Codex on the Flight of Birds
Eighteen folios on how birds use wind, balance and the centre of gravity — the theory behind every flying machine I drew.
“A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law.”
Folio V · Codici · The notebooks
Open notes, written backwards
More than seven thousand pages survive: shopping lists beside flying machines, geometry beside jokes. I write right to left — the left hand’s natural direction — so turn the notes around to read them as I do.
The Codex Leicester — water, rivers and why the old moon glows — now belongs to a private collector.
Codex Atlanticus
The largest gathering of my papers: over a thousand leaves of machines, weapons, mathematics and botany, bound together after my death by Pompeo Leoni.
“Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences.”
Landscape of the Arno valley
My earliest dated drawing — the day written in the corner. A landscape for its own sake, drawn quickly in pen, perhaps the first of its kind in Europe.
“Day of Our Lady of the Snow, 5 August 1473.”
A deluge
Late studies of water and wind tearing a landscape apart — physics, fear and abstraction on a single sheet.
“Water is the driving force of all nature.”
A page from my to-do list
Things to find out
Lists like this run through the notebooks. Most of them are still open questions for anyone curious enough.
- Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.
- Get the master of arithmetic to show me how to square a triangle.
- Measure Milan and its suburbs.
- Ask Benedetto Portinari how people walk on ice in Flanders.
- Draw Milan.