The Vespiary Book Binding & Book Conservation

I often curse when I have to reverse patch up jobs done on books with poor materials and inept hands, so it’s somewhat comforting to hear that this happens on a much larger scale as well.

The Ambrosiana Library of Milan has announced that they are going to dismantle the Codex Atlanticus, a huge collection of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, thereby reversing a misguided (and controversial) restoration project of the 70s and returning the pages to their original loose state.

The Codex Atlanticus (called so because of its atlas-like enormous size) has not had an easy life, and teaches many lessons of how NOT to care for a precious manuscript.  With the best of intentions, an Italian sculptor named Pompeo Leoni gathered together as many of da Vinci’s drawings from Leo’s assistant, Francesco Melzi, and then cut them up into a thousand pieces and pasted them in giant notebooks.  That’s right, he cut up the originals and bound them thematically as he saw fit.  The Codex Atlanticus contains most of the technical and scientific drawings, while anatomical and naturalist ones went into other codices.  He often mounted the original folio pages in paper frames so that one could see both front and back.  Unfortunately by doing this, much of Leonardo’s margin notes were obscured.  With one fell swoop, Leonardo’s original filing system was totally annihilated.

Skip ahead to 1966.  A contract to dismantle Leoni’s work is drawn up between the Ambrosiana Library (who had acquired the Codex back in 1636) and the Grottaferrata Monks (the last Byzantine-Greek monastery in existence).  This contract specified that no one could observe the restoration work performed in the Laboratorio di Restauro.  According to Carlo Pedretti, a da Vinci scholar, even more damage was incurred by submerging the pages in water and alcohol, and then badly touched up.

Given that the most recent sale of a Leonardo drawing fetched 25 million dollars, the damage caused by this restoration was genuinely incalculable.

A side controversy erupted during this dismantling, the discovery of what some have thought to be a drawing of a bicycle, 300 years before it was invented.  Prescient sketch? Assistant doodle?  Or hoax that was perpetrated while the codex was entrusted to the monastery?  Read the article.

Now, the museum is going to undo what was done by the monks, and split out each individual page for examination and proper treatment.  The museum also addressed concerns about blooming stains with assurances that the marks were not a dreaded mold attack, but mercury salts added as a disinfectant to protect the codex from bacterial damage.

More:

• The Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia has a nice listing of the various manuscripts and a brief synopsis of the contents and current owner (i.e. Codex Leicester is owned by Bill Gates).
• The Guardian has an additional mystery surrounding some drawings called the Windsor Folios.  Even without all the hubbub surrounding The da Vinci Code, there’s plenty of mystery and omertá surrounding Leo’s work.
• L3 - a company that offers an array of digital media and international exhibits on da Vinci’s inventions and work.  They have an interactive Codex Atlanticus on CD-ROM available - I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy and give you the full report.
• Lastly, the Universal Leonardo site.  The timeline at the top of each page is fun to play with.