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NEW YORK, July 3 (UPI) -- Google Arts & Culture, the tech giant's platform for archiving and sharing artworks and cultural artifacts from around the world, has unveiled a new retrospective into the codices of Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci powered by artificial intelligence. Valeria Gasparotti, program manager at Google Arts and Culture, told UPI in an interview that the project -- called Decode da Vinci -- was created to unpack Leonardo "as a man and a polymath."
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Leonardo, beyond achieving fame for his paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, was an avid scientist and engineer whose research spanned from anatomy to human flight.
He conceived ideas for everything from underwater diving suits to machine guns and scrawled his ideas and sketches for them out on paper -- known as Leonardo's codices.
Google has now digitized and assembled Leonardo's codices in one unique online tool with the help of 28 cultural institutions from eight nations around the world with the goals of allowing researchers and the public the ability to dive into the Renaissance Man's pursuits in art and science.
"He's a figure in the history of art and in the history of science that needs to find a space online," Gasparotti told UPI.
Gasparotti said "the objective is to unpack this figure," and that Google provided the "container for institutions around the world to bring in their knowledge."
The project particularly catalogued seven of Leonardo's codices with Gasparotti noting that the Codex Atlanticus is among the largest works included and spans a number of volumes.
A previous project created by The Visual Agency and the Mondadori Portfolio in collaboration the Biblioteca Ambrosiana library and art gallery in Milan digitized and cataloged the Codex Atlanticus in 2019. The interactive tool allows users to search pages of the document's 1,119 pages by subject.
But Google's project appears to be the first that artificial intelligence has been used to explore Leonardo's work across codices.
"One thing comes across very clearly by looking at this variety of material is Leonardo's visual language and how he was not just an artist. How he taught and how he created really comes across in these materials," Gasparotti said. "A curl in the hair of a woman will turn into a vortex in the water."
Gasparotti, who spoke to UPI before the launch of the project, said Google hopes "it will be useful for researchers worldwide" who are not able to examine multiple physical codices at a single time as they are spread out among different international institutions and are often restricted from public access.
"Of course, the physical objects are protected by the institutions," Gasparotti said. "There are observational issues or concerns because they're fragile. So they're not always equally accessible to the public."
Freya Salway, program manager at Google Arts and Culture, said the program does not use a live AI model as viewed by users.
However, Google partnered with Martin Kemp, a professor of art history at the University of Oxford and a leading expert on Leonardo da Vinci, to dive into the artist's work.
"Martin used a machine learning model that already exists and applied it to his codices to draw connections," Salway said. "So there it was really about him using it as a tool, and everyone can see kind of the different clusters and schematics that were found."
Salway noted Google also used AI image generation research to create an interactive tool that allows users to pair any two Leonardo drawings from his codices to come up with new drawings.
"They're kind of based on what the model has produced, so it's not an infinite possibility of outcomes because we're not running a live model here. It's all pre-generated," Salway said.
Still, Salway said Leonardo was a prolific sketcher and she believes users will have fun dreaming up "wacky thoughts and ideas."
"One of my favorite combinations is 'leaf' and 'lake'," she said. "They are just ways, because the codices are so vast, to expose people to the codices in a playful way."
Gasparotti added this is not the first such retrospective created by Google. The tech giant previously did others including one for the Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil.
In one final piece of fun for users, Google also created an animation of how one of Leonardo's flying machines would look in practice.
"It's one of the retrospectives that we already do on the platform," Gasparotti said.
"We go through a series of codices that unpack Leonardo's interest in flight. He was really, really obsessed with it. So this helped us go through how he talked about flight throughout his career."
