V & A and Bill Gates: no show for the Codex Leicester

Organisers of the V&A's Leonardo da Vinci exhibition were keen to include a series of pages from the Codex Leicester, a collection of [Leonardo] Da Vinci's notes and drawings. However, Gates's representatives insisted on a series of restrictions governing how, when, and under what conditions the pages could be shown.

"The terms for the showing of [the codex] included having people being searched going in, having to leave all their metallic objects behind and so on," the exhibition's curator, Martin Kemp, told the Guardian."The security people said that if you had these two airport-style walkthroughs, the corridors would be jammed up."

Professor Kemp attempted to work around the restrictions, but eventually balked at a set of conditions that would have forced the museum to show the Codex Leicester's pages either for shorter periods or at lower lighting levels than the rest of its collection.

Posted by David on September 27, 2006 10:22 PM