Word: codex
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...display follows a theme of Leonardo da Vinci exhibits throughout the country, following the coattails of Da Vinci's Codex Leceister, the artist's 16th-century manuscript that Bill Gates bought in 1994 for $30.8 million which is currently on display in Paris at the Musee du Luxembourg...
Even for a duke of cyberspace like Bill Gates, the price seemed steep. In 1994 he paid the estate of oil baron Armand Hammer $30.8 million for one of Leonardo da Vinci's lesser notebooks. Compared with the Renaissance master's other surviving manuscripts, Codex Leicester (named for the English family that owned it for two centuries) is trifling, just 18 sheets of linen paper folded in half to produce 72 pages. It contains only modest samples of Leonardo's celebrated draftsmanship--no spectacular drawings of flying machines, no cutaways of the human anatomy or exploded views of geared gadgetry...
Gates, who says Leonardo has always been a personal hero, is now letting the world glimpse his treasure. In a stunning exhibition titled "Codex Leicester: A Masterpiece of Science" at New York City's American Museum of Natural History, Leonardo's precious sheets are beautifully displayed in climate-controlled glass cases, illuminated only intermittently to protect the ancient ink and paper, while skilled docents use working models to repeat Leonardo's experiments. At nearby computer terminals, museumgoers view digitized images of the manuscript close up, reading English translations alongside Leonardo's Italian, zeroing in on specific drawings and flipping back...
...fragments' early origins, Thiede notes that the handwriting on the Magdalen Papyrus is in a style known as uncial, which began to die out in the middle of the 1st century. A second clue to the manuscript's origins is its format. The three fragments are from a codex, a primitive kind of book in which writing is found on both sides of the papyrus. (On a scroll, by contrast, only one side is used.) Contrary to the views of most biblical scholars, Thiede argues that codices were widely used by 1st century Christians, since they were easier to handle...
...transferred the other half offshore, to Mr. Codex here,'' Dad says, ``and he converted it into the local currency -- tax free...