Why does water swirl down a drain? Why do mountains look blue in the distance? Why is the sky blue?
It adds a layer of mystery. You feel like you are decoding a secret message from a time traveler. We live in the age of specialization. You are a "doctor" or a "lawyer" or a "programmer." Leonardo hated that. The Codex Leicester is a manifesto for generalists.
In 1994, the Microsoft founder paid for the manuscript at a Christie’s auction. That’s roughly $500,000 per page. At the time, it was the most expensive book ever sold. (Gates later had it scanned into a digital format for Windows 95 CD-ROMs—a perfect marriage of Renaissance curiosity and digital futurism). Water: The Star of the Show What did Leonardo obsess over in these 72 pages? Water. the codex leicester
But there is another Leonardo. A Leonardo of obsessive curiosity, of messy reverse-script handwriting, and of questions so vast they stretched the limits of 16th-century science.
That Leonardo lives in the Codex Leicester . Why does water swirl down a drain
And 500 years later, we are still listening. Have you ever tried mirror-writing? Would you pay $30 million for a used notebook? Let me know in the comments below!
In one paragraph, he jumps from the flow of a river to the cratering of the moon to the growth of a tree. He saw no barrier between art, science, and nature. To him, the curl of water in a fountain followed the same mathematical rules as the curl of hair on a human head. You don’t need $30 million to think like Leonardo. You just need a notebook and a willingness to ask dumb questions. It adds a layer of mystery
Leonardo was left-handed, and it’s believed he wrote this way to avoid smudging wet ink as his hand dragged across the page. To read it, you literally have to hold the page up to a mirror.