Leonardo da Vinci may have been a genius, but he was also a hot mess—at least in terms of organizing his works. When he died in 1519, the Renaissance master left behind 7,000 pages of undated drawings, scientific observations and personal journals, more or less jumbled up in a box. So, when his assistant collected da Vinci’s papers, he did his best to collate them into journals, or codices, mostly based on subject matter. Ever since, art historians have used all sorts of techniques to make an accurate timeline of the various documents now held in museums and collections across the world.
Cracking the da Vinci chronology: System tries to bring order to the works of a Renaissance genius
