Leonardo

Leonardo da Vinci (Anchiano, 15 April 1452 - Castello di Clos-Lucé, 2 May 1519) was a great Italian artist and scientist. He was considered intelligence and talented during the Italian Renaissance. He embodied the universalist thought of his time and divulged it through the most popular expression forms in the most different sectors of art and knowledge.
He was painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, mathematician, anatomist, musician, inventor and he is considered one of the greatest geniuses of the story.

These manuscripts have a distinctive and symmetrical writing, written from right to left, that you can be read only if you put the papers in front of a mirror. Leonardo bequeathed his manuscripts to Francesco Melzi and after Melzi’s death they came to the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who subdivided them and changed their original appearance in order to be more commercial.

In XVII century, the most part of them were collected by the Milanese count Galeazzo Arconati and then they were donated to the Ambrosian Library of Milan. In 1976 they were moved to Paris and after the fall of Napoleone, only the Codex Atlanticus came back to Milan and the other manuscripts remained in the Institut de France because of a mistake made by the Austrian person in charge. The other codices were in England. Nowadays there are more than 8000 papers, that means more than 16000 pages of his notes with thousands of his drawings. These are thought to be a little part of Leonardo’s notes and sketches. Someone thinks that he wrote about 60000 or 100000 pages, which had been lost. Maybe there is something in ancient archives; for example, in 1966 two new codices were founded in Madrid.