The Leonardo Da Vinci Galleries
A scenographic itinerary among 170 historical models, works of art, ancient volumes and installations to tell the story of Leonardo, engineer and humanist. Here are the 10 sections.
Artists or engineers?
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.
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Renaissance Tuscany was home to a vibrant school of engineering, which inherited the medieval tradition, reinterpreting it, however, through the lens of the new humanist vision. The generation of artist-engineers who matured in the workshops of the Renaissance developed the art of drawing as an instrument to illustrate treatises on architecture and machines.
Leonardo da Vinci GalleriesNational Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci
All kept sketchbooks and notebooks and wrote treatises in which the military arts, engineering, and architecture are accompanied by the revival of the classical tradition. Leonardo excelled in this cultural context for the astonishing quality of his techniques of representation.
Drawing the world
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.
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Leonardo’s drawing showcases his versatility in passing from one field of inquiry and representation to the next, and the close connections between art and science.
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The experimental nature of Leonardo’s drawing is evident from the numerous techniques he used in representation, from axonometric projections to plan views, from sectional views to transparencies and exploded views. In his anatomical drawings, this strength of representation is obvious.
The years of his first stay in Milan, between 1482 and 1499, were fundamental for Leonardo’s growth. Around 1490 the size of his library had reached some 40 books, remarkable for the times, and expanded even further later. As testimony to his associations with the intellectuals working in Milan, Leonardo collaborated in 1498 with the famous mathematician Luca Pacioli by illustrating his treatise “De divina proportione” with a series of geometric solids.
The art of war
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.
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Leonardo’s drawings of fantastic war machines gave voice to his wide ranging and extraordinary imagination, illustrating traditional and contemporary war technologies in a sort of anthology and repertoire, with endless variations.
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After 1490, Leonardo’s researches in the field of fortified architecture and firearms, previously imprecise and cumbersome on a practical level, underwent an evolution, with further theoretical investigation in the fields of ballistics and physics. He carefully studied the parabolic trajectories of projectiles, tracing their paths with sure strokes, and also considered possibilities of in-series or simultaneous detonations of multiple barrel firearms.
The theatre of machines
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.
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Working at the Sforza court, Leonardo designed and constructed elaborate scenic sets for important commemorative events, such as the Festa Del Paradiso for the wedding of Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella of Aragon in 1498. On that occasion, he designed and constructed a star-strewn vault with a large stage machine that miraculously set the planets in motion.
Leonardo passed, particularly in the 1490s, from documentation of practical problems to a more theoretical analysis of the principles regulating the functioning of machines, from the study of mechanical elements to their interrelation. His studies on friction and on motion in general are to be inserted into this perspective, which led him to the idea of compiling a treatise on mechanics, based on analysis of mechanisms and gears, the so-called “Mechanical Elements”. The most important compiling of these results is contained in Codex Madrid I.
Ingenuity at work
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.
PRINTING PRESSNational Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci
This was the case with movable-type printing, which in the 15th century produced a veritable revolution in the speed and processes of spreading cultural developments.
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As in other sectors of his activity, the work machines first designed by Leonardo were related to the customary practices of Renaissance workshops, in line with medieval tradition. With continued study during his first sojourn in Milan, however, he acquired profound knowledge of those elements which he referred to as “macchinali”. Thus, by the 1490s, he was able to design machines with highly advanced systems of automation.
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Between 1495 and 1497, the same years when he was working on his Last Supper, Leonardo also devoted himself to intensive study in the fields of textiles and metallurgy, production areas in which Milan excelled during the Sforza era.
The dream of flight
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.
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In most of his studies, Leonardo made attempts to transform the anatomy of a bird into machine form, using mechanical elements of engineering such as pulleys, gears, and endless screw and bolt systems.
In the beginning of the 1500s, after his return to Florence, Leonardo opened a second phase of study of flight, turning his attention to the physiology and flight trajectories of birds within the complex context of upward air currents, adopting a more comprehensive vision of nature and focusing on the ability of birds to soar “without the beating of wings”.
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Despite their limitations, Leonardo's studies on flight are among the most original, and least indebted to tradition, being based on a methodical line of work combining observation, design, measurement, and experimentation.
Ideal cities and bodies
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.
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Against actual observations of a Milan characterized by a circular layout, Leonardo contrasted his theoretical studies for an ideal city. A dream city based on principles of efficiency and rationality, by contrast with the metaphysical beauty of ideal cities cherished during those same years by many Italian architects and painters.
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In Milan, Leonardo also tried his hand at the classical architectural tradition, an inquiry at the center of the Renaissance conversation. For example, the theme of central plan churches, here compared to the Pantheon of Rome, the archetype of classical antiquity.
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The comparison with the ancient world was focused in Leonardo and his contemporaries mainly along the lines of principles from the rediscovered Roman architect Vitruvius, who theorized the comparison between the proportions of buildings and those of the human body, summarized in the idea of the “well proportioned” man. This model is proposed anew by Leonardo in his famous Vitruvian Man, in dialogue with similar representations from other Italian humanists.
Waterways
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.
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His earliest drawings of the Milanese waterways date primarily from the 1490s, although these were developed also during the second Milanese period, from 1506 to 1513. Leonardo studied not only large rivers, like the Adda and the Ticino, but also smaller watercourses around the city, like the Nirone.
Above all, it was the “Navigli,” the city’s artificial canals, that attracted his attention, from the medieval Naviglio Grande, connecting the River Ticino to Milan, to the Martesana Canal, built beginning in 1457 by the engineer Bertola da Novate, on commission from Francesco Sforza, to bring the Adda’s waters into Milan.
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Observing and surveying the basins employed in the Milan area, Leonardo described and perhaps designed a number of improvements, although it is difficult to establish with certainty whether his drawings represent original proposals or memoranda of previously existing constructions.
Inspired by Leonardo
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.
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Since their creation, the important stylistic, compositional, and iconographic innovations of Leonardo's Last Supper and other works – the Virgin of the Rocks, the Mona Lisa, the Sant’Anna, and the Salvator Mundi – have inspired a great number of Lombard artists, among whom Bernardino Luini excelled, a painter very active in Milan until 1532.
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The earliest copies of the Last Supper, nearly contemporary with the original, were made by the Leonardeschi, painters after Leonardo including Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Giampietrino, and Cesare Magni, who produced versions faithful to the original composition. Many other Renaissance artists took inspiration from it more freely. In the following centuries, despite changing styles and compositional models, the Last Supper has ever continued to exert its charm.
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Since the 19th century, many artists have made total or partial copies of this work, so fragile and deteriorated, making use of advanced photographic techniques.
Man and the cosmos
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.
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So, for example, the theme of the vortex is investigated in eddies of water as they encounter obstacles, as well as in storms, or even in the patterns of the hair in the Leda, one of his most celebrated works, now unfortunately lost. Elsewhere, the branching of a watercourse is shown as comparable to the structure of the bronchi, or of the branches of a tree.
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In these genuine obsessions, Leonardo describes nature and man, in the study of gestures and movements, of shadows and lights, of geometry, of microcosms, in which all creatures obey the same natural causes.
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Leonardo’s thirst and desire for knowledge never fail, nor does his curiosity about nature, which he observed and described in its most catastrophic and spectacular manifestations, portraying these in the series of floods now preserved at the Royal Library.
