About
"LILeo" is an open source web-publishing platform for the cataloguing and display of Leonardo’s personal library items, and the reconstruction of Leonardo’s creative process that interlaces words and images in the form of emblems. The project, developed in collaboration with the Rutgers Digital Humanities Laboratory, involves the digital reconstruction of Leonardo’s library under the direction of the preeminent Leonardo scholar Carlo Vecce for an exhibition to be held at the Museo Leonardiano of Vinci in 2019.
“LILeo” is composed of three basic sections: item, collection, and exhibit. The first two sections—item and collection—serve primarily to classify and organize the data according to their provenance. Each item is visualized under the title of the manuscript or the book to which it belongs, and the page on which it features. Items are gathered into collections that are named after the physical archives where they are preserved. The exhibit section is devoted to the analysis and interpretation of the data (i.e. linking a fable to an emblem, and an emblem to a mathematical law). This section contains exhibits on the evolution of Leonardo’s fables into emblems (sequence 1 and 2), and on the development of the books belonging to his personal library—particularly Aesop’s and Pliny’s works—into Leonardo’s visual narratives (sequence 3).
My goal is to digitally enable the juxtaposition and layering of drafts belonging to similar projects in Leonardo’s works and sources, in order to identify aesthetic and scientific patterns in his output, uncover the origins of his interdisciplinary research, and reveal his development of a hieroglyphic language. Furthermore, I created a section (sequence 4) that illustrates how this digital catalogue can be expanded to present-day visual culture, allowing to examine the impact of Leonardo’s visual sequences on contemporary writers (such as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Carlo Emilio Gadda) and artists (Andrey Tarkovsky, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, and Peter Greenaway).