A collaboration between the British Library and Microsoft, titled Turning the Pages 2.0, made 570 pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s’ Codex Arundel available for free online. Now anyone can navigate the writings of one of the most inventive minds of the Renaissance.
In the hundreds of digitized pages are ideas for aeroplanes, helicopters, parachutes, submarines and automobiles, centuries before they were developed and brought to the world.
During his lifetime, part of his ideas and reflections were recorded in his notebooks. Some of these manuscripts have been lost over the centuries, and those that remain have become rare objects accessed only by a select group of collectors and historians – until now.
Painter, sculptor, architect, mathematician, engineer, botanist, historian, musician… it seems that Leonardo da Vinci’s list of aptitudes is truly universal – and perhaps that is precisely why he is one of the most famous artists in the world, inside and outside the art circles.
The process of digitization began in 2007 today it is possible to “turn” the pages of the da Vinci’s manuscript as if it were a real book, including notes from the British Library.
Browse the texts and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts here, and to know more about the life and work of the inventor, see here.