Sciences featured prominently in Martin Bodmer’s collection. Seven splendid tapestries from 1547-49 hang on the wall of the exhibition room. They originate from the castle of the Count Palatine Ottheinrich who founded the Palatine Library in Heidelberg. The models for the tapestries were wood engravings by Pencz, one of Dürer’s students. They depict the influence of the planets on man’s activities according to an astrological perception of the world. In contrast, between each tapestry, there is a cabinet showing the progress of modern science:

• the 15^th-and 16^th-century expeditions and discoveries of the world: the new world to the West (Christopher Columbus); the North Pole (Theodorus de Bry); the expedition around the southern tip of Africa (Camoens’ poetry); India and Asia to the East (Breidenbach)
• from a closed world to an infinite universe: Copernicus (1543); Giordano Bruno (1591); Tycho Brahe (1602); Kepler (1621); Galileo (1632); Hevelius (map of the moon, 1647)
• a mathematical approach to physics: from Newton’s unique work of 1687 annotated by Leibniz to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916) – not to mention Pascal, Bernouilli, Huygens and Euler, the other mathematicians in the collection
• Marie Curie’s autograph memoirs (1904) on her discovery of radioactivity – a pioneer work in the field of nuclear physics.

In 2010-2011, the Foundation organized a major exhibition on medicine. It featured over 80 items of the Collection, including Hippocrates’ seminal work on dietetics written in Latin and copied at the Fulda Abbey in the 11^th century. Also on display was Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, a compendium of ancient medical knowledge translated by Gérard de Crémone and printed in an incunabulum dated 1473.