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The Da-Vinci API exposes the Veni Vidi Da Vinci library — the largest readable digital collection of Leonardo’s manuscripts — as a free, read-only JSON API. Every page in the library carries three layers:
  1. The scan — public high-resolution photography in three sizes, served from a CDN.
  2. The original — the scholarly e-Leo transcription of Leonardo’s Italian, where one survives.
  3. The Reader’s Edition — an editorial layer written with AI and grounded in the first two: a title and subtitle, subject tags from a frozen 25-term vocabulary, a plain-English summary, evidence-linked highlights, and a complete English translation aligned block-by-block with the source.

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What’s inside

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Start here

Quickstart

Your first request in under a minute — no key required.

API Reference

Every endpoint, interactive — try requests from the page.

The data model

Collections, folios, transcriptions, and how the Reader’s Edition layer is grounded.

Attribution

Free with credit. What to include and where to link.

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For agents

These docs ship with an MCP server and an llms.txt index, so AI agents can search and read everything here natively. The API itself is CORS-open, keyless by default, and every folio response carries a ready-made attribution string — designed to be built on.