This is what it said:\n\n'Click [[here | http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/l/leonardo-da-vinci/]] to find out more about The Forster Codices: Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks at the V&A'. \n\nAfter literally clicking on the piece of paper, the piece of paper magically turned into a tablet e-Reader, giving Anna immediate access to V&A's web resources about Leonardo da Vinci. \n\nAnna can now view all five Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks that the V&A has, using the [[interactive page-turner | http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/e/leonardo-da-vinci-explore-the-forster-codices/]]. \n\nAnna can also see the enchanting [[animated illustration | http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/l/leonardo-da-vinci-animated-illustration/]] of the Forster codices that shows how Leonardo da Vinci composed illustrations of a dodecahedron: a solid composed of twelve pentagons. \n\n"How did Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks come to V&A's possession?", Anna thought. \n\nFind out more about [[Leonardo's notebooks]].\n\n[img[http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/image/0016/223630/2006aw1851_da_vinci-forster_codex_vol1_16_verso_custom_290x336_06200719.jpg]] \n\n

[[Anna]]\n\n[[Leonardo]]

Anna is on a field trip to the [[V&A | http://www.vam.ac.uk/]] museum from the [[University for the Creative Arts | http://www.uca.ac.uk]] at Farnham. \n\nAnna was amazed by the gigantic Trajan's column and the enigmatic engravings on it. \n\n[img[http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/sites/default/files/album_images/1864-128.jpg?0]] \n\nWhen she walked around the column, she found a piece of paper on the ground. \n\n[[Pick up the piece of paper]] \n\n[[Ignore the piece of paper]]

Da Vinci's Code\n\nThis choice-based narrative hypertext game was created on 23-24 November 2013 at the V&A Game Jam. The story was inspired by V&A's collection of Leonardo da Vinci's Foster Codex, Wikipedia content about Leonardo da Vinci, and other materials housed at the V&A. The work is powered by the free open source software Twine, designed for building CYOA or hypertext. The game is released under the [[GNU Free Documentation License|http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html]]. The game should be friendly to people with disabilities as well given that it uses open standard text-based HTML wiki technologies and non-proprietary (free to modify). \n

Leonardo had never been educated at home. Please choose a diffeernt option. [[Leonardo]]

A codex is a bound book made up of separate pages. It developed in late Roman times and replaced the scroll as the preferred way of keeping texts. Codices were originally hand-written, though they began to be printed from the mid-15th century. Some texts, including personal memoranda and writings such as notebooks, continued to be written by hand.\n\nCodex Forster I2 (Milan, about 1487-90)\nThe earliest of the V&A's notebooks was compiled around 1487-90 when Leonardo was a servant of the Sforza duke in Milan. It contains notes and diagrams for devices relating to hydraulic engineering and on the moving and raising of water. Some of the ideas recorded investigate perpetual motion. The writing on a few sheets of this notebook extend beyond the gutter which indicates that Leonardo wrote them before the sheets were folded into the booklet as it survives today.\n\n\n[[Milan]]\n[[Mirror writing]]\n[[Codex Forster III]]\n[[Codex Forster II2]]\n[[Codex Forster II1]]

Codex Forster I1 (Florence, 1505)\nA note in Leonardo’s own hand gives this notebook a title, ‘Libro titolato de strasformatione’, and dates it July 1505. This shows that it was begun when he was in Florence, just after he had undertaken to produce his famous ‘Battle of Anghiari’ mural in the Palazzo della Signoria, the centre of the city’s government. The notes consider the measurement of solid bodies and the problems of relating changes in shape to those of volume, a branch of mathematics known today as topology.\n\nThe notebooks are not bound in any logical fashion and only one carries any indication of when it was made (Codex Forster I1).\n\n\n\n[[Florence]]\n[[Mirror writing]]

Leonardo maintained long-lasting relationships with two pupils who were apprenticed to him as children. These were Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, who entered his household in 1490 at the age of 10, and Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Milan aristocrat who was apprenticed to Leonardo by his father in 1506, at the age of 14, remaining with him until his death. \n\n[[Salai]]\n[[Melzi]]

Overloaded by too much information, Anna decided to turn off the e-Reader, go home come back to V&A some other time.

Anna picked up the piece of paper, which was written in some enigmatic language. \n\nThe writing looked familiar, but seemed to be the reverse of some kind of language. Anna recalled the teacher taught them something called [[Mirror writing]]. She tried to decode what was written on the piece of paper as the mirror image of normal writing. \n\n[[Read what was written on the piece of paper]]\n\n[[Ignore the piece of paper]]

Codex Forster III (Milan, about 1490–93)\nThis is the most miscellaneous of the notebooks. Interspersed with notes on geometry, weights and hydraulics are sketches of a horse’s legs, perhaps connected with Leonardo’s work on an equestrian statue for the founder of the Sforza dynasty, drawings of hats and cloths that may have been ideas for costumes at balls, and an account of the anatomy of the human head.\n\n[[Milan]]\n[[Mirror writing]]

Leonardo da Vinci liked to write notes in mirror writing, including those on his famous Vitruvian Man image. \n\n[img[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg]] \n\nThe V&A houses some notebooks written in Leonardo's famous mirror-writing. This writing has given rise to much speculation. Was he trying to ensure that only he could read his notes? He was left-handed and probably found it easier to write from right to left. Writing masters of the period were liable to make demonstrations of mirror-writing, so that it may not have seemed as strange as it does today. The letter-shapes are in fact very ordinary: Leonardo used the kind of script that his father, a notary, would have used. Once the eye has become accustomed to the scripts of the period, it soon learns to decipher the mirror-writing Leonardo used.\n\nThe paper for the notebooks was probably bought at one of the many stationery shops in Milan. Leonardo either bought full-size sheets and folded them to make booklets, or bought the booklets ready-made. The ink probably came from the same source.\n\nReturn to [[Read what was written on the piece of paper]]

Da Vinci's Code\n

Codex Forster II1 (Milan, about 1495)\nThis notebook was compiled around 1495. It contains notes on the theory of proportions and mentions the work of Leonardo’s colleague in Milan, a famous mathematician named Luca Paccioli (died about 1514). It also contains a good deal of miscellaneous material: bells and a striking mechanism, a portrait of the General of the Franciscan Order, Francesco Nanni-Samson, and a passage discussing the postures of a group at a table, possibly relating to Leonardo’s work on the Last Supper fresco in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, begun in about 1495.\n\n[img[http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/image/0005/223628/2006aw1609_da_vinci-forster_codex_vol2_91_verso_custom_290x290_169462107400.jpg]]\n\n[[Milan]]\n[[Mirror writing]]

Anna ignored the piece of paper, and soon caught up with her fellow students. They continued their visit at the [[V&A | http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/15524]]. \n\nReturn to [[Anna]]

Codex Forster II2 (Milan, 1495–97)\nMade up between about 1495 and 1497, Codex Forster II2 has extensive notes on the theory of weights, traction, stresses and balances. It also contains an examination of a crossbow (a terrifying weapon outlawed on several occasions by the Papacy), and a remark ridiculing those who thought perpetual motion possible.\n\n[img[http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/image/0004/223627/2006aw1604_da_vinci-forster_codex_vol2_94_r_custom_290x397_061640885.jpg]]\n\n\n[[Milan]]\n[[Mirror writing]]

At the age of about fourteen Leonardo was apprenticed by his father to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio. Leonardo was eventually to become a paid employee of Verrocchio's studio. \n\nDuring his time there, Leonardo met many of the most important artists to work in Florence in the late fifteenth century including Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Pietro Perugino. Leonardo helped Verrocchio paint The Baptism of Christ, completed around 1475. According to Vasari, Verrocchio, on seeing the beauty of the angel that his young pupil had painted, never painted again.\n\nShould Leonardo stay at Florence or should he move somewhere else like Milan?\n\n[[Florence]]\n[[Milan]]

Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, better known as Salai, was an Italian artist and pupil of Leonardo da Vinci from 1490 to 1518. Salai entered Leonardo's household at the age of 10. He created paintings under the name of Andrea Salai. He was described as one of Leonardo's students and lifelong servant and is the presumed model for Leonardo's paintings St. John the Baptist and Bacchus.\n\nGian Giacomo was nicknamed Salai or il Salaino meaning "the little devil". Vasari describes him as "a graceful and beautiful youth with fine curly hair". The "Little Devil" lived up to his nickname: a year after his entering the household Leonardo made a list of the boy’s misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton". But despite Salai's thievery and general delinquency — he made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, spent a fortune on apparel, including twenty-four pairs of shoes, and eventually died in a duel — he remained Leonardo's servant, and assistant for thirty years. At Leonardo's death he was bequeathed the Mona Lisa, a valuable piece even then, valued in Salai's own will at the equivalent of £200,000.

The V&A has in its collections five of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. They reveal how he thought on paper and contain some of his most complex and challenging designs. Although many other artists, inventors and scientists have brainstormed on paper, none of Leonardo's predecessors, contemporaries or successors used paper quite like he did. The intensity, variety and unpredictability of what happens on a single sheet are unparalleled.\n\n[[Codex Forster I1]]\n[[Codex Forster I2]]\n[[Codex Forster II1]]\n[[Codex Forster II2]]\n[[Codex Forster III]]\n\nLeonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) seems to have begun recording his thoughts in notebooks from the mid-1480s. When he died at Amboise in 1519, he left all his drawings, papers and notebooks to his assistant, Francesco [[Melzi]] (1491/3-about 1570), who took them back to [[Milan]].\n\nFind out more about Leonardo's [[Apprentices]].\nFind out who is [[Melzi]].\nFind out more about Laonardo's time in [[Milan]].\n\n[img[http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/image/0003/223626/2006aw1546_da_vinci-forster_codex_vol2_123_verso_custom_base_custom_290x290_06200620.jpg]]\n\nOverloaded by too much information, Anna made a dramatic [[decision]].

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519) has long been regarded as the archetypal Renaissance Man. \n\nAt the age of about fourteen, young Leonardo had to decide what he would like to do for his future. Should he follow his father's suggestion to become an apprentice of the artist Andrea del Verrocchio, or should he be home schooling? \n\n[[Verrocchio]]\n[[Home Schooling]]

Francesco Melzi (fl. 1491 - 1568/1570) was the son of a Milanese noble family. Melzi joined the household of Leonardo da Vinci in 1506. He accompanied Leonardo on trips to Rome in 1513 and to France in 1517. As a painter, Melzi worked closely with and for Leonardo. Some works which, during the nineteenth century, were attributed to Leonardo are today ascribed to Melzi.

Leonardo left Florence and travelled to Milan carrying a gift from Lorenzo to the regent ruler, Ludovico Sforza. He was employed by Ludovico from 1481 to 1499, during which time his most important works were the Virgin of the Rocks, the Last Supper and a huge model of a horse for an equestrian monument which was never completed. \n\nWhen Milan was invaded by the French in 1499, Leonardo left and spent some time in Venice, and possibly Rome and Naples before returning to Florence.\n\nThe V&A holds several codex created by da Vinci during his stay at Milan. \n\n[[Codex Forster I2]]\n[[Codex Forster III]]\n[[Codex Forster II1]]\n[[Codex Forster II2]]\n\n\nWanna know more about Leonardo Da Vinci's assistants?\n\n[[Apprentices]]\n[[Melzi]]\n[[Salai]]

Yuwei Lin

Leonardo stayed at Florence when he was working at Verrocchio's workshop, claimed to be "one of the finest in Florence". \n\nHe then lived with the Medici and worked in the Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers which the Medici had established.\n\nHe went to Milan without completing his first of two independent commissions: in January 1478, he received to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio and, in March 1481, The Adoration of the Magi for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto. \n\nOn his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival".\n\nLeonardo returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria,[30] with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.[nb 12] In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David.\n\nThe Forster Codex that V&A holds were created at Milan or Florence? \n\n[[Milan]]\n[[Florence]]\n\nWanna know more about Leonardo Da Vinci's assistants? \n\n[[Apprentices]]