Manuscript Offers Look at Leonardo Da Vinci’s Genius

The dinosaurs have a new neighbor.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, bought by Bill Gates two years ago for $30.8 million, is on display at the American Museum of Natural History after a yearlong farewell tour of Italy.

Written between 1506 and 1510 in the great artist-inventor’s delicate mirror script, the codex comprises 72 pages illustrated with more than 300 drawings and diagrams.

The exhibit at the natural history museum--the first in the United States since Gates bought the manuscript--runs through Jan. 1. It presents the linen pages in dimly lighted display cases with excerpts translated into English.

Visitors also can use computers to examine the document in more detail.

“It is a magical work and offers an excellent perspective from which to see the workings of its creator’s mind,” curator Craig Morris, dean of science at the museum, said at a press preview in October.

The codex’s main subject is water, with sections on swamp drainage, the properties of a drop of water and what Leonardo saw as the analogy between the flow of water on Earth and the flow of blood through the body.

One of the most brilliant discoveries described in the manuscript is that a crescent moon’s dim light is the reflection of light from Earth and its oceans.

Even without being able to read Italian backward, the viewer can grasp something of Leonardo’s imaginative range by peering at the sketches of siphon systems or a tiny seesaw.

“The Codex Leicester reveals the universal nature of Leonardo’s genius, which unites an unparalleled scientific curiosity with equally acute powers of observation,” said Ellen Futter, president of the museum.

Morris said Leonardo apparently wrote backward not to fool anyone--it is easy enough to hold his notes up to a mirror--but simply because he found it easier to write right to left.

The codex is the only Leonardo manuscript in private hands; its $30.8-million price tag is the most ever paid for a manuscript.

The work has a history of baronial ownership.

It was purchased in 1717 by Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester, whose descendants kept it until the late 20th century.

Industrialist Armand Hammer bought it for $5.6 million in 1980 and renamed it the Codex Hammer. Gates, the software mogul, bought it in November 1994 and restored its name to Codex Leicester.

The manuscript spent the last year on a farewell tour of Italy, drawing thousands of visitors in Venice, Milan and Rome.