Grand plans: Leonardo’s architectural designs

This sheet shows Leonardo's designs for a house with three terraces.

The accompanying text note allows us to better understand Leonardo's sketches for the house: in section...

... and in elevation ...

...for a villa placed on the crest of a hill, which develops into three floors, each with a large terrace overlooking the landscape.

It was in these years that the Marquis of Mantua commissioned Leonardo to design a villa in imitation of a Medici villa, located south of Florence.

In 1499 Leonardo designed a “stove” for a bathroom equipped with every comfort including hot water, a real luxury for the time.

It was the bathroom of the duchess Eleonora of Aragon's residence, who had married a member of the Sforza family and resided in Milan.

In the upper left drawing the coal burns inside the domed structure with the water at the bottom, while in the drawing on the right…

…the coal is under the dome and the water is in a container at the bottom. In both cases there is a narrow inlet and outlet so that “the coal remains alight for long enough”.

He also makes a note to himself to study “the vortex motions of fire” similar to those of water and air.

Leonardo analyses a crack in the lower part of an apse in which, at the top, a window was opened. He deduces general rules to avoid similar structural problems: avoid altering the original balance of the arch structure, that lead to weight disproportions.

Leonardo spent his last years in France. Having recently acquired the Mona Lisa, Francis I commissioned Leonardo to work on a grand hunting lodge, the Château de Chambord.

Leonardo envisaged a grandiose royal palace, the plan of which shows various buildings with a central focus, and dominated by the regularity and geometric proportionality that guided other fields of his research.

Besides the architectural extravagance, Leonardo devised ways in which to bring water into the complex, using a branch of the Loire River. He planned a dam to store clean water for the residential complex, and the means to discharge sediment into the surrounding lands for use as fertiliser.

Leonardo designs, in a very
original way, a bastion to protect a military
fortress formed by a forest of willows. 

These trees are not very expensive, he writes, and have the advantage of weaving their branches more and more over time, in order to increase the effectiveness of the defensive system.

The drawings represent, among other things, the order in which to plant the trees.

In a sheet full of notes and drawings of various subjects, the drawing for the façade of a building can be recognised in the bottom left corner

The presence of pillars and wide openings allow us to hypothesize its connection with the project for the villa of Charles d'Amboise, the French governor of Milan in the early 16th century, known through drawings from other manuscripts.