No his­tor­i­cal fig­ure bet­ter fits the def­i­n­i­tion of “Renais­sance man” than Leonar­do da Vin­ci, but that term has become so overused as to become mis­lead­ing. We use it to express mild sur­prise that one per­son could use both their left and right hemi­spheres equal­ly well. But in Leonardo’s day, peo­ple did not think of them­selves hav­ing two brains, and the worlds of art and sci­ence were not so far apart as they are now.

That Leonar­do was able to com­bine fine arts and fine engi­neer­ing may not have been over­ly sur­pris­ing to his con­tem­po­raries, though he was an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly bril­liant exam­ple of the phe­nom­e­non. The more we learn about him, the more we see how close­ly relat­ed the two pur­suits were in his mind.

He approached every­thing he did as a tech­ni­cian. The uncan­ny effects he achieved in paint­ing were the result, as in so much Renais­sance art, of math­e­mat­i­cal pre­ci­sion, care­ful study, and first­hand obser­va­tion.

His artis­tic projects were also exper­i­ments. Some of them failed, as most exper­i­ments do, and some he aban­doned, as he did so many sci­en­tif­ic projects. No mat­ter what, he nev­er under­took any­thing, whether mechan­i­cal, anatom­i­cal, or artis­tic, with­out care­ful plan­ning and design, as his copi­ous note­books tes­ti­fy. As more and more of those note­books have become avail­able online, both Renais­sance schol­ars and laypeo­ple alike have learned con­sid­er­ably more about how Leonardo’s mind worked.

First, there was the Codex Arun­del, dig­i­tized by the British Library and made freely avail­able. It is, writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, “the liv­ing record of a uni­ver­sal mind”—but also, specif­i­cal­ly, the mind of a “technophile.” Then, the Vic­to­ria and Albert Nation­al Art Library announced the dig­i­ti­za­tion of Codex Forster, which con­tains some of Leonardo’s ear­li­est note­books. Now The Visu­al Agency has released a com­plete dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanti­cus, a huge col­lec­tion of the artist, engi­neer, and inventor’s fine­ly-illus­trat­ed notes.

(Note: If you speak Eng­lish, make sure you click the “EN” but­ton at the bot­tom right hand cor­ner of the site. Also see “How to Read” at the top of the site.)

“No oth­er col­lec­tion counts more orig­i­nal papers writ­ten by Leonar­do,” notes Google. The Codex Atlanti­cus “con­sists of 1119 papers, most of them drawn or writ­ten on both sides.” Its name has “noth­ing to do with the Atlantic Ocean, or with some eso­teric, mys­te­ri­ous con­tent hid­den in its pages.” The 12-vol­ume col­lec­tion acquired its title because the draw­ings and writ­ings were bound with the same sized paper that was used for mak­ing atlases. Gath­ered in the 16th cen­tu­ry by sculp­tor Pom­peo Leoni, the papers descend­ed from Leonardo’s close stu­dent Gio­van Francesco Melzi, who was entrust­ed with them after his teacher’s death.

The his­to­ry of the Codex itself makes for a fas­ci­nat­ing nar­ra­tive, much of which you can learn at Google’s Ten Key Facts slideshow. The note­books span Leonardo’s career, from 1478, when he was “still work­ing in his native Tus­cany, to 1519, when he died in France.” The col­lec­tion was tak­en from Milan by Napoleon and brought to France, where it remained in the Lou­vre until 1815, when the Con­gress of Vien­na ruled that all art­works stolen by the for­mer Emper­or be returned. (The emis­sary tasked with return­ing the Codex could not deci­pher Leonardo’s mir­ror writ­ing and took it for Chi­nese.)

The Codex con­tains not only engi­neer­ing dia­grams, anato­my stud­ies, and artis­tic sketch­es, but also fables writ­ten by Leonar­do, inspired by Flo­ren­tine lit­er­a­ture. And it fea­tures Leonardo’s famed “CV,” a let­ter he wrote to the Duke of Milan describ­ing in nine points his qual­i­fi­ca­tions for the post of mil­i­tary engi­neer. In point four, he writes, “I still have very con­ve­nient bomb­ing meth­ods that are easy to trans­port; they launch stones and sim­i­lar such in a tem­pest full of smoke to fright­en the ene­my, caus­ing great dam­age and con­fu­sion.”

As if in illus­tra­tion, else­where in the Codex, the draw­ing above appears, “one of the most cel­e­brat­ed” of the col­lec­tion.” It was “shown to trav­el­ing for­eign­ers vis­it­ing the Ambrosiana [the Bib­liote­ca Ambrosiana in Milan, where the Codex resides] since the 18th cen­tu­ry, usu­al­ly arous­ing much amaze­ment.” It is still amaz­ing, espe­cial­ly if we con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that its artistry might have been some­thing of a byprod­uct for its cre­ator, whose pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion seems to have been solv­ing tech­ni­cal problems—in the most ele­gant ways imag­in­able.

See the com­plete dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonardo’s Codex Atlanti­cus here. And again, click “EN” for Eng­lish at the bot­tom of the site, and then “How to Read” at the top of the site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (1482)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The water­col­or paint­ing has a rep­u­ta­tion for light­ness. It’s a casu­al endeav­or, done in scenic out­door sur­round­ings on sun­lit days. Water­col­ors are the choice of week­end hob­by­ists or chil­dren unready for messier mate­ri­als. Water­col­ors, in oth­er words, are often treat­ed as unse­ri­ous. But for a cou­ple hun­dred years, they served a very seri­ous pur­pose. In addi­tion to being a portable medi­um with an expan­sive range, water­col­ors’ ease made them the pri­ma­ry means of mak­ing doc­u­men­tary images before pho­tog­ra­phy com­plete­ly took over this func­tion by the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry when portable con­sumer cam­eras became a real­i­ty.

“Before the inven­tion of the cam­era,” explains the Water­colour World, “peo­ple used water­col­ors to doc­u­ment the world. Over the cen­turies, painters—both pro­fes­sion­al and amateur—created hun­dreds of thou­sands of images record­ing life as they wit­nessed it. Every one of these paint­ings has a sto­ry to tell.”

The Water­colour World is a large-scale dig­i­ti­za­tion of thou­sands of water­col­ors found hid­den away in draw­ers all over the UK by for­mer diplo­mat Fred Hohler, who came up with the idea for the project while on a tour of Britain’s pub­lic col­lec­tions.

“The value—and excitement—of the Water­colour World project,” writes Dale Bern­ing Sawa at The Guardian, “is that it views these his­toric paint­ings as doc­u­ments, not aes­thet­ic objects.” That’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly how their cre­ators’ saw them. “A lot of the val­ue in these images is… acci­den­tal. Often it’s the context—replete with tree­lines, snow­lines or waterlines—the artist paint­ed around, for exam­ple, the flower they’d set out to record.” Such acci­den­tal doc­u­men­ta­tion cap­tured one of the first known images of Mount Ever­est, sit­u­at­ed in the back­ground, in a paint­ing from the 1840s. Of course much of the doc­u­men­tary pur­pose was intentional—in land sur­veys and sci­en­tif­ic illus­tra­tions, and in the many paint­ings, like that above from 1833, of Mount Vesu­vius erupt­ing.

These images are becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant to sci­en­tists and his­to­ri­ans as ice-caps melt, his­tor­i­cal sites are bombed or van­dal­ized, and flo­ra and fau­na dis­ap­pear. With a focus on pre-1900 images, the site launched with around 80,000 dig­i­tized water­col­ors, a num­ber that could expand into over a mil­lion, Hohler esti­mates, at which point, it will become an “absolute­ly indis­pens­able tool to help us under­stand today.” As for under­stand­ing the con­text in which these works were created—it’s com­pli­cat­ed. Many of the paint­ings come with a wealth of iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion. Some of the artists were pro­fes­sion­als, some mil­i­tary drafts­men, botanists, expe­di­tion water­col­orists, and sur­vey­ors.

Some had long, dis­tin­guished careers tak­ing over oth­er coun­tries, like colo­nial British Gen­er­al James Mau­rice Prim­rose, who paint­ed sev­er­al very impres­sive land­scapes in India like 1860’s “In the Neil­gher­ries,” above. And there are also “untold num­bers of ama­teurs,” Sawa writes, “which Hohler sus­pects will turn out to have been most­ly women, unpaid for their time and skill—who picked up a paint­brush to record the world around them.” Who­ev­er these painters were, and what­ev­er moti­vat­ed them to make these works of art, we can be grate­ful that they did, and that these thou­sands of paint­ings, many of which are quite frag­ile, sur­vived long enough for dig­i­ti­za­tion in this impres­sive pub­lic project.

“By mak­ing his­to­ry more vis­i­ble to more peo­ple,” the Water­colour World puts it, “we can deep­en our under­stand­ing of the world.” The UK-based orga­ni­za­tion seeks paint­ings from around the globe; “there are thou­sands of water­colours still to add.” If you have some pre-1900 works to con­tribute, you are encour­aged to get in touch and find out if they’re suit­able for inclu­sion. Enter the Water­colour World here.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

The Get­ty Dig­i­tal Archive Expands to 135,000 Free Images: Down­load High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of Paint­ings, Sculp­tures, Pho­tographs & Much Much More

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness