Leonardo's mirror script: In order for Leonardo to write without smudging, he employed a technique where he would write in reverse to make sure his hand wouldn't drag along the page.
Sketch of the Arno Valley
One of Leonardo's first jobs in Milan was to be a set designer for the plays that were frequently held in court. In his most famous play, La Danae, da Vinci makes the set for a mountain which splits apart to reveal the god of death, weeping children, and colored fires.
In order to produce a statue of such monstrous proportions as da Vinci hoped, he would have to use lost wax castings method, which would allow him to make a mold of his sculpture that would only fill a layer a few inches thick, as opposed to a solid casting.
Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo's patron and semi-leader of Florence would decline in health as he began to develop acromegaly, the same growth disease that causes gigantism. You can see in these two portraits that his facial features will continue to grow in size well beyond their years.
Meant to be displayed at the Palazzo di Signoria in Florence, this painting was planned to be a massive depiction of Florences' victory over Milan, spanning over 50 feet wide. While this was being painted, Leonardo would have his first encounter with a young Michelangelo.
Codex Leicester would be Leonardo's most in-depth dive into how the world worked, being 72 pages long, crammed with thousands of discoveries around geology, hydrodynamics, and astronomy, accompanied with 360 drawings to illustrate his ideas.
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