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Leonardo da Vinci is famous for his art, most notably “The Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa,” but he was also highly skilled in other areas. Besides being an artist, he also dabbled in architecture, literature, astronomy, and engineering. Some of his sketches show his interest in flying machines and weapons of war. Luckily, you can now see some of his most fascinating musings in these digitized notebooks!
How to view them
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London used the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to digitize da Vinci’s journals, creating super-high resolution scans of the delicate pages. This gives any viewer the ability to zoom in and pick up impeccable details from each entry, even tiny notes in the margins!
While the best part of this process is that anyone can see and examine the scholar’s notebooks, it also preserves these invaluable pieces of history for years to come.
What lies in the pages
After the artist’s death, two of his notebooks were bound together to form what we now know as the Codex Forester I. One of the journals covers the years 1487 to 1490, and the other was penned in Florence in 1505.
By digitizing these journals, people can look into the mind of the Renaissance man and see that he was much more than one of the best artists in history. He was incredible!
Ingenious ideas
Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks are filled with amazing drawings of inventions, such as devices to move and raise water like fountains and water clocks. There are notes for a perpetual motion machine, a puzzling device that could function indefinitely without an energy source.
He also doodled the human body and ideas for interesting hats. He was a truly unbelievable man with an equally unbelievable mind, and now you can see why!