Data visualization as a tool to access Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest work
By: The Visual Agency Editorial
Tags: Leonardo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Data Visualization, Leonardo500, Codex Atlanticus

These initial studies have identified the Codex Atlanticus as the work with the greatest experimental interest; therefore the need of shaping a tool of digital humanities that helped the analysis and the communication of such an articulated content as the one inside these 1,119 pages. From an analytical point of view all papers contain different types of drawings and writings. In order to create an application capable of reporting such heterogenous content our research had to extend into multiple dimensions.

The first dimension concerns the pictures of the pages. Thanks to an archive in concession to Mondadori Portfolio the leaves have been digitized, cropped and cleaned up in order to be used in the application.

The second dimension concerns the writings. The possibility to report the original transcription of the texts has been discarded because the ancient Italian together with dialectal forms and several abbreviations is extremely difficult to understand, even for an Italian today. There was another possibility represented by the so called critical transcription (a specific transcription approach into contemporary Italian language) that unfortunately is protected by rights belonging to third parties and, in any case, too extensive to be translated in English.

At this point a new path has been opened up: finding which topics and subject are treated on every single page in order to represent the Maestro’s thoughts. The philological study of the Codex Atlanticus’ content, made by Augusto Marinoni in the seventies, provided a solution. Augusto Marinoni, professor of Romance studies at the Catholic University of Milan, considered the greatest expert on the philology of Leonardo da Vinci, published his studies in the book Il Codice Atlantico di Leonardo da Vinci : indici per materie e alfabetico (The codex atlanticus by Leonardo da Vinci: alphabetical table of content and by subject) edited by Pietro C. Marani in 2004. In addition to a substantial critical analysis of the work, the philological study contains a list of 140 topics and where they are treated, as well as an estimation of the year of writing for every sheets.

Thanks to this philological study we started to conceive a visualization capable of showing the evolution of Leonardo da Vinci’s thought through the years of his life.

Creating a brand new dataset

The very first step in the process was to understand how to get and build a consistent dataset. The index of Marinoni’s work was, in fact, a classification of all the subjects and topics contained in each page of the Codex. Starting from the digitization of this authoritative source we were able to create our very first textual dataset describing all 1.119 pages.

At the end of this (manual!🖖) transcription phase we had a 45.000+ raws excel file containing the list of topics treated in each page and, for most of them, the year in which they were written. Given the huge amount of topics (140) identified by Marinoni, we decided to group them into 5 subjects that could be easily associated to the content of the pages and could help us to make information accessible.

We decided to make this dataset open source and available on the website codex-atlanticus.it

The dataset has been finally completed adding the high-resolution images of the pages, protected by copyright, that we obtained thanks to the concession of Mondadori Portfolio and the Ambrosiana library.

Understanding and sketching data

The design of the page module was the result of a long process of sketching data. Our goal was to find a flexible visualization of the single page that could be easily scaled down, readable and, at the same time, able to show an intuitive overview of the codex composition.

We created a custom module that visually summarized the subjects contained in a page as well as the numerical and chronological order of the page in the collection. The final result was the consequence of different attempts to combine the data of the page in a single visualization.