Leonardo's Last Notebooks

1519

Leonardo da Vinci, nearing death in France, made his final notebook entries on water and the flight of birds. He sketched the geometry of a deluge and bequeathed his papers to his devoted pupil Francesco Melzi. The notebooks would disappear into obscure attics for centuries before being gradually rediscovered. The thirteen thousand surviving pages, in his mirror script, contain observations anticipating scientific discoveries by centuries.