How Leonardo da Vinci used to keep his notes secret 

You must have pretended to be a secret agent sometime growing up, creating those secret codes and messages with invisible ink for your friends so that only they could read them.   

But do you know Leonardo da Vinci, the great Italian painter, known for his iconic painting Mona Lisa, invented his own discreet way of writing which anyone would find hard to decode? Well, he used ‘mirror writing’ to write all his journals and notes which meant he wrote from right to left and inverted the letters. 

What was Leonardo’s signature way of writing? 
Curious to know more about his invention? Well, Da Vinci6 would start writing on the right side of the page moving to the left as against the usual left to right. Also, he would invert the letters. That is, he would mirror his writing, making it an unusual script that could only be read with a mirror. Only when he was writing something intended for other people did he write in the normal direction. 

Why did Leonardo use ‘mirror writing’? 
But was he really using this signature way of writing to hide his notes from others? What could be the plausible reasons?  

Leonardo could have developed this “mirror writing” out of fear as he was always worried about others stealing his ideas but some people argue that this is highly unlikely. Someone as intelligent as Leonardo (who was also a great inventor, mathematician and a linguist by the way!), would have developed a whole new language than just mirroring his writing if he really wanted to keep his work secret. Some others say that Leonardo was hiding his notes from churches as his beliefs were contradictory to religious views. Well, maybe.  

Another guess is that this way of writing from right to left may have been a way to keep his hands clean. Well, this seems to be quite possible. Even, the records left by his contemporaries imply that Leonardo was left-handed. So you can say that as a lefty, this mirrored style of writing would have prevented him from smudging his ink as he wrote. 

The scribbles of Da Vinci 
Leonardo was born in 1452 and it is estimated he produced between 20,000 to 28,000 pages of notes and sketches over the course of his life. His writings include notes on engineering, philosophy, painting, botany, physiology, architecture, geography, theories and inventions among others. Infact, he started writing his journals when he was just 26.