscular physique. From a distance,
what would have caught your eye, urging you to move closer to appreciate his
finer points, were his clothes. He wore
distinctively bright and rose-colored clothing that branded him a “dandy” - a man who placed
particular importance on physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely
hobbies pursued with the appearance of nonchalance. These days the moniker “metrosexual,” someone who is
especially meticulous in their grooming and appearance, would be appropriate. A guy with a curated look straight out of “GQ
Magazine” might best describe the phenomenon, but there was more to it. Leonardo, like Michelangelo, his patron Verrocchio and others, was sexually
attracted to men. This was common in Florence’s
artistic community. At the age of 24,
anonymous charges were brought against him and others, leading to his arrest. In the roundup, Leonardo was fortunate that
one of the others arrested was related to the Medici family which ruled
Florence at the time. This was likely
the gauzy reality of why charges were subsequently dropped, though officially
it was attributed to the lack of witnesses. Leonardo never married and left no direct descendants,
though genealogical records have identified 35 people today related to Leonardo
da Vinci. What’s more, unlike the
average person, he was not motivated by wealth or possessions. Neither was he devoutly religious, nowhere
near as religious as Michelangelo, twenty years his junior. He was also a vegetarian whose love of nature
would not permit him to kill another creature. Never legitimized by his father, though he easily
could have been, he sensed that he was different, not accepted. Instead, obsessive in
his quest, he devoted himself to his research
interests, his engineering endeavors, his art, intertwined with a passionate
dedication to nature and in deciphering its mysteries. His astonishing skills of observation coupled
with a passionate intellect placed him in stark contrast to his contemporaries.
Was
it his unstructured freedom to explore and roam the countryside as a child,
some never before seen special DNA genetic brew or a dose of fantasy coupled
with childlike curiosity to question everything around him that made the difference? It is doubtful there was anyone
before and certainly since like Leonardo da Vinci, that colorfully dressed fellow who wrote backward in his notebooks. He
is known for more than his art, two of which remain among the world's most famous
and admired, the Louvre’s “Mona Lisa” and Milan’s “The Last Supper”. He knew he was different.
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| Typical Image of Leonardo |
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| A Reflection of Leonardo's Driving Curiosity of Nature |
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| The Never Delivered Mona Lisa |
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| Da Vinci's Last Supper |
Different not only in his make-up, but in his quiet rebellion to strict
adherence to the orthodoxy of the time, non-accepting of the strictures of
classical thinking, and to the denial of what to him was obvious. It was a new time, a renaissance in fact,
where Leonardo epitomized the “Renaissance Man.” Standing on the corner of
Technology Way and Art Street taking notes, he was clearly different and today is
known for the difference he made.
From That Rogue Tourist
Paolo
Solution to my Mirror Script Pangram:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
