December 12:

1980 : Da Vinci notebook sells for over $5 million
On this day in 1980, American oil tycoon Armand Hammer
pays $5,126,000 at auction for a notebook containing
writings by the legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci.
The manuscript, written around 1508, was one of some
30 similar books da Vinci produced during his lifetime
on a variety of subjects. It contained 72 loose pages
featuring some 300 notes and detailed drawings, all
relating to the common theme of water and how it
moved. Experts have said that da Vinci drew on it to
paint the background of his masterwork, the Mona Lisa.
The text, written in brown ink and chalk, read from
right to left, an example of da Vinci's favored
mirror-writing technique. The painter Giuseppi Ghezzi
discovered the notebook in 1690 in a chest of papers
belonging to Guglielmo della Porto, a 16th-century
Milanese sculptor who had studied Leonardo's work. In
1717, Thomas Coke, the first earl of Leicester, bought
the manuscript and installed it among his impressive
collection of art at his family estate in England.
More than two centuries later, the notebook--by now
known as the Leicester Codex--showed up on the auction
block at Christie's in London when the current Lord
Coke was forced to sell it to cover inheritance taxes
on the estate and art collection. In the days before
the sale, art experts and the press speculated that
the notebook would go for $7 to $20 million. In fact,
the bidding started at $1.4 million and lasted less
than two minutes, as Hammer and at least two or three
other bidders competed to raise the price $100,000 at
a time. The $5.12 million price tag was the highest
ever paid for a manuscript at that time; a copy of the
legendary Gutenberg Bible had gone for only $2 million
in 1978. "I’m very happy with the price. I expected to
pay more," Hammer said later. "There is no work of art
in the world I wanted more than this." Lord Coke, on
the other hand, was only "reasonably happy" with the
sale; he claimed the proceeds would not be sufficient
to cover the taxes he owed.
Hammer, the president of Occidental Petroleum
Corporation, renamed his prize the Hammer Codex and
added it to his valuable collection of art. When
Hammer died in 1990, he left the notebook and other
works to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural
Center at the University of California at Los Angeles
(UCLA). Several years later, the museum offered the
manuscript for sale, claiming it was forced to take
this action to cover legal costs incurred when the
niece and sole heir of Hammer's late wife, Frances,
sued the estate claiming Hammer had cheated Frances
out of her rightful share of his fortune. On November
11, 1994, the Hammer Codex was sold to an anonymous
bidder--soon identified as Bill Gates, the billionaire
founder of Microsoft--at a New York auction for a new
record high price of $30.8 million. Gates restored the
title of Leicester Codex and has since loaned the
manuscript to a number of museums for public display.

history.com/tdih.do


1901 : Marconi sends first Atlantic wireless
transmission
history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=7109
1913 : Mona Lisa recovered in Florence
history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=5593