The codices

After Leonardo's death, all his manuscripts on which he had noted his lifelong research, projects, theories and reflections were inherited by his student Francesco Melzi who brought them back to Italy from France. It must have been a very large number of codices: it is believed that the material that has come down to us corresponds to about a fifth of the entire mass of papers left by Leonardo but even so the number of papers that have come down to us is truly impressive.