Leonardo Da Vinci’s two Madrid Codices, the only manuscripts by the Renaissance genius that remain in Spain, can now be enjoyed online, thanks to “Interactive Leonardo”, created with Madgazine.
The Madrid I and II Codices, two works by the Renaissance genius who came to Spain thanks to Pompeo Leoni, Felipe II’s sculptor, represent one of the Spanish National Library’s greatest jewels. And now they are accessible online for everyone, thanks to this initiative that lets us interact with them and discover the notes, reflections, and, above all, inventions developed by Leonardo in one of his most fruitful periods.
From now on, anyone can access via Internet Da Vinci’s two work notebooks, transcribed in Italian and translated into modern Spanish. There is a specific index by content type (personal annotations, mechanics, crafts, etc.) and these works have been framed in their intellectual and temporal context. Additional multimedia content on the age which we have custom developed for this project can be accessed, for example, works such as the Sforza Horse, information on the Arno River, a map of his travels, and so on.
Madgazine, Madpixel’s cloud platform for creating spectacular interactive multi-device publications, was used to create “Interactive Leonardo”. Additionally, we have included some ad-hoc functionalities, such as the possibility of seeing the documents in a mirror (to better distinguish the handwriting and to read the original text, since Leonardo wrote “backwards”, as if in a mirror).
“Interactive Leonard”, besides from the codices themselves, contains more than 120 digitalized works of the Spanish National Library (BNE), 11 tracks of music from the period, 42 3D animations, more than a hundred pages with interactive content, nearly 100 quotes taken from the Madrid Codices, and a chronological map with forty files containing passages on Leonardo’s life and context.
In this project of the Spanish National Library, sponsored by Telefónica, the more than 700 pages that make up the two books have been digitalized and it has taken more than 20,000 work hours by a multi-disciplinary team made up of 40 professionals, among them librarians, researchers, IT technicians, designers and advisors.
