V&A digitizes Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Forster notebooks

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has digitized the first volume of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Forster, a collection of notebooks bequeathed to the museum by literary critic John Forster in 1876. The three volumes contain Leonardo's thoughts and projects from 1480 to 1505, written during his years in Milan at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza. The pages feature hydraulic engineering designs, tools for digging canals, and solid geometry studies, all written in mirror script. The museum plans to digitize the remaining two volumes by 2019 to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death. The digitization uses IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) technology, allowing high-resolution zoom and comparison with other documents. Curator Catherine Yvard notes that Leonardo presented himself primarily as a military engineer when offering his services to Ludovico Sforza. The initiative aims to preserve the fragile notebooks while making them accessible to scholars and enthusiasts worldwide.