Two Huge Collections of Leonardo’s Codexes Digitally Reunited After 400 Years

For the first time in hundreds of years, two collections of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks have been brought together online at the Leonardotheka. In some cases, pages that were cut apart centuries ago have been digitally joined so we can see the full pages again, as Leonardo drew and wrote them. From the press release:

Marking the culmination of a 10-year project in collaboration with Royal Collection Trust, Windsor, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, and the Biblioteca Leonardiana in Vinci, a dedicated group of Leonardo scholars and digital experts has worked to bring approximately 3,500 pages of manuscripts back together after they were separated and cut into pieces in the late 16th century. Leonardotheka reveals new insights into Leonardo’s thoughts, vision and working process through the ambitious reconstruction of select pages, digitally restoring their original appearance, to make clear the intended connections between scientific texts and figurative drawings, which had been arbitrarily separated by a later collector.

Museo Galileo initiated this collaboration between partner institutions — convening the world’s leading scholars and knowledge accumulated over centuries of study — with the primary goal of broadening access to Leonardo’s rich legacy via a public platform. Leonardotheka reunifies the 1,119 sheets of the Codex Atlanticus — the largest single set of Leonardo’s writings, held by the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana — with the most important group of figurative, anatomical, landscape and natural-history drawings by Leonardo in existence — around 550 sheets, part of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. These two collections — originally from the same set of manuscripts made by Leonardo from the mid-1470s to just before his death in 1519 — are now brought together in a cross-searchable digital resource.

Here’s a piece in Discover about the collection. Good luck spending less than 30 minutes (or several hours) poking around the archive. (via @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social)

• art
• Leonardo da Vinci
• museums
• science