Thanks to the British Library, we can go inside the mind of a genius and peruse Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. The first true Renaissance Man, Da Vinci not only painted the Mona Lisa, but was a master inventor who is sometimes credited with creating the parachute and helicopter. And, to top it all off, he wrote his notes backward, in mirror image from right to left.
Who wouldn’t want to understand more about what this master of painting, drawing, engineering, and mathematics was thinking? Now you can flip through 570 pages of his notebook The Codex Arundel. Works of art themselves, the pages date from 1480 to 1518, and are a fascinating glimpse into Da Vinci’s process. Interestingly, for a man so in tune with technology, the artist never attempted to publish his notebooks during his lifetime. Instead, they were left to his pupil Francesco Melzi and individual sheets have since been dispersed among wealthy collectors, many ending up in museum collections.
