Showtime

What: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria and Albert Museum

Where: Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St. W., Toronto

Phone: 416-979-6660

You've heard of The Da Vinci Code. But what about the Da Vinci codex, a book handwritten and illustrated by the great man himself?

You can see a couple of Leonardo's notebooks, penned five centuries ago in his distinctive right-to-left script, this summer at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The notebooks, bound together some time ago into one volume (codex in Latin), are part of Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This exhibition of 35 sacred and secular masterpieces includes numerous touchstones of art history dear to me from my life in London. The works, made from precious metals, stained glass, ceramics, wood and ivory, date from around 400 to 1600.

The time periods are easy to deal with. Renaissance begins in Italy in the 15th century. Medieval refers to art made in Western Europe from the fourth to the 15th century.

The exhibition also includes Byzantine art -- Byzantine being a civilization that flourished at the same time as medieval. Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) was the centre of the Byzantine Empire.

In the sixth century, ivory carvers in Constantinople were busy making reliefs for government officials. One famous relief, once part of a commemorative diptych, was made for Flavius Anastasius, a consul who ruled in the early sixth century.

The relief's up-to-date hierarchical style stresses Anastasius' importance, not his physical likeness. Big and frontal, richly dressed, he sits on a cushioned throne adorned with carved felines. A shell-like semicircle behind his head is meant to be a niche framed by a pediment. Three medallions of the imperial family hang above his throne.

He's in the hippodrome, or racetrack, where special events are being held to commemorate his inauguration as consul. He holds an eagle-topped sceptre in his lowered left hand and raises a mappa, or ceremonial handkerchief, in his right.

He's about to drop the mappa to start the games, some of which are depicted in the two tiny registers at the bottom. Just near the break in the ivory at the bottom, there's the head of a man with a crab attached to his nose, a reference to something comical.

The crab man is but one of many details vying for our attention. An even greater sense of eye-catching detail can be found in early medieval metalwork.

A gold and silver Anglo-Saxon brooch, probably crafted in England in the seventh century, shows a careful balance between artistic chaos and order. The whole surface is covered with patterns, but all of them are ordered into geometrical compartments. The central circle is framed by a thick red border, which is linked by four red arms to the brooch's rim. The resemblance to a Christian cross is probably accidental.

The red circle, its arms and the border consist of red garnets enclosed in small gold compartments, some rectangular, others five-sided.

The cross arms divide the area between border and core into four golden sections. In each one, a central boss is flanked by interlace motifs made from twisted gold-wire filigree.

Like the Anglo-Saxons, Leonardo loved geometrical shapes and he drew some in his notebooks. The text is written in "mirror-script," but there's no hidden message here.

Leonardo was left-handed and wanted to avoid smudges.

Regina Haggo, a former professor of art history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. You can contact her at dhaggo@thespec.com