Wealthy collector Pierre-Antoine Labouchere donated several thousand manuscripts to the public library in Nantes in 1872. When a journalist came across a reference to a document in a biography of Leonardo da Vinci his search brought him to Nantes, and to the Labouchere collection, where he discovered a coded manuscript, written by Da Vinci and most probably in 15th century Italian.
The manuscript has yet to be deciphered, as it is coded in Da Vinci’s trademark right-to-left mirror writing.
This is not the first important discovery at the library from the same collection, as in 2008 a musical score by Mozart was found.
Read more about the discovery of a coded manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci in Nantes.
