Painter, engineer, anatomist, inventor. Here is every public-domain image of Leonardo’s work held on Wikimedia Commons, animated films of Leonardo’s masterpieces, and Leonardo’s birth chart. Everything in English.
Twelve short films with a slow camera move across Leonardo’s work.
Paintings, drawings, notebook pages and studies, pulled live from Wikimedia Commons’ collection of works by Leonardo. Tap any image for full size and its record.
Images: Wikimedia Commons; Leonardo’s works are in the public domain. Some photographs of objects carry their photographer’s license, shown in each record.
Handwritten notes and personal items: a job application, a to-do list, a complaint about a boy who stole, the day Leonardo’s father died, and what Leonardo left behind. Leonardo wrote mostly right to left, in mirror script. Translations are Jean Paul Richter’s public-domain edition of the notebooks (Richter, 1883).
“Most illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war…”
Leonardo offered the Duke of Milan bridges, siege machines, cannon and covered vehicles, and only near the end mentioned painting and sculpture. The draft has corrections and no signature. Richter No. 1340, Codex Atlanticus.
“Ask Benedetto Portinari how the people go on the ice in Flanders,— … You will draw Milan…”
A running list of people to ask and books to borrow: the measurement of the Castle, a master of arithmetic to show how to square something, a friar to show a book on weights. Richter No. 1448.
“Describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of the crocodile.”
One line among Leonardo’s anatomy reminders. Richter No. 819.
“Giacomo came to live with me on St.-Mary Magdalen’s day, 1490, aged 10 years.… Thief, liar, obstinate, glutton.”
Leonardo kept an itemized list of what the boy took and broke. Salai stayed with Leonardo for most of the rest of Leonardo’s life. Richter No. 1458.
“On the 9th of July 1504, Wednesday, at seven o’clock, died Ser Piero da Vinci, notary at the Palazzo del Podestà, my father,—at seven o’clock…”
Leonardo wrote the hour twice. Richter No. 1372.
“Maestro Leonardo of Florence.”
Leonardo wrote this name on a sheet of short notes, apparently to try a pen. Richter No. 1368.
“Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour.”
Richter No. 1133.
“…each and all of the books the Testator is at present possessed of, and the instruments and portraits appertaining to [Leonardo’s] art and calling as a painter.”
Leonardo left all books, instruments and portraits to the pupil Francesco Melzi; half a garden outside Milan’s walls to the servant Battista de Vilanis and the other half, where Salai had built a house, to Salai; and to Maturina, a waiting woman, a cloak. Richter No. 1566.
After Leonardo’s death, Melzi kept the notebooks; Melzi’s heirs let them scatter. Thousands of pages survive in these collections.
The largest collection: 1,119 sheets on flight, weapons, mathematics and machines, gathered into one album by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni in the late 1500s.
72 pages on water, rivers, fossils and why the moon glows. Bought in 1994 for $30.8 million and lent for public shows.
Notebook pages from across Leonardo’s career, mostly physics and mechanics. Viewable online through the library.
Leonardo’s self-taught Latin word lists, with architecture sketches.
About 1505. A small notebook on how birds fly and how a person might.
Twelve notebooks, lettered A to M, on optics, painting, hydraulics and war.
Three pocket notebooks on geometry, hydraulics and machines.
Two notebooks on mechanics and the casting of the Sforza horse, rediscovered in 1967.
Hundreds of drawings, including the great anatomical studies of the heart, skull and fetus.
Every quote here is checked word for word against Richter’s translation. Many lines passed around online as Leonardo’s are not in the notebooks at all.
“Wisdom is the daughter of experience.”
“Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err…”
“Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature.”
“As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.”
“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.”
“Just as iron rusts unless it is used, and water putrifies or, in cold, turns to ice, so our intellect spoils unless it is kept in use.”
“Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.”
“Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.”
“Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass…”
“I wish to work miracles…”
“The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature…”
“Where there is most feeling, there is the greatest martyrdom.”
See Leonardo’s full natal chart: Taurus Sun, Pisces Moon, Sagittarius rising, computed for the third hour of the night on April 15, 1452.