Discovering Leonardo Da Vinci's Digital Notebooks

It took us 500 years, but we can now access the notes, thoughts, and drawings of one of the greatest geniuses in history (for free!)

Renaissance artist, musician, inventor, anatomist, architect, paleontologist, botanist, scientist, writer, sculptor, philosopher, engineer, and painter, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) is considered one of the greatest geniuses of all time and one of the most talented artists in history. Not only for his incredible works such as La Gioconda (1503), The Last Supper (1498), or The Annunciation (1472), but also for the notebooks and books full of diagrams, drawings, personal notes, and observations he made that are now proof of his genius.

Leonardo seems to have started annotating his ideas and world views in the mid-1480s. He was a pioneer of the use of paper as a sketching tool and filled pages and pages with ideas, comments, thoughts, and inventions, blending the mind of a designer with that of a scientist. And now, some of these priceless notebooks are freely available on the Internet.

The exact number of notebooks Da Vinci had is unknown, but the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London has five of them, grouped into three small volumes known as Codex Forster. They have been in the museum's collection since 1876 and are named after John Forster, the English biographer and critic who donated the books to the institution.

The collection dates from 1487 to 1505. And, at the end of 2018, the museum decided to make the pages of some of the notebooks public, using a state-of-the-art scanning machine. The first digitized work was the Codex Forster I: two notebooks compiled in a single volume after Leonardo Da Vinci's death, which contains the research done while at the service of the Duke of Milan, focused on hydraulic engineering, geometry, and the measurement of solids.

The notebooks contain careful sketches and annotated diagrams with a well-known Leonardo peculiarity: mirror writing that is read backwards and from right to left. Such writing may point to the fact that the great artist did not want to share all his notes, although several art historians have concluded that, being left-handed, he may have found it easier to write from right to left.

The V&A has also digitized the Codex Forster II and III, just in time to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Da Vinci's death. According to the museum's curator of special collections, Catherine Yvard:

"The notebooks remind us that Leonardo was both an engineer and an artist. If we want them to survive another five centuries, we have to make sure we don't handle these volumes too much, so we look for different ways to make them accessible to everyone."

You can explore the entire collection on the Victoria and Albert Museum website.

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