Codex Ashburnham

Codex Ashburnham

The famous sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) are distributed across collections around the world today. After his death, most of Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings were inherited by his pupil and heir Francesco Melzi (ca. 1491/92 – ca. 1570) and kept them at his villa near Vaprio d'Adda, which is now part of the Metropolitan City of Milan in the Italian region of Lombardy. Melzi’s son Orazio inherited the documents after his father’s death and some of the collection was acquired from him ca. 1590 by the sculptor and art collector Pompeo Leoni (1531–1608), who in turn sold the collection to Count Galeazzo Arconati (ca. 1580–1649). Arconati donated the extensive collection to Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1637.

The Sordid History of the Manuscripts

The da Vinci manuscripts remained in Milan for nearly 160 years before being looted by the forces of Napoleon in 1795. Sometime during the 1840’s, Count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja (1803–1869), an Italian mathematician and bibliophile whose love of manuscripts led him to thievery, gained access to the Bibliothèque nationale de France and clipped pages 81 to 114 of manuscript A and pages 91 to 100 of manuscript B. He fled to England after receiving a tip that French authorities were on to him. There he sold 1,923 manuscripts to Bertram Ashburnham, 4th Earl of Ashburnham (1797–1878) and a great collector of precious books and art, for the sum of £8,000 in March of 1847.
Libri was convicted in absentia of theft by a French court in 1850 but Ashburnham was deemed to be just another innocent victim of Libri’s. Ashburnham initially refused the offer of the French government to buy the collection for what he paid for it because he still believed Libri to be innocent, such was the deception. After his death, the 5th Earl sold off the manuscript collections over the course of more than twenty years, including selling the Codex Ashburnham and other stolen manuscripts back to the French government between 1888 and 1890.