ABOUT THE ARCHIVE

A place to look closely.

Discovering Da Vinci is an independent educational archive about Leonardo's art, notebooks, life and ideas. It is not a museum's official catalogue.

Start with the object, then the evidence

The artwork pages introduce paintings and drawings. The notebook hub connects manuscript collections, subjects and editions. The source library points toward holding institutions and scholarship.

Not every text is Leonardo's wording

• Historical transcription: an editor's reading of the original writing. It can contain uncertain or disputed words.
• Historical translation: a rendering into another language, tied to a named edition where available.
• Modern paraphrase or AI-assisted rendering: a reading aid, not an authenticated transcription or a substitute for the cited edition.
• Research hypothesis: a proposed explanation to test against evidence, not an established discovery.

Passage numbers in a published edition are not the same as notebook folio numbers. Image-to-text alignment is incomplete; a related image is not proof that a passage belongs to that sheet. The archive's older pages are still being reviewed for consistent citations and labels.

Images and attributions

The homepage uses web-size derivatives of the site's existing reference images. It does not show digitally generated reconstructions as original artwork. The red-chalk head on the life link is traditionally identified as a self-portrait; that identification is not certain. A depiction of a study or proposed machine does not demonstrate that a working machine was built.

Follow the linked artwork and source pages for collection and attribution details. An artwork's age does not automatically settle every source's image-reuse terms. This site does not grant blanket permission to redistribute images held by other institutions.

Privacy and traffic

This homepage does not install advertising trackers, analytics cookies or fingerprinting scripts. The hosting provider records ordinary web-server access logs, which can include network addresses, requested URLs, times and user agents. Site maintenance uses aggregated log statistics to identify popular pages and broken links.

Aggregate request counts are not a census of people: bots, repeated visits, shared networks and caching affect them. No visitor identities or raw access logs are shown publicly. Other pages may load externally hosted images, fonts or media; those providers receive the requests needed to deliver that content. External links have their own privacy policies.

What is still being improved

Media availability, source citations, catalogue coverage and verified folio-to-text connections are ongoing work. The archive should not be treated as a complete inventory of Leonardo's surviving works or as a fully verified handwriting dataset.