British Library Arundel MS 263 - The Leonardo Notebook

'This is to be 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.' Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Leonardo is describing how, in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in the year 1508, he began the collection of short treatises, notes and drawings, which now makes up the Leonardo Notebook in the British Library. The manuscript, in Italian, is written in Leonardo's characteristic 'mirror writing', left-handed and moving from right to left. The notebook was not originally a bound volume, but was put together after Leonardo's death from loose papers of various types and sizes. Many of the pages were written in 1508; others come from different periods in Leonardo's life, covering practically the whole of his career. The range of subjects - from mechanics to the flight of birds - demonstrates Leonardo's almost compulsive intellectual curiosity about scientific and technical matters. British Library Arundel MS 263

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