Seattle Times
Entertainment & the Arts: Tuesday, October 14, 1997
Codex History -- A Coveted Trophy For The Intellectually Curious
The Codex Leicester is a folio of scientific notes and observations that Leonardo da Vinci made during a several-year stay in Milan beginning in 1508. As usual, he divided his time between painting - he was busy working on his luminous "Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" - and continuing his studies on geometry and human anatomy. But in what we now call the Codex Leicester, Leonardo also kept notes on his experiments with hydraulics and his observations about the relationship of the moon to the earth.
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On Nov. 11, 1994, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates purchased it from Christie's for $30.8 million.
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In the preface he wrote to the Seattle Art Museum catalog for the upcoming show, Gates makes clear that his fascination with the codex has to do with Leonardo's scientific inquisitiveness.
"Leonardo pursued knowledge with unrelenting energy," Gates writes. "His scientific `notebooks' are awe inspiring not simply as repositories of his remarkable ideas but as records of a great mind at work. In the pages of the Codex Leicester, he frames important questions, tests concepts, confronts challenges, and strives for answers. . . . His writings demonstrate that creativity drives discovery, and that art and science - often seen as opposites - can in fact inform and influence each other."
