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Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Codex Arundel’ digitized for online viewing

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A notebook from Leonardo da Vinci that contains some of the Renaissance-era thinker’s scientific and artistic studies has been digitized by the British Library and is now available for online viewing.

The so-called “Codex Arundel” is viewable on the British Library’s website. The notebook contains the artist’s trademark backward writing that can be read (in Italian) when reflected in a mirror. The British Library says on its site that the notebook features “diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes.”

It quotes the artist saying that the manuscript is “a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat.”

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The “Codex Arundel” contains material dating principally from 1508. The notebook was once owned by Thomas Howard, the second earl of Arundel, from which it gets its name.

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