When Bill Gates purchased Leondardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester in 1994,
part of a broad buyout of images and content, he went to the Seattle Art
Museum (SAM) to stage an exhibition. And today, SAM hosts what will
prove to me the most highly attended show in its history, a multimedia
circus titled "Leonardo Lives" that showcases the last privately owned
da Vinci notebook in the world.

As gallerists and curators are keen to note, new media has changed the
landscape of the *museum* as much as it has changed art. In this
exhibition, computer mock-ups of the da Vinci notebook are given nearly
equal billing to the manuscript itself, creating an interesting dynamic
between the museum-goers's fascination with cultural artifacts and,
especially in this part of the country, their interest in computers. The
codex is not bound but shown page by page in a confusing arrangement on
the main exhibition floor. For preservation reasons the manuscript pages
are displayed under glass and lit for only one minute out of five.

Next door, gobs of computer terminals offer digitized walk-throughs of
the codex thanks to Corbis's "Leonardo da Vinci" CD-ROM, a fascinating
entry-point for the notebook. Mesmerizing the museum goers and nearly
upstaging the codex itself, the CD-ROM features the complete content of
Codex Leicester photographically reproduced. Then, using a clever
lens-like movable overlay, the user is able to zoom in on a particular
page and in real time translate the text into several different modes
including a mirror image of the text (da Vinci wrote the notebook
backwards and from right to left, allegedly due to to his
left-handedness), an Italian transcription and finally an English
translation. Synopses are also available for each section of each page.

After an extended run Leonardo Lives closes this weekend at the Seattle
Art Museum.