Reading
Leonardo in Egypt
The Codex Atlanticus holds drafts of letters from Leonardo to “the Devatdar of Syria” describing travels in Armenia and the Taurus Mountains. Grant reads them as a coded account of a journey to Giza.
Emőke Dénes, “The Great Pyramid of Giza”, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Most Leonardo scholars treat the letters as a literary exercise or fiction; no record places him outside Italy and France. Grant’s reading turns Taurus into the Apis bull and the bull into a name for the pyramid, and dates the trip to about 1486. It is a reading of a reading. The site records it because it is the hinge of his Vitruvian Man argument, not because the trip is attested.