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Leonardo

Serge Bramly

534 pages

An intimate, awe-inspiring glimpse into the restless, brilliant mind of history's greatest polymath.

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What it feels like

Reading this feels less like consuming a traditional narrative and more like wandering through a quiet, dimly lit archive with a master thinker. The pace is inherently meandering, inviting you to linger over marginal sketches of water currents and decipher the logic behind centuries-old mirror script. It is a deeply intimate and intellectual experience, wrapping the reader in a contemplative mood that borders on reverence. The text oscillates between raw, fragmentary bursts of genius and the steady, scholarly hand of modern curation. It is a book for the endlessly curious—those who find poetry in hydraulics and art in astronomy—offering a profound sense of awe at the boundless capacity of human observation.

Mood
  • contemplative
  • intellectual
  • intimate
  • awe-inspiring
Tone
  • scholarly
  • reverent
  • analytical
  • curious
Pace
meandering
Themes
boundless curiosity · intersection of art and science · the pursuit of knowledge · observation of the natural world
The writing
A blend of fragmentary, inquisitive primary observations and meticulous, scholarly contextualization.
The arc
Begins with historical curiosity and deepens into profound reverence for the sheer scale of human ingenuity.
Who it's for
Polymaths at heart who delight in the raw, unfiltered process of discovery and the tactile history of manuscripts.

About the book

Bill Gates bought the Codex Leicester a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci's scientific observations and theories in 1994 from the estate of Armand Hammer for $30.8 million. Last year Gates loaned the work to Australia's Powerhouse Museum, which prepared this companion to its exhibition. No longer in codex form (the pages were bound in the 1600s, but Gates had the binding dismantled for digital reproduction), the manuscript ranges over topics from fossils to astronomy. Each recto of this edition reproduces one of Leonardo's pages, written in mirror-script Italian with sketches jotted in the margins; a discussion (but not a translation) appears on the verso. It includes an introduction to Leonardo's life, but no index.

Description from Open Library.

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