Most people know Leonardo da Vinci from his paintings , but the artist also had the intellect of an engineer , as evidenced by the 100 of page he used to chalk out out his inventions . Now , two of the notebooks he left behind are being made usable for the populace to view . AsThe Art Newspaperreports , the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has published a digitalize version of Codex Forster Ionline .
Codex Forster I — named for John Forster , who donated the book to the museum in 1876 — is a bound mass consisting of two of Leonardo ’s personal notebook . Dated from 1487 to 1505 , it contains both the early and the most late Leonardo da Vinci notebooks in the V&A ’s collection .
The subject feature some of the artist ’s invention related to hydraulic engineering , including devices for digging canals and adjusting water supply levels , as well as his thoughts on measuring solids . The text is written in " mirror - writing"—which means all the letters and dustup are backwards and can only be decrypt when obligate up to a mirror . Because he wasleft - handed , this method of committal to writing allowed Leonardo to compose chop-chop without blur the ink .
On the Victoria and Albert Museum ’s website , visitors can now take their fourth dimension browsing and zooming in on the varlet of Codex Forster I. upload the notebooks made them accessible to a globose interview , but that ’s not the only ground they were digitalise : Having an online version signify the museum can focus on preserving the physical copy for C to come , instead of hand it off to researchers and shortening its lifetime .
The two other Leonardo notebook computer volume in the V&A ’s collection , Codex Forster II and III , have n’t received the web handling yet , but the museum project to make them fully viewable online sometime in 2019 .
[ h / tThe Art Newspaper ]
