As a long-time aspiring renaissance man myself, I have studied all of da Vinci’s paintings and drawings, including the scraps of sketches that he used as case studies before a commissioned painting. My love for da Vinci’s works led me to spend 5 straight years in my university library, studying every book on the Old Master (European) painters that I could get may hands. I learned a great deal about drawing and composition, but alas, never developed a skill for painting.

Besides being a painter, an inventor, and a student of science, da Vinci was a sort of journalist, in the sense that he documented everything he did, with probably no intention of actually communicating his knowledge to anyone else. Da Vinci’s noteboooks were for himself. He documented pretty much everything in his notebooks, including monies owed to him or borrowed.

Da Vinci’s notebooks, sans diagrams, have been collected into a free etext at Project Gutenberg. Adhering to their distribution license, I have created a PDF of Da Vinci’s notebooks [~2.8 Mb], free for download. Because it is a 350 page document, I suggest you download it and read it at your leisure. I massaged the text formatting for about 10 pages, but gave up due to the sheer volume of work. If you want the original unformatted text, please visit the Project Gutenberg website. In either case, please read the terms of use info at the beginning of the document.

The ebook, sourced from Project Gutenberg, is an 1888 translation, by Jean Paul Richter, of the original notebooks. According to the website, Da Vinci’s Notebooks is one of the most downloaded ebooks, if not the most.

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In fact, during “Da Vinci Code Week” (Mon May 8 – Fri May 12) on the History Channel (Canada’s equivalent of History TV, I believe), they showed a variety of programming related to Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. (This book is a combination of fiction and fact, and implies that Leonardo painted information about the supposed bloodline of Christ into his own paintings. Thus, the Da Vinci code.)

One of the programs showed a demonstration, using a dummy hung outside over 12 hours, of how the Shroud of Turin may have been created, using canvas and a Camera Obscura – and a man. The host’s hypothesis is that because the man would have to have remained perfectly still for the entire time, he must have already been dead.

I’ve forgotten the exact date, but a corner of the Shroud has been carbon-dated around 1430 (predating Da Vinci).  However, other evidence, such as the unique weave of the fine linen cloth, indicates that the shroud must have been from the Masada plateau region of Israel around the 1st century AD. (An old TV mini-series from 1981 showed that the inhabitants of Masada, who were one of the 12 tribes of Israel, were completely wiped out. So how would the cloth have ended up in Turin, Italy?)

So why the 1400s for the corner of cloth from the Shroud? Apparently it’s due to some micro-organisms that contaminated the sample. I didn’t actually catch any program during Da Vinci Code Week that indicated that the Shroud had been re-dated from another sample. However, it’s still possible that the cloth itself had in fact wrapped Jesus.

Nevertheless, logic suggests that the Shroud’s actual image could not be of Jesus Christ simply because the necessary glass lens did not exist during his time. The image is more likely to have been created around the 1400s, so the image must be of some other male. Why anyone would do that, of course, is anyone’s guess. But one researcher suggested that the man in question had broken bones in his face. There was also evidence of pooled blood in the hair and forehead, consistent with a crown of thorns.

The mystery remains. I spent 25 years loosely researching the life of Jesus Christ, by talking to people of six or seven different faiths and hearing their culture’s knowledge of Jesus. I learned a great deal, but I had never previously heard of any tie-in to photography. Maybe the mystery of the Shroud will one day be revealed.

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