Creating Leonardo: Commemorating 500 Years of Leonardo’s Legacy

Leonardo’s Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader / Paula Findlen (History, Stanford). Leonardo was a lifelong learner, inveterate note-taker, and writer with an uneven and highly self-directed education. He lived in a world in which Gutenberg’s printing press, created shortly before his birth, had begun to transform the nature of the book but manuscripts still mattered a great deal. Early in life, Leonardo owned very few books, but over time his collection grew until he had his own library, in addition to books he borrowed from others. Throughout his life, Leonardo encountered many different kinds of learning; the diversity of his interests led him to read and think broadly. His library is a key to how he interacted with and learned from his world.