In the basement of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, in Milan, a conservator named Vito Milo had simply carried out a small gel strip to the threshold of a 500-year-old drawing to be able to dissolve the glue that joined it to a bigger paper body. Now, with a scalpel, he labored unfastened a couple of millimeters of the drawing. I requested Milo what was once within the gel, and after he rattled off an inventory of elements in Italian, I introduced a layman’s tough translation: “particular sauce.” He smiled and nodded. “Si, particular sauce.”

The drawing was once a web page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, and I were invited to witness the painstaking technique of its conservation. One morning closing wintry weather, I descended to the conservators’ laboratory, which occupies a room simply outdoor the steel-and-glass doorway to the Ambrosiana’s gleaming vault. On the backside of the steps, I used to be stopped by means of an attendant, who took a espresso cup from my fingers and positioned it out of injury’s method.

The Codex Atlanticus is a 1,119-page number of da Vinci’s engineering designs and technological desires—for flying machines, guns of conflict, hydraulic units—along side line after line of statement in a small, exact hand. It’s the greatest number of works by means of da Vinci on the earth. The folio pages, as soon as sure right into a unmarried quantity, are actually preserved as person sheets. The only Milo was once bent over—folio 855 recto, with its design for a parabolic swing bridge—rested at the glass of an LED gentle field. Da Vinci’s brown ink stood out sharply towards a sparkling background. Having a look intently, inches from the web page, I may just make out the recommendation of a little bit guy on horseback atop the bridge, rendered in a couple of flicks—a playful addition for scale.

I used to be reminded of this discuss with to the Ambrosiana after I noticed the announcement of a da Vinci exhibition, “Imagining the Long term,” on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in Washington, D.C. Twelve authentic folios from the Codex Atlanticus have simply long past on show—the primary time any of the Codex pages have traveled to the USA. The display, which runs thru August 20, has understandably gotten consideration: We all know what “da Vinci” indicates—his title popularity is common.

“Ambrosiana,” after all, is any other tale.

The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is likely one of the international’s least-known nice museums—to the general public, at any price, if to not students. It occupies a good-looking 400-year-old development, only some blocks from Milan’s well-known cathedral, however receives best about 180,000 guests a 12 months. The Vatican Museums, in Rome, welcome that quantity each and every week. The Ambrosiana was once based in 1607 by means of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, who named it after the town’s patron, St. Ambrose, and endowed it along with his personal in depth number of books, manuscripts, and artworks.

The art work owned by means of the Ambrosiana are small in quantity however selection in high quality: Botticelli, Caravaggio, Titian, Bruegel, and da Vinci himself. The newly restored initial caricature achieved by means of Raphael ahead of he painted The Faculty of Athens—9 ft top and 26 ft lengthy—takes up a complete wall of 1 gallery. A enormous learn about in charcoal and lead-white on grey paper, it’s emotionally extra brilliant than the completed fresco. In different galleries, abnormal relics are preserved at the back of glass: a lock of hair from Lucrezia Borgia; the gloves worn by means of Napoleon as he watched his military fall to the Duke of Wellington’s, in 1815.

The books and manuscripts come from in every single place the arena: Borromeo’s accumulating sensibility was once cultural and cosmopolitan, now not spiritual or provincial. The Ambrosiana opened its doorways to somebody who may just learn and write—some of the first libraries in Europe to take action. It didn’t chain books in position, as different repositories did, who prefer a special more or less safety: The penalty for robbery, spelled out on a marble plaque that may nonetheless be noticed, was once excommunication.

Over time, the gathering has been augmented, particularly by means of the purchase of the Codex Atlanticus, in 1637. Da Vinci had died greater than a century previous, leaving his drawings and notes to considered one of his scholars. Many of those folio pages had been later accrued and sure by means of the late-Renaissance sculptor Pompeo Leoni right into a quantity whose dimensions gave the Codex its title. (Atlanticus refers to a big paper dimension used for atlases.) The Codex then adopted a picaresque trail into the fingers of a Milanese nobleman, who bequeathed it to the Ambrosiana.

The folio pages, which span a 40-year duration of da Vinci’s paintings, are coated now not best with sketches and schemata but additionally with da Vinci’s singular “reflect writing”—he was once left-handed, and wrote from proper to left. No longer the entire exposition is technical. In a single position, da Vinci scribbled some phrases of reminder to shop for charcoal, for drawing. The Codex Atlanticus incorporates his closing recognized dated notice, from 1518: “At the twenty fourth of June, the day of Saint John, in Amboise within the Palace of Cloux.” Da Vinci died in Amboise the next 12 months, at age 67.

Probably the most hectic match within the Ambrosiana’s lifestyles was once the coming of Napoleon. He crossed the Alps in 1796, and as he made his method down the Italian peninsula, he despatched wagonloads of plunder again to Paris. The loads of art work and statues taken from Italy—Laöcoon and His Sons, from Rome; Venus de’ Medici, from Florence; the bronze horses atop St. Mark’s, from Venice—would by means of themselves represent a world-class museum. If truth be told, they did: the Louvre. Napoleon took books and manuscripts too. A lot of the Vatican archives made its method north. So did the Codex Atlanticus.

After Napoleon’s defeat, the plundered treasures of Europe had been meant to be returned to their puts of foundation. Some had been; some weren’t. The Vatican couldn’t have enough money to cart again all of its archives; many paperwork had been bought for scrap and utilized in Paris to make paper or to wrap meat and cheese. France held again many pieces. In any case, best about part of what was once misplaced to le spoliazioni napoleoniche—“the Napoleonic looting”—was once in reality returned. The Codex Atlanticus was once a type of pieces. It’s been lodged safely within the Ambrosiana ever since.

Safe from marauders, however now not from the entirety. All the way through the Nineteen Sixties, consultants took aside the huge unmarried quantity of the Codex and reframed every of the 1,000-plus folios with a contemporary paper give a boost to, leaving all sides of every folio visual when important. When that was once achieved, the pages had been rebound into 12 smaller volumes. Then, in 2006, a conservator from the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, in New York, raised an alarm. Analyzing the Codex, she had came upon black spots at the pages, perhaps brought about by means of mould.

An investigation started. The recognizing, it became out, was once brought about now not by means of mould however basically by means of mercury salts, most certainly within the adhesive attaching every folio to its paper give a boost to. Thankfully, the recognizing hadn’t affected the da Vinci folios themselves—best the paper round them. The Codex volumes had been taken aside. Each and every affected folio needed to be indifferent from its outdated paper body and given a brand new one. Henceforward, the folios can be preserved as unmarried sheets.

Which brings the tale again to Vito Milo, operating outdoor the Ambrosiana’s vault. He wore a white lab coat and white latex gloves. His options had been bottom-lit by means of the golden glow from the field. As he labored, he spoke concerning the intimacy of this connection to da Vinci: how you’ll be able to see his erasures, his errors, the little notes he wrote to himself. It could take a couple of month, he mentioned, ahead of this actual drawing was once freed from its outdated paper give a boost to, wiped clean of the outdated glue, and reaffixed with a brand new more or less adhesive to a brand new give a boost to. Then he can be onto the following folio.

One end result of unbinding the Codex is that the folios might be digitized. Any other is that particular sheets can shuttle and be displayed, making conceivable exhibitions corresponding to the only now in Washington. On the Ambrosiana itself, a rotating choice of a dozen pages is now all the time on public view in show bins, climate-controlled and bulletproof. The protocols are strict: To stop deterioration attributable to herbal gentle, a folio can also be exhibited for best 3 months. Then it will have to relaxation in darkness for 3 years.

The Ambrosiana stays an ecclesiastical establishment, and Alberto Rocca, the director of its image gallery, is a Catholic priest. I met with him for an hour in a Baroque ground-floor administrative center, its ceiling top, its bookshelves sagging. A member of the Ambrosiana’s governing School of Fellows, Rocca oversees now not best the image gallery but additionally a community of techniques for far-flung students. He’s trim {and professional}. Take off the Roman collar, and he can be at house some of the body of workers on the Rijksmuseum or at Christie’s.

Our dialog ranged over many subjects. Having a look again: how extraordinary Borromeo’s cross-cultural outlook was once on the time, and likewise how extraordinary his need to make books freely to be had to the general public. Having a look ahead: the trouble of maintaining an establishment of this sort. The Ambrosiana’s artwork gallery can give a boost to itself; the analysis library, with its 1 million books and 40,000 manuscripts, can not. Europeans, Rocca famous, don’t have the philanthropic custom that American citizens do.

It’s mentioned that Napoleon himself walked out of the library with Petrarch’s personal reproduction of Virgil beneath his arm. (It was once in the end returned.) It’s no doubt true that some subject material by means of da Vinci didn’t come again, and most likely by no means will. Rocca didn’t need to stay on historical past, even though Napoleon obviously had so much to respond to for. At the plus aspect, Rocca mentioned, “a minimum of we now have the gloves he had when he was once defeated at Waterloo.”