The Weimar's copy of the Codex Leicester: creative approaches of Leonardo from Bossi to Goethe

Abstract

At the beginning of the 19th Century one copy of the manuscript of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester catalyzed the interest of the artist Giuseppe Bossi, the scientist Giambattista Venturi and the poet-scientist Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Their interest was first of all historical, but their studies were very different from the more modern ‘Leonardo scholarship’, to the point of becoming a free creative appropriation of Leonardo’s text. A method that contemporary historicism does not approve, but that’s just for this reason, attracts us and that it’s important understanding and knowing better because it is a form of approach no longer allowed to use.