The Leonardo Da Vinci Galleries

Leonardo was interested in machines and mechanisms even from an early age. His first true engineering experience took place between 1469 and 1471, when, in Verrocchio’s workshop, he participated in the completion of the Florence cathedral, collaborating in the demanding task of fabricating an enormous gilded copper sphere and positioning it upon the summit of the cathedral lantern. On the construction site, Leonardo was able to observe the actions of cranes conceived four decades earlier by Filippo Brunelleschi for building the renowned cupola, one of the greatest and most revolutionary constructions of the Renaissance.

In Leonardo, drawing was not only an instrument for study and analysis of reality, but also a marvelously efficient form of communication, as it best expressed his flexibility of thought.

Leonardo presented himself with a letter written to the duke of Milan, Ludovico Maria Sforza, upon his arrival to the city in 1482. In this letter, now part of the Codex Atlanticus, he offered his services as a military engineer. At that time, truth be told, the Tuscan artist had little experience of military art, but during this first sojourn in Milan, he strove to teach himself by studying the classical authors, like Archimedes, Frontinus, and Vegetius, available to him in the invaluable new text, “De Re Militari”, written by Roberto Valturio and translated into the vernacular by Paolo Ramusio in 1483.

During his first sojourn in Milan, Leonardo divided his attention between practical aspects of production and visionary ideas. Machines became marvelous, awe-inspiring objects, like the fantastic war carts designed by humanists Giovanni Fontana and Roberto Valturio.

Throughout the centuries, work has been always identified and represented in correspondence with the manual gestures and tools involved in human activities. In the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the introduction of mechanical innovations – from the coupling of gear and pinion with the crank and piston rod system, to the introduction of worm gears – gradually transformed the means of work and production, which evolved over this period, from manual to ever more mechanized processes.

Leonardo’s first period of reflections on flight, which he called "instrumental", meaning mechanical, date to his first stay in Milan (1482-1499). Aware of the limits imposed by energy and materials, Leonardo developed solutions to amplify the strength of a man. The great machines of these years testify to his exceptional vision, but also to the limitations of his research, in which he stubbornly attempted to apply the mechanisms of the engineering tradition to a field that proved them inadequate for the context.

Since his arrival in 1482, Leonardo observed the city of Milan with keen attention and interest, to the extent that in many of the drawings from those years, we see traces of the various city construction sites, both civil and military. He was also personally involved in the competition for the construction of the lantern for Milan’s cathedral, an enterprise from which he retired after offering his own proposal.

For the city of Milan and its territory, water was a vital resource, not only for agriculture and activities of production, but also as a basis for transportation of goods and people. A true source of wealth, it stimulated the development of a lively school of hydraulics in Lombardy, which was a source of study and curiosity for Leonardo, constituting an important training experience during his years in Milan.

For Leonardo, painting was a stimulus and instrument for studying and expressing the world around him. He viewed it as a genuine science, which thus incorporated all further investigation into other fields, in a continuous and fertile dialogue. The knowledge acquired in technical and scientific fields thus also translated into works of art, marking Leonardo's unique style.

In his most mature years, after moving to France in 1516, Leonardo focused primarily on formulating wide-ranging theories about nature, which he increasingly saw as subject to a series of universal laws, thanks to a flexible approach capable of viewing associative links and interconnections between phenomena.