First published June 2, 2019.
Every one of the 1,119 sheets of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus can be viewed online for free. The digital edition was built by the Milan design studio The Visual Agency together with the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the library that has kept the codex since the 17th century. You can open it at codex-atlanticus.ambrosiana.it (the older codex-atlanticus.it address now redirects there), switch the interface to English, and browse Leonardo's drawings and notes by date or by subject.
Below is a guide to what the Codex Atlanticus is, how it came together, what you will find inside, and how to get the most out of the online version.
What the Codex Atlanticus is
The Codex Atlanticus is the largest surviving collection of Leonardo's papers. It holds 1,119 leaves, most of them written or drawn on both sides, so the total runs to well over two thousand pages. Today the sheets are bound in 12 large volumes.
The material covers almost Leonardo's entire working life, from 1478, when he was a young artist in Florence, to 1519, the year he died at Amboise in France. That span takes in his years in Milan at the court of Ludovico Sforza, his return to Florence, a period in Rome and his final years in the service of the French king.
The name has nothing to do with the Atlantic Ocean. "Atlanticus" refers to format: the original pages were glued onto very large sheets of the kind used for printing atlases.
How the collection was assembled
Leonardo did not create the codex as a book. After his death his papers passed to his pupil Francesco Melzi, and after Melzi's death they began to scatter. In the late 16th century the sculptor Pompeo Leoni gathered a large group of them from Melzi's heirs. Leoni took some of Leonardo's notebooks apart, cut and arranged the loose leaves, and mounted them on the big album pages that gave the codex its name.
In 1637 the Marquis Galeazzo Arconati donated the collection to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. It has had its share of adventures since then. After Napoleon's army took Milan in 1796, the codex was carried off to Paris along with other treasures. When looted art was returned after Napoleon's fall in 1815, the Codex Atlanticus came back to Milan. A well-known story from that time says an Austrian envoy mistook Leonardo's mirror writing for Chinese, and that the sculptor Antonio Canova recognised the manuscript for what it was.
Between 1968 and 1972 the codex was restored by monks at the Abbey of Grottaferrata near Rome, which is when it took the bound form scholars use today.
What is inside
Because Leoni gathered sheets from many periods and notebooks, the Codex Atlanticus is less a single project than a cross-section of Leonardo's restless mind. Its subjects include:
- Machines and engineering: gears, lifting devices, pumps, mills and designs for moving water.
- Military technology: catapults, giant crossbows, cannon and devices for defending walls.
- Flight: studies of birds and designs for flying machines, along with a famous parachute-like device.
- Architecture and urban planning: churches, canals and fortifications.
- Mathematics, astronomy, botany and optics.
- Writing: short fables about animals and plants, philosophical notes and personal memoranda.
One of the best-known items is a draft of Leonardo's letter to Ludovico il Moro, often described as his job application or CV, in which he lists what he can build for war and peace. It is thought to have been written out by a professional scribe. The codex even contains one of Leonardo's last dated notes, written at Amboise less than a year before his death.
A closer look at a few sheets
The images below show the kind of material you will meet when you start browsing.
A large sheet combining a rearing horse with a fan of curved lines. Sheets like this mix subjects freely, showing how Leonardo moved between art and mechanics on the same page.
Leonardo's drawing of mortars firing exploding projectiles, one of the most reproduced pages in the codex. The arcs of falling shells show his interest in the paths objects take through the air.
A tall wooden frame with gears and a crank below it. Mechanical sheets like this one show a design worked out in several views, with notes in his right-to-left mirror script.
A defensive mechanism for a fortress wall: a system of beams operated from inside to push away the ladders of attackers. Many of Leonardo's military designs were never built and remained ideas on paper.
How to use the online codex
The digital edition is designed as an interactive visualisation, not a simple page-by-page scan. A few tips make it easier to use:
- Switch to English. The interface offers an English option; look for the language switch on the screen.
- Browse by time. Arranging the sheets by date lets you follow how Leonardo's interests shifted over four decades.
- Browse by subject. Colour-coded topics group the sheets into fields such as mechanics, flight or architecture.
- Zoom in. Much of the value lies in small details: tiny marginal sketches, corrections and notes.
- Read the descriptions. Leonardo wrote in mirror script and in Renaissance Italian, so the catalogue notes are often the quickest way to know what a sheet is about.
A good way to start is to pick one subject you already like, such as water, flight or weapons, and follow it across several sheets. You will start to notice Leonardo returning to the same problem years apart and trying a new approach.
Common misconceptions
"Leonardo invented all of these machines." Not quite. Some designs improve on devices already in use in his time, some are copied or adapted from earlier engineers, and many were never built. The notebooks show thinking in progress more than a list of finished inventions.
"It is one notebook." It is a later compilation of loose sheets from different notebooks and periods, put together by Pompeo Leoni decades after Leonardo died.
"The pages are always on display." The originals are fragile. The Ambrosiana shows selected sheets in rotating exhibitions, so the online edition is the only way to see the whole collection at once.
Why the digital codex matters
For most of its history, the Codex Atlanticus could be studied only by scholars with permission to handle it, or through expensive printed facsimiles. Putting it online opens one of the great records of Renaissance thinking to students, teachers, artists and anyone curious about how a famous mind worked. It shows Leonardo not as a finished genius but as someone who sketched, guessed, corrected and tried again.
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Sources: Codex Atlanticus (Wikipedia); Biblioteca Ambrosiana: Ten key facts about the Codex Atlanticus (Google Arts & Culture); Codex Atlanticus digital edition by The Visual Agency. Images: Biblioteca Ambrosiana / The Visual Agency.
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