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# After Leonardo da Vinci's death, his manuscripts first passed to his last pupil, Francesco Melzi
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/posle-smerti-leonardo-da-vinchi-ego-rukopisi-snachala-pereshli-k-ego-poslednemu-ucheniku-franchesko-meltsi/
- Published: 2026-06-08T10:18:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:53.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Art, Books, Museums, Science

After Leonardo da Vinci's death, his manuscripts first passed to his last pupil, Francesco Melzi. But years later Melzi's children decided to sell the da Vinci archives, and they were acquired by the Tuscan sculptor Pompeo Leoni.

Leoni reassembled part of the notebooks, unstitched the quires, took loose sheets, notes and scraps, and compiled from it all, at his own discretion, two famous collections. The first, the "Codex Atlanticus", comprised technical drawings, schemes of war machines, architectural projects and geometry. Everything concerning art and the science of man, more than 600 drawings, anatomical studies, sketches of horses, landscapes, geographical maps and caricatures, he united in the second codex.

When the owner of both volumes later became Leoni's son-in-law, he sold the technical part to Count Galeazzo Arconati, who donated it to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The smaller artistic part, meanwhile, made its way to England in the 1620s and entered the Royal Collection 50 years later, possibly as a gift to Charles II. This part of the archive became known as the "Windsor Codex".

Now, 400 years on, the integrity of the composite volume has been restored. The Galileo Museum in Florence has reunited Leonardo da Vinci's "Codex Atlanticus" with more than 500 pages, restoring its full extent to the largest surviving album of the master. The museum has launched the Leonardotheka 2.0 project, adding to the 1,119-page volume held in Milan's Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana about 550 pages from Britain's Royal Collection Trust. The project gives researchers from around the world online access to da Vinci's archive.