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Leonardo da Vinci celebrating a 500-year legacy
A self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci
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A self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.
Five centuries after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, his brilliant legacy is still alive and celebrated the world over.
Da Vinci was a genius in multiple disciplines. He was a painter, a scientist and an innovative inventor. He honed his skills in various disciplines by apprenticing everywhere. He even delved into architecture, botany and zoology.
He also became very skilled in anatomical dissection, making him the first man to become competent at drawing human body parts in detail. Da Vinci, according to historians, dissected at least 30 corpses to study their anatomical details.
On May 2, the world commemorated the 500th anniversary of da Vinci’s of death.
As an inventor-scientist, the man born in Vinci, Italy, on April 15, 1452, created various famous visual artworks, establishing a legacy as one of the most influential maestros of the Renaissance, which means rebirth in French.
To remind the world of da Vinci’s brilliance, a number of science institutes and art galleries are promoting his works in special ways from January to the middle of 2019.
The Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris and The Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie Church in Milan, Italy, for example, are being shown as special exhibits.
Milan, Vinci and Florence in Italy along with London, Edinburg and several other cities in the United Kingdom are also displaying hundreds of da Vinci’s creations.
Apart from exhibiting da Vinci’s paintings, the institutes and galleries also showcase his designs of technological products and inventions. Hundreds of da Vinci’s product design illustrations have been transformed into 3-D models at the exhibition Die Modelle von Maschinen aus dem Museo Leonardiano di Vinci (The Machine Models from the Leonardo da Vinci Museum).
The pictures and models are placed side by side. Close by are photos of modern and super modern technological objects developed from da Vinci’s illustrations. History shows that throughout da Vinci’s life, he was never able to turn his designs into 3-D forms.
The Die Modelle von Maschinen organizers have taken the exhibition to various European cities and countries, such as at the Kaiserliche Hofburg in Innsbruck, Austria.
One of da Vinci’s designs exhibited in Innsbruck is his hand-press printing machine. This machine, which uses a pressing and drawing method with a base slab made out of paper or cloth, was once very popular, but lately has been forgotten.
For nearly 500 years, until the period before the year 2000, people still used the hand-press machine to reproduce printed materials like newspapers, flyers, brochures and pamphlets. With the exhibition in Innsbruck, the world has finally learned that the idea and shape of the machine came from da Vinci’s design.
At the same time he designed the hand-press printing machine, da Vinci also illustrated links of a chain connected with a gear, making the chain function as a means of transmission.
In another design, da Vinci drew ball bearings, later functioning effectively to propel all kinds of machines, and, at another time, he offered the idea of ponte girevole (mobile bridge, swing bridge), capable of opening or turning to allow for the passage of large vessels.
Da Vinci also charted other objects considered to be technologically advanced and revolutionary for his era. These range from parachutes and gantolle (paraglider) to bicycles, hydraulic machines, paddle boats and oxygen masks for divers or firefighters.
Just imagine being an average person living in medieval Europe seeing da Vinci’s futuristic designs. It must have been like science fiction for medieval Europeans.
Da Vinci’s brilliance and limitless creativity caught the attention of French King Louis XII. The king then appointed the genius da Vinci as a military advisor in Milan and in this role, he also displayed the same brilliance he showed as an artist, scientist and inventor.
Da Vinci, for example, designed a military vehicle with a tortoise shell-like roof that covered a bowl-like base that had four wheels driven by a hand crank and canons that protruded from the sides. Da Vinci called his design the carro armato (combat tank).
Under the illustration, da Vinci wrote: “This war machine is to penetrate the enemy line. But its movement must be followed by the infantry and operated by 8 people”. In the 20th century, da Vinci’s idea became what we know today as tanks.
Da Vinci had 200 patented inventions under his name but, unfortunately, Michael H. Hart’s book The 100, A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History does not list his name.
Hart had his own reasons for excluding da Vinci. In painting, for instance, da Vinci did not introduce something spectacularly new in his time, despite the fact that some of his paintings were later seen as special with really intriguing extrinsic aspects.
Hart also argued that da Vinci could not prove his ideas as nonimaginary objects. Thus, Da Vinci was unlike Thomas Alva Edison, who was able to build his inventions for electric power, or James Watt, whose steam engine made him a key figure of the Industrial Revolution, or aviation pioneers Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, who enabled man to fly in the sky.
— Photos by Agus Dermawan T.
