Leonardo da Vinci was ahead of his time in many ways. His notebooks are renowned for their plans and sketches of inventions, including a bicycle, a machine gun, contact lenses, a parachute and a diving suit. Less well known is the extent to which Leonardo could have done with a publisher to produce a multimedia edition of his work. Only now, nearly 500 years after his death, has he found one.
Today, bandwidth is scarce, and Web site designers have to balance speed with whizzy features. In Leonardo's day, paper was scarce, and he had to use every available square inch, with references to other sheets when he ran out of space. As a result his notes - for an epic series of textbooks that Leonardo hoped would redefine scientific method - look like a complete dog's breakfast. Following Leonardo's death in 1519, the books were never published - and, looking at the notes, it's easy to see why.
"It is not possible to define this here for lack of paper, but go to the beginning of the chapter at folio 40 where this is defined," reads one scrawled hyperlink. When you get to folio 40, you have to follow a trail that runs backwards through the twelve preceding pages. "Go to page 59," says another note. "Read page 45," says another. "Here is finished what is lacking three pages before this," says yet another.
It gets worse: Leonardo was left-handed, and his habit of writing right-to-left in mirror script in order to prevent smudging makes reading his notebooks even more confusing. And different subjects are frequently mixed up on a single page - sometimes because of lack of space, and sometimes because that was just the way Leonardo's brain worked. "My concern is to find cases and inventions, gathering them as they occur to me," he wrote in one note. "Therefore you will not wonder, nor will you laugh at me, reader, if here I make such great jumps from one subject to the other."
Leonardo also included links to pictures elsewhere in his notebooks: "This is drawn in the margin at the bottom four folios following," says one. Unfortunately, he was ahead of his time once again: his illustrations were way ahead of anything the printing presses of his day could reproduce. Printing had, after all, only been around in Europe for 40 years.
Some have suggested that the notebooks' unconventional structure - a sort of hyperlinked data soup - was a deliberate ploy to foil Giovanni, a German industrial spy who wanted to get his hands on Leonardo's research into the military applica-tion of mirrors. Whatever the actual reasons for Leonardo's use of paper hypertext, to the modern eye his works cry out for presentation in multimedia form. And now the first properly cross-linked digital edition of one of Leonardo's notebooks has been produced by Corbis, Bill Gates' media company. The ROM, Leonardo da Vinci, is based upon a digitised version of the Codex Leicester, a 36-page notebook that Gates purchased anonymously at auction for US$30.8 million. (Bill admits that he has been fascinated by Leonardo since the age of ten.)
The CD-ROM edition of the Codex Leicester is more than just a high-resolution colour facsimile. The authors have reconnected the threads of Leonardo's arguments through a nifty piece of user interface design that does a better job of untangling Leonardo's notes, and hence his thought processes, than any previous rendition of his work.
Modern readers can make sense of the notebooks using a tool cheekily dubbed the Codescope, which both translates Leonardo's writing (after flipping it to make it the right way round) and allows the material in the Codex to be navigated thematically. "The structure of Leonardo's drawings and writings is never linear," says Professor Martin Kemp, a leading Leonardo scholar and the ROM's senior editor. "Even a single page may contain a complex network of cross-references that confuses or confounds the reader. This CD-ROM allows us to keep up with Leonardo's thoughts."
The Codescope is also a fine example of something that is all too rare in multimedia: a feature that offers the user an experience that genuinely wouldn't be available in any other medium. Armed with the Codescope, we can explore the Codex Leicester's vast range of subjects, including the properties of water, the phases of the moon, light and shade, mechanics, hydraulics, astronomy, cosmology, paleontology and geology. We can accompany Leonardo as he surfs the fringes of the scientific knowledge of his day, leaping from subject to subject as the mood takes him.
"Systematically and creatively we may explore his world," says Professor Kemp, "connecting seemingly disparate comments and illustrations - something the Renaissance scientist, inventor and artist would truly appreciate."
Tom Standage is your average left-brain/right brain kind of guy. He's also deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph's Connected section.
Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM for PC and Mac: distributed by Corbis. Available in the US; expected out in the UK in early 1997.