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

The drawing used to be a web page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, and I have been invited to witness the painstaking strategy of its conservation. One morning remaining 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 through an attendant, who took a espresso cup from my palms and positioned it out of damage’s method.

The Codex Atlanticus is a 1,119-page choice of da Vinci’s engineering designs and technological goals—for flying machines, guns of battle, hydraulic gadgets—along side line after line of remark in a small, actual hand. It’s the biggest choice of works through da Vinci on this planet. The folio pages, as soon as certain right into a unmarried quantity, are actually preserved as particular person sheets. The only Milo used to be 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. Taking a look carefully, inches from the web page, I may just make out the advice of just a little guy on horseback atop the bridge, rendered in a couple of flicks—a playful addition for scale.

I used to be reminded of this seek advice from to the Ambrosiana after I noticed the announcement of a da Vinci exhibition, “Imagining the Long run,” on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in Washington, D.C. Twelve unique folios from the Codex Atlanticus have simply long gone 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 reputation is common.

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

The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is among 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 simplest about 180,000 guests a 12 months. The Vatican Museums, in Rome, welcome that quantity each week. The Ambrosiana used to be based in 1607 through Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, who named it after town’s patron, St. Ambrose, and endowed it together with his personal intensive choice of books, manuscripts, and artistic endeavors.

The artwork owned through the Ambrosiana are small in quantity however selection in high quality: Botticelli, Caravaggio, Titian, Bruegel, and da Vinci himself. The newly restored initial cool animated film achieved through Raphael earlier than he painted The Faculty of Athens—9 ft prime 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 shiny than the completed fresco. In different galleries, abnormal relics are preserved in the back of glass: a lock of hair from Lucrezia Borgia; the gloves worn through Napoleon as he watched his military fall to the Duke of Wellington’s, in 1815.

The books and manuscripts come from everywhere the arena: Borromeo’s amassing sensibility used to be cultural and cosmopolitan, now not non secular or provincial. The Ambrosiana opened its doorways to any individual 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 roughly safety: The penalty for robbery, spelled out on a marble plaque that may nonetheless be observed, used to be excommunication.

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

The folio pages, which span a 40-year length of da Vinci’s paintings, are coated now not simplest with sketches and schemata but in addition with da Vinci’s singular “replicate writing”—he used to be left-handed, and wrote from proper to left. Now not all the exposition is technical. In a single position, da Vinci scribbled some phrases of reminder to shop for charcoal, for drawing. The Codex Atlanticus comprises his remaining identified dated be aware, 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.

Essentially the most anxious tournament within the Ambrosiana’s lifestyles used to be 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 artwork 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 through themselves represent a world-class museum. In truth, 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 intended to be returned to their puts of foundation. Some had been; some weren’t. The Vatican couldn’t have the funds for to cart again all of its archives; many paperwork had been offered for scrap and utilized in Paris to make paper or to wrap meat and cheese. France held again many pieces. After all, simplest about part of what used to be misplaced to le spoliazioni napoleoniche—“the Napoleonic looting”—used to be in fact returned. The Codex Atlanticus used to be a type of pieces. It’s been lodged safely within the Ambrosiana ever since.

Safe from marauders, however now not from the whole lot. All over the Sixties, consultants took aside the huge unmarried quantity of the Codex and reframed every of the 1,000-plus folios with a contemporary paper fortify, leaving each side of every folio visual when vital. When that used to be 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. Inspecting the Codex, she had found out black spots at the pages, most likely brought about through mildew.

An investigation started. The recognizing, it became out, used to be brought about now not through mildew however principally through mercury salts, most certainly within the adhesive attaching every folio to its paper fortify. Thankfully, the recognizing hadn’t affected the da Vinci folios themselves—simplest the paper round them. The Codex volumes had been taken aside. Each and every affected folio needed to be indifferent from its previous 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, running outdoor the Ambrosiana’s vault. He wore a white lab coat and white latex gloves. His options had been bottom-lit through 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 will take a couple of month, he stated, earlier than this actual drawing used to be freed from its previous paper fortify, wiped clean of the previous glue, and reaffixed with a brand new roughly adhesive to a brand new fortify. Then he can be onto the following folio.

One outcome of unbinding the Codex is that the folios may well be digitized. Every other is that specific sheets can go back and forth 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 packing containers, climate-controlled and bulletproof. The protocols are strict: To forestall deterioration caused by herbal gentle, a folio will also be exhibited for simplest 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 workplace, its ceiling prime, its bookshelves sagging. A member of the Ambrosiana’s governing School of Fellows, Rocca oversees now not simplest the image gallery but in addition a community of methods for far-flung students. He’s trim {and professional}. Take off the Roman collar, and he can be at house a number of the team of workers on the Rijksmuseum or at Christie’s.

Our dialog ranged over many subjects. Taking a look again: how peculiar Borromeo’s cross-cultural outlook used to be on the time, and in addition how peculiar his need to make books freely to be had to the general public. Taking a look ahead: the trouble of maintaining an establishment of this type. The Ambrosiana’s artwork gallery can fortify 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 stated that Napoleon himself walked out of the library with Petrarch’s personal replica of Virgil underneath his arm. (It used to be sooner or later returned.) It’s without a doubt true that some subject material through da Vinci didn’t come again, and most probably by no means will. Rocca didn’t need to reside on historical past, despite the fact that Napoleon obviously had so much to reply to for. At the plus aspect, Rocca stated, “a minimum of we’ve got the gloves he had when he used to be defeated at Waterloo.”