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Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his private notes in mirror writing: the letters run from right to left and are reversed, so they read normally in a mirror. When he wrote for other people, he used ordinary script.

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The story behind the card

Leonardo filled thousands of pages with notes and drawings on anatomy, flight, water, machines and painting, from shopping lists to designs for flying machines. The usual explanation for the mirror script is that he was left-handed: writing from right to left let his hand move away from the fresh ink instead of smudging it. The idea that he was hiding secrets is less convincing, since any mirror undoes the trick at once. After his death in 1519 the notebooks passed to his pupil Francesco Melzi and were later scattered. Today they are in collections such as the British Library and the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, and one, the Codex Leicester, was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for about $30.8 million. Mirror writing also appears in Ottoman calligraphy, where mirrored compositions often carried a mystical meaning.

Türkçe oku
Leonardo da Vinci kişisel notlarının çoğunu ayna yazısıyla yazdı: Harfler hem sağdan sola ilerler hem de ters dönüktür; yazı ancak aynada normal okunur. Başkalarının okuyacağı metinlerde ise normal yazıyı kullanırdı.

Leonardo anatomiden uçuşa, sudan makinelere ve resme kadar pek çok konuda binlerce sayfa not ve çizim bıraktı; aralarında alışveriş listeleri de, uçan makine tasarımları da vardır. Ayna yazısının en yaygın açıklaması solak olmasıdır: Sağdan sola yazınca eli yeni sürülmüş mürekkebin üstünden geçmez, yazıyı bulaştırmaz. Sırlarını saklamak için böyle yazdığı görüşü pek inandırıcı değildir, çünkü herhangi bir ayna bu yazıyı hemen çözer. 1519'daki ölümünden sonra defterler öğrencisi Francesco Melzi'ye kaldı, zamanla dağıldı. Bugün British Library ve Windsor Kalesi'ndeki Kraliyet Kütüphanesi gibi koleksiyonlarda bulunurlar; Codex Leicester adlı defteri ise Bill Gates 1994'te yaklaşık 30,8 milyon dolara satın aldı. Ayna yazısı Osmanlı hat sanatında da görülür: Müsenna denen, iki yarısı birbirinin aynadaki yansıması gibi yazılan bu kompozisyonlara çoğu zaman tasavvufi bir anlam yüklenirdi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Mirror writing
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Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

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The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.

Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

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