Leonardo da Vinci

"Leonardo daVinci"---What do you recall when you hear this name?
An artist? or An inventor? or An architecture??

Now "Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition" is held in Roppongi Hills. Since I saw the poster at the station a couple of months ago, I had been looking forward to it. And today, I went there after the work.

When you think about da Vinci, most of you might recognize him as an artist. He surely is because he left several famous paintings, like "The Mona Lisa," "The Last Supper," and "The Virgin of Rocks."

BUT this is just one side of his character. In reality, he described himself as a "scientist." For proof of that, while his paintings are just about ten and most of those are unfinished, the codex that he took his own study and experiment down are left at least 8,000 pages! The one of those codices, The Codex Leicester, is featured in this exhibition.

The room where the codex were displayed was very dark. According to the explanation, they can't light them strongly because of the quality preservation. The Codex Leicester consists of 18 pieces of paper, and we can see the entire pages in this exhibition. Each Paper was put between the glasses and the lighting was pretty weakly. In addition to it, the light faded out in shortly. So I had to move to another paper when the light faded out.

His study covered the astronomy, the anatomy, the architecture, the nature, the geology, and more. He recorded those studies with beautiful sketches. And the most surprising thing was that he wrote in mirrored character. It means you can read normally if you see it in a mirror.

How can I describe him? I can say just "He is the very genius." And I can also say "Genius is only one remove from insanity."

By way of parenthiesis, this codex now belongs to Bill Gates from Microsoft. He provides it once a year in one place in the world. Of course, this is the first exhibition in Japan. I am very curious to know which city this is going to be held next...