A da Vinci Book That's Controversy-Free

No, says Neal Turtell , the National Gallery of Art's executive librarian, there is no shocking message hidden inside the 497-year-old book that he has unsheathed from its protective case and laid before me.

Yes, it's the only book known to be illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci . Yes, Washington has a special connection with Leonardo. ("We have the only da Vinci in the Western Hemisphere," says Neal, referring to the gallery's circa 1474 painting "Ginevra de' Benci.") And, yes, da Vinci is red hot right now, what with that Dan Brown book.

But "Divina Proportione" doesn't mention Mary Magdalene, the Knights Templar or the secret of the universe (at least according to Neal; my Latin's rusty). That doesn't make it any less wonderful, especially since nearly any schlub off the street can ask to take a look at it and any of the other books in the National Gallery's East Building library.

Yup. In the morning I was reading the throwaway Express on the Metro. In the afternoon I'm thumbing through a priceless Renaissance book. Is this a great town or what?

The National Gallery's 8,000 rare books include many choice titles. There's a 1486 history of the world, owned by one Agnolo Bronzino , a painter who updated it himself by scribbling in the latest events at the back. There's Albrecht Durer's 1525 treatise on drawing, and a similar pamphlet by Hans Sebald Beham , one of only five known to exist. (Durer's widow accused Beham of plagiarizing her husband and had the first printing destroyed.)

Neal is especially fond of "Divina Proportione," which he purchased on behalf of the museum to honor a former gallery trustee, the late Franklin Murphy .

"Actually, I wasn't looking for it because I thought I'd never find it," says Neal. He'd been shopping for the euphoniously titled "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," a book from 1499. "And I saw this one on a shelf [at a rare book fair], and I nearly fell over. I thought I would never see one."

Printed in Venice in 1509, "Divina Proportione" was a collaboration among Luca Pacioli , da Vinci and da Vinci's teacher, Piero della Francesca .

Pacioli, the main author, was a mathematician (accountants know him as the father of double-entry bookkeeping), and the book lays out nothing less than the mathematical underpinnings of beauty.

"It gets really to the heart of art," says Neal. "How does a human react to the world around him? What makes one thing considered ugly and another thing considered beautiful? And their idea here is it's the harmony, the proportionality of things. If it's right, it's beautiful. If it's wrong, it's ugly."

I would like to report that the book contains many drawings of well-proportioned women, but it most resembles a geometry textbook. Da Vinci contributed tetrahedrons, dodecahedrons, octahedrons and all manner of other -hedrons. There is a so-called Vitruvian man. However, it's not the nekkid, spread-eagle fellow prominent in "The Da Vinci Code," but a human face that's been sliced and diced into its proper proportionality.

None of this detracts from the thrill I feel holding "Divina Proportione." Its first owner was probably some royal collector whom I imagine curled up in a castle reading its dense prose or tracing its captivating geometric woodcuts.