Leonardo da Vinci’s “mysterious” backwards writing from his nearly-lost notebooks

These pages are changed out every three months, then sit in darkness for three years. That’s what the museum told me on Instagram, anyway. I tried to ask when I was there but the woman in the room who was eyeballing me didn’t speak English.

You know, you’d think it would be nice to visit a museum with virtually no one around, but instead you kind of feel like the guards are staring at you and you’re right on the verge of being arrested for something. 

Leonardo da Vinci: Procrastination, Perfected

Leonardo was…let’s just say “intensely curious.” He was deeply, passionately fascinated by nearly everything he encountered: How the eyeball works, how people move when taken over by certain emotions, how water interacts with objects.

Believe me, the dude was absolutely obsessed with the movement of water. It’s crazy. He even worked with Machiavelli on changing the course of a river. I didn’t make that up.

And, of course, there were his famous explorations of flight. Many seem to think he had the sole purpose of finding a way to make a man fly, but I tend to think it was just one of a great many meandering paths his mind would take.

This is part of what gained him a reputation as a procrastinator. Leonardo would commission for a painting, then get distracted. He’d think about how objects look more hazy in the distance, then go change something on a portrait. He carried around some of his paintings for decades, making tiny brushstrokes here and there.

There’s a lot of quotes floating around, where people complained about how the guy just never seemed to get anything done. Even a Pope whined about it. But I think the best way to explain it is to look at Water Isaacson, the author of a recent biography.

He was describing what happened when Leonardo was commissioned to create a giant statue of the Duke of Milan’s dad on horseback — a work that never happened, incidentally.

“Leonardo got so deeply immersed in these studies that he decided to begin an entire treatise on the anatomy of horses…While studying horses, he began plotting methods to make cleaner stables; over the years he would devise multiple systems for mangers with mechanisms to replenish feed bins through conduits from an attic and to remove manure using water sluices and inclined floors.”

Procrastinator, or passionate perfectionist? Maybe both. There are many nowadays who think Leonardo had some form of ADHD, and it certainly isn’t hard to look at him through that potential lens.

The Unpublished Notebook Enigma

Here’s the real mystery to me: Leonardo craved attention and acceptance. It makes sense when you think about it: he was born out of wedlock and didn’t have formal schooling. He was surrounded by people who were technically higher up the totem pole than he was.

He wrote a famous letter to the Duke of Milan bragging about all he could do, saying he could build cannons and bridges and drain moats, hoping for a job.

He was also rather “fancy.” I don’t mean that he was gay, although he almost certainly was — I just mean he liked nice things. He dressed in colorful outfits with bright hats, loved theatrics, and regularly invited people to watch him paint and show off what he could do. He was a bit of a showman, and enjoyed the company of wealthy people. He loved to impress.

But despite all of this, the guy never published anything from these notebooks. There were plans to, but it never came to be. He made countless discoveries that others wouldn’t realize for centuries…and essentially kept them to himself.

Let’s take his studies of anatomy as an example. And to get more specific, his studies of the human heart. He discovered it consists of four chambers, not two as people believed at the time. He also observed how a heart pumps in a “wringing” motion. He made a glass model of an aorta, using grass seeds and water to observe how they moved.

Many of his findings wouldn’t become public knowledge for centuries, when others made these observations on their own and actually published them.

Why didn’t Leonardo make his discoveries known? While dissecting corpses was frowned upon, I don’t think it was strictly illegal at the time — nor do I think that would’ve necessarily stopped him.

“Why” is the big question here, and I haven’t figured that out. It’s like if Spielberg made some actually decent Indiana Jones movies in the 90’s, and just hid them in his garage.

An Ocean of Pages

So the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci were never published. After his death, his stacks of pages went to his heir, Francesco Melzi. He never published them either. They were passed down, some tutor stole them, then they were given away, taken back, given again, broken into pieces, sold, bought, resold, and…here we are.

The “Codex Atlanticus” has nothing to do with the Atlantic Ocean — it got that name because when the pages were compiled, they were pasted on paper typically used for atlases. Once that was completed, the volume was given the name “Drawings of machines and of the arts, secrets and other things of Leonardo da Vinci collected by Pompeo Leoni.” Which may be verbose, but is also quite cool.

Some of the notebooks were almost certainly lost. Some claims as much as 80 percent are gone. There’s reports that they were neglected for quite some time, and people were just snatching up pages.

But still, we’re left with enough that we’re able to get a glimpse into one of the most complicated minds of all time. And there’s a chance that more will be found: in 1967, two notebooks were discovered collecting dust in a library in Madrid.

You can view the entire Codex Atlanticus for yourself. It’s all been digitized and is available online. There’s similar sites for the other codices as well. By the way, Bill Gates owns one. At least he doesn’t keep it locked up and hidden. I bet Bezos would.

Codeless Code

But you might have come here to read about the backwards writing — you didn’t think I would just leave you hanging, did you? You’ve got to save something for the end. Did you think I was clickbaiting you? Be honest now. You’ll be pleased to know this is a “no clickbait zone.” This page, I mean. I make no such claims about the site as a whole.

Leonardo wrote backwards. All his letters are in reverse. There’s been a lot of speculation about this — that it holds some sort of mystery, that he was trying to make it so people couldn’t steal his secrets, and so on.

The truth is that he was left handed, and wrote this way so he didn’t smudge the ink. I find it impossible to believe that a man who realized on his own that the moon reflects the light of the sun wouldn’t have figured out that his “code” could be broken with a mirror. Also, I’m willing to bet that Leonardo, a guy who thought sculpture was low class and made you dirty, wouldn’t have wanted ink on his hand.

There’s no secret code. Just the writings of one of the smartest men who ever lived.

Now don’t go thinking that was clickbait after all, just because it didn’t turn out that Leonardo da Vinci was an alien who wrote in reverse because that’s the way his people communicated.