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July 25, 2017 2:43 PM   Subscribe

The British Library has digitized Leonardo da Vinci's Notebook ('The Codex Arundel') and made 570 digitized images available online. [via]

The notebook of Leonardo da Vinci ('The Codex Arundel') is a collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as 'a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams.

More on Leonardo's notebooks from The Guardian's Jonathan Jones.
posted by Room 641-A (6 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite
 
Going through this is giving me goosebumps!!
posted by Hermione Granger at 3:52 PM on July 25, 2017


Thank you for telling us about this!!!
posted by agregoli at 4:31 PM on July 25, 2017


Oooooh. Awesome. Ill be down this rabbit hole if anyone needs me.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 6:25 PM on July 25, 2017


Leonardo would have loved the WWW, I think (Well, some specific parts of it, including Metafilter). Thank you for this heads up, Room 641-A!
posted by vers at 7:28 PM on July 25, 2017


Leonardo would have loved the WWW

I expect he would have given us tantalising plans for matter transfer devices, cold fusion reactors, and quantum computers, none of them actually quite practical or finished but sort of resembling the devices that will actually be built in another 500 years.

Think of the art, though...
posted by Segundus at 3:59 AM on July 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


He would have had a word or two to say about MS withdrawing Paint, anyway.
posted by Segundus at 6:04 AM on July 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


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