Charles Ravaisson-Mollien

The Scholar

Charles Ravaisson-Mollien (1848–1919) was a French scholar and the son of the philosopher Félix Ravaisson. Working at the Institut de France in Paris — home to the largest single collection of Leonardo's notebooks — he undertook one of the most ambitious publication projects in art historical scholarship: the complete facsimile reproduction of all Leonardo manuscripts held in Paris.

Between 1881 and 1891, Ravaisson-Mollien published Les Manuscrits de Léonard de Vinci in six folio volumes. Each volume reproduced a manuscript page by page in facsimile, accompanied by a diplomatic transcription of Leonardo's mirror-script and a French translation. This was the first time scholars could study these manuscripts without traveling to Paris.

His approach was the opposite of Richter's, undertaken at almost exactly the same time. Where Richter broke apart the manuscripts and reorganized passages by subject, Ravaisson-Mollien presented each manuscript exactly as it exists — page by page, in physical order, with all the multi-subject chaos preserved.

What He Published

The six volumes covered the twelve small notebooks Leonardo left in France (now designated by letters A through M) plus the two Ashburnham manuscripts (portions cut from Manuscripts A and B in the 19th century, later returned to the Institut):

The Principle

Ravaisson-Mollien's fundamental conviction was that a manuscript should be published as it is, not as a later editor thinks it should be. Each page is reproduced in facsimile — preserving Leonardo's mirror script, his drawings, his crossed-out passages, his marginal doodles, everything. Facing the facsimile is a diplomatic transcription (a letter-by-letter rendering of the text, reversing the mirror script) and a French translation.

This approach has the enormous advantage of showing what a real page of Leonardo's notebooks actually looks like: a tangle of text, diagrams, sketches, calculations, and occasional personal notes all coexisting on a single sheet. It preserves context that subject-based compilations destroy.

Strengths

• Physical fidelity — shows the manuscripts as Leonardo left them, not as editors reconfigured them
• Multi-subject context preserved — a page about water next to a sketch of architecture stays together
• Scholarly foundation — the transcriptions enabled generations of future scholars to work without visiting Paris
• Complete coverage — every page of every Paris manuscript, including blank pages and damaged sections
• Reproducible — later scholars could check Ravaisson-Mollien's readings against the facsimiles

Limitations

• No subject access — to find Leonardo's thoughts on painting, you must read through every manuscript page by page
• French only — translations in French limited the anglophone audience
• Paris manuscripts only — the Codex Atlanticus, Arundel, Leicester, Windsor, Madrid, and other major collections were not covered
• Transcription errors — some readings have been corrected by subsequent scholars, particularly Pedretti
• 19th-century reproduction — facsimile quality was limited by the printing technology of the 1880s

Ravaisson-Mollien's approach — publish the physical manuscript faithfully — became the standard for subsequent facsimile editions. The Codex Atlanticus, the Madrid Codices, the Codex Leicester, and the Windsor collection have all been published in editions that follow his model: high-quality reproduction, diplomatic transcription, translation.

In the digital age, this approach has found its fullest expression in online facsimile databases like the British Library's Codex Arundel viewer, the Ambrosiana's Codex Atlanticus project, and the Victoria & Albert Museum's Codex Forster viewer. These resources are, in a sense, Ravaisson-Mollien's descendants — the by-codex approach carried to its logical conclusion with technology he could never have imagined.

His six volumes remain an essential reference, reprinted and digitized, consulted by every serious Leonardo scholar. He gave the world its first clear look at what Leonardo's notebooks actually are: not books, but working spaces — messy, brilliant, and stubbornly resistant to any single organizing scheme.