Florence’s Galileo Museum has digitally reunited Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus with 550 pages removed in the 16th century, restoring the full scope of the artist-engineer’s largest surviving notebook for the first time in 400 years, per artnet.com.
The museum launched Leonardotheka 2.0 on June 9, adding 550 pages now held by the UK’s Royal Collection Trust to the 1,119-page volume housed at Milan’s Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
The pages were excised in the late 16th century by Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who split Leonardo’s folios into two albums. Leoni separated artistic studies from technical and scientific work, dividing material that Leonardo treated as a unified body of inquiry.
The Codex Atlanticus is the largest of Leonardo’s surviving notebooks. Produced between the 1470s and 1519, it contains designs for inventions including a flying machine and a harpsichord-viola.
After passing to Leonardo’s pupil Francesco Melzi, the manuscripts went to Leoni. His son-in-law Polidoro Calchi later sold the technical volume, now known as the Codex Atlanticus, to Count Galeazzo Arconati. Arconati donated it to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The artistic section reached England in the 1620s and entered the Royal Collection around 50 years later, possibly as a gift to Charles II.
Leonardotheka, which first made parts of the Codex digitally accessible in 2023, has now reconstructed 50 new pages. Researchers matched dimensions, preparation methods, materials and watermarks to rejoin separated sheets. One notable reunion places a drawing of a horse alongside Leonardo’s notes on Pavia’s Regisole equestrian monument, linked to his unfinished design for the Francesco Sforza monument.
Professor Paolo Galluzzi, president emeritus of Museo Galileo, said Leonardotheka “offers scholars worldwide unprecedented opportunities to explore the vast and invaluable wealth of information contained within Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts”.
Museo Galileo executive director Roberto Ferrari said the project “sets a compelling precedent for how cultural institutions can and must retain intellectual ownership of their digital endeavors, resisting the temptation to delegate such responsibilities to commercial platforms”. He added that it challenges “the proliferation of generic digital libraries” and efforts “to turn Leonardo’s legacy into a commercial asset”.
Leonardo’s notebooks were not published in his lifetime. The Codex Atlanticus name derives from its large, atlas-sized pages. Leoni’s 16th-century reordering reflected a collector’s preference but disrupted Leonardo’s integration of art and science, a core Renaissance principle.
•Featured image: Leonardo da Vinci, A wooden machine for the excavation of a canal (c. 1503) Codex Atlanticus, f. 4r. Photo: © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, courtesy of Leonardotheka.
