Museo Galileo, the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Embassy of Italy in London announce the reunion of two globally significant collections of Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s writings and drawings for the first time in over 400 years in a new online platform. Leonardotheka launches today,
\n8 June 2026, at teche.museogalileo.it\/leonardo, and constitutes the most extensive resource on Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts in the world.<\/p>\n
Marking the culmination of a 10-year project in collaboration with Royal Collection Trust, Windsor, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, and the Biblioteca Leonardiana in Vinci, a dedicated group of Leonardo scholars and digital experts has worked to bring approximately 3,500 pages of manuscripts back together after they were separated and cut into pieces in the late 16th century. Leonardotheka reveals new insights into Leonardo\u2019s thoughts, vision and working process through the ambitious reconstruction of select pages, digitally restoring their original appearance, to make clear the intended connections between scientific texts and figurative drawings, which had been arbitrarily separated by a later collector.<\/p>\n
Museo Galileo initiated this collaboration between partner institutions \u2013 convening the world\u2019s leading scholars and knowledge accumulated over centuries of study \u2013 with the primary goal of broadening access to Leonardo’s rich legacy via a public platform. Leonardotheka reunifies the 1,119 sheets of the Codex Atlanticus \u2013 the largest single set of Leonardo\u2019s writings, held by the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana \u2013 with the most important group of figurative, anatomical, landscape and natural-history drawings by Leonardo in existence \u2013 around 550 sheets, part of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. These two collections \u2013 originally from the same set of manuscripts made by Leonardo from the mid-1470s to just before his death in 1519 \u2013 are now brought together in a cross-searchable digital resource.<\/p>\n
Following Leonardo\u2019s death, Francesco Melzi \u2013 Leonardo\u2019s final student \u2013 inherited his entire collection of manuscripts. They then came into the possession of Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni who dismounted and cut the folios, separating the materials into two albums according
\nto his own judgement: the larger portion for technical and scientific topics; the other for Leonardo’s artistic and figurative workings. In the early 17th century, Polidoro Calchi, Leoni\u2019s son-in-law, inherited the manuscripts. He sold the most substantial album, later named Codex
\nAtlanticus, to Count Galeazzo Arconati, who donated it to the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1637. The other album containing the figurative works was brought to England in the 1620s and entered the Royal Collection around 1670, probably as a gift to Charles II.<\/p>\n
Leonardotheka includes 50 confirmed page reconstructions, in which small page fragments held at Windsor have been returned to the pages of the Codex Atlanticus to restore their original context. This complex task involved examining the dimensions and preparation of
\npaper, use of writing media and watermarks \u2013 all of which are available filters within Leonardotheka. One notable reconstruction (reuniting folio 399r of the Codex Atlanticus with folio 912345r from Windsor) brings together a drawing of a horse with a written reflection on
\nthe classical Regisole equestrian monument in Pavia. This likely represents the moment that Leonardo conceived the final sketch for the horse intended for the ambitious, never completed Francesco Sforza equestrian monument.<\/p>\n
Leonardotheka\u2019s advanced tools allow users to navigate the labyrinth of Leonardo’s papers with detailed data on physical and material properties (watermark imaging and digitisation by Haltadefinizione) and writing and drawing techniques; links to related sheets; transcriptions;
\ncritical commentaries; thematic indexes; and bibliographies, including links to items available in Museo Galileo’s digital library.<\/p>\n
Ambassador Fabio Cassese, who opened the conference \u2018Leonardotheka, an innovative tool for the study of Leonardo\u2019s codices\u2019 at the Embassy of Italy in London on the occasion of the launch, said:
\n“The importance of Leonardo transcends national borders. He belongs not only to Italy, but to the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity as a whole. His work embodies the unity of art and science, imagination and observation, creativity and reason. Therefore projects such as Leonardotheka have such a crucial importance that extends well beyond academic research. The partnership between Museo Galileo in Florence, Royal Collection Trust in Windsor, and the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan is an exemplary model of this spirit of cooperation. It demonstrates how institutions from different countries can work together to make knowledge more accessible, more interconnected, and more alive.”<\/p>\n
Professor Paolo Galluzzi, President Emeritus and former Director of Museo Galileo, and creator of Leonardotheka, said:
\n“Leonardotheka is a tool that offers scholars worldwide unprecedented opportunities to explore the vast and invaluable wealth of information contained within Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s manuscripts. Thanks to collaboration agreements with the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana and Royal Collection Trust, Leonardotheka allows for the integrated exploration of the Codex Atlanticus and the precious collection of Leonardo\u2019s folios held in the Royal Collection at Windsor. This innovative tool marks the beginning of a new and highly promising era of research into the artistic, scientific, and literary legacy of the Genius of Vinci.”<\/p>\n
Professor Michele Ciliberto, President of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (National Institute of Renaissance Studies), Florence, said:
\n“Leonardotheka is a groundbreaking work that will reshape Leonardo studies. Thanks to Museo Galileo, an international leader in outlining new research perspectives on key figures of the Humanist and Renaissance culture, this milestone project goes beyond reframing Leonardo by challenging traditional 20th-century frameworks and offering a fresh new vision of this crucial European epoch. Through innovative digital tools designed to analyse original texts, Leonardotheka will make this shift possible. The launch is thus a major event that addresses not only Leonardo, but the whole era in all its complexity.”<\/p>\n
Roberto Ferrari, Executive Director of Museo Galileo, said:
\n“The model for Leonardotheka sets a compelling precedent for how cultural institutions can and must retain intellectual ownership of their digital endeavours, resisting the temptation to delegate such responsibilities to commercial platforms. It stands in deliberate contrast to two equally reductive tendencies: the proliferation of generic digital libraries, which privilege breadth of content over depth of scholarship; and the growing effort to turn Leonardo\u2019s legacy into a commercial asset, dressed up under the respectable guise of the so-called \u201ccultural industry\u201d. In an age of rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, this project reminds us that the true value of digital humanities lies in the willingness of scholarly institutions to assume direct responsibility for shaping the tools through which our shared heritage is explored and understood.”<\/p>\n
Museo Galileo was formerly named the Institute and Museum of the History of Science. It was established in 1925 and has been housed in the 11th-century Palazzo Castellani since 1930. It holds a world-renowned collection of over 5,000 scientific instruments dating from the 11th
\nto the 19th centuries, primarily from the Medici and Lorraine collections. It is a leading hub for research and documentation, and conceives and delivers exhibitions exploring the intersection of science, technology and the arts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Museo Galileo, the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Embassy of Italy in London announce the reunion of two globally significant collections of Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s writings and drawings for the first time in over 400 years in a new online platform. Leonardotheka launches today, 8 June 2026, at teche.museogalileo.it\/leonardo, and constitutes the most extensive […]","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":7251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"tags":[19,20],"class_list":["post-7253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-diplomazia-culturale","tag-diplomazia-scientifica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7255,"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions\/7255"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amblondra.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}