News: Lost Leonardo Work Discovered

Renaissance artist, inventor and all around genius Leonard da Vinci left many clues to his numerous experiments, much of which is written in a backwards handwriting he invented in order to keep his discoveries secret. Now, a fragment of his manuscript that had been forgotten for nearly 150 years has been rediscovered in the local archives in Nantes, France, uncovered by a local journalist who came across a reference to the document in a Leonardo biography.
 
The text on the document has yet to be deciphered but is in his backwards writing and the head of the library believes that in addition to writing in 15th century Italian, he was possibly also writing in other languages. Leonardo spent time in France and spoke a number of tongues.
 
The document came to the archives from wealthy local collector Pierre-Antoine Labouchère, who donated 5,000 documents to the city, amongst which was an unseen score by composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart discovered in 2008.