Leonardo Introduction
An introduction to the various subjects in the Da Vinci Inventions exhibition.

Audio Guide Transcripts

(0) Leonardo Introduction
During the Renaissance period which lasted from the fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, the nations of Europe underwent a rebirth in their culture.

Art, music, education, banking, politics and industry – in fact the way people lived their lives and viewed the world changed forever.

L de V, born in 1452 in the village of Vinci in Northern Italy was the archetypal Renaissance Man.  He created an extraordinary body of work which is a mixture of art, science and technology, some of which you can experience here at this exhibition.

His unstoppable curiosity led him to research, study and experiment throughout his life.   He was constantly looking for ways to harness natural laws for his inventions and making visual and written studies for his world famous codices, sculpture and paintings. 

This audio guide describes a selection of exhibits from each section of the show.
Please go to Exhibit number 1 and press 1 on your keypad - the Parachute we will describe will be above your head over the stairs in the main foyer.

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(1) Parachute

Leonardo believed that a man could throw himself from any great height without injury if using his parachute design. 

The parachute you see here is approximately one third of the actual size.

His original design consisted of a pyramid of wooden poles, each about 7 meters long, and covered in gummed linen cloth which he copied from a Roman Military tent. 

Leonardo never put his invention to the test but when it was tried in the year 2000, full size, all went smoothly.  

However, the brave British man Adrian Nicholas who made the jump from a balloon at 3000 meters,   cut himself free before landing to avoid being squashed by the heavy structure above his head.

Leonardo commented on one of his designs:  “The machine should be tried over a lake and you should carry a long wine-skin as a girdle so that in case you fall in you will not be drowned” but his misgivings did not deter his invention.

Please make your way to the main gallery to exhibit (2) – the Glider


(2) Flight

You are now in the Flight Section.

Leonardo shared Man’s long held desire to dominate the lightest and most impalpable of the elements, air.  In his own words, he was convinced that “Man forcing his big artificial wings against the resistant air, winning, can rule and rise above it.”

Hanging above you, his glider was the result of his close study and fascination with flight and the movement of birds’ wings.  He made close observations into the beating of wings and the distribution of their feathers and this invention also harnesses the energy of air currents he had observed being used by large birds of prey.

The graceful wing like structure, made of timber and cloth, allows the pilot to hang vertically at the centre of the machine and the wing tips have joints to be used to control the apparatus.  The rigid structure is made for supporting it. 

Although this machine would not have worked because it required unrealistic amounts of human strength, it marked a major development in aerodynamic research.

Please move to exhibit (3) – the Aerial Screw
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(3) Aerial Screw

When Leonardo realised that direct imitation of bird flight was impossible due to the differences in bird’s and man’s anatomy, he turned his attention to mechanical instead of muscular means of flight.

 He had learned that a bird’s power to weight ratio could not be copied by man as a bird’s muscles possess a greater weight than all the rest of the bird.

His mechanical design for the Aerial Screw you see here, which is one of his most famous drawings,  anticipated the principle of a propeller on a plane. 

He designed a rising screw mechanism made of wood and linen with a radius of 4.8 meters, set in motion by four men using pedal power on a central platform at the base,  pushing bars in front of them to turn a shaft.  The linen covered blades spun around and an upward rush would be created.    
The machine would probably not have worked but is recognized as the ancestor of today’s helicopter.
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(4) Civil Section

You are now in the Civil Section

One of Leonardo’s leaps forward in technology, was his ability to convert natural energy sources to power machines using basic functions.  

Using traditional sources to transmit and transform motion, he invented methods and mechanics which are still in use today and designed a variety of machines that enhanced mechanic possibilities and added speed and labour saving to many repetitive and intensive tasks.

The crank operated cart you see here shows how to transmit motion to the axle of a wagon. 

It uses a crank which, when turned, engages a toothed wheel to a sprocket. 

This in turn drives an axle which turns a wheel.

Motion is only transmitted to one of the two wheels of the cart to enable the two wheels to move at different speeds when turning.

This basic function is still incorporated in the car differentials of today.

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(5)  The Machine-Gun

The Renaissance was a time of rapid development in modern weaponry.   Advancements emerged through the use of new technology usually encouraged and funded by rulers. Control of the political situation in Italy depended increasingly on military might and innovation, and as a consequence, military engineers were highly sought after for defensive and offensive objectives.

Leonardo offered his skills in military engineering to the Court of Ludovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan, for whom he worked for twenty years.

Leonardo had an assiduous interest in battle techniques and machines which he researched and borrowed from ancient and contemporary treatises - his stay in Milan was a time of significant development in firearms which  radically changed techniques of fortification and assault in the battlefield.
 
The Multidirectional Machine Gun is a perfect example of the advances made in weaponry during the Renaissance and Leonardo’s efforts to increase the speed of fire and capacity of the gun. 

Leonardo increased the volume of the machine gun by multiplying the number of barrels which he arranged in a fan shape which could fire single shots or simultaneous rounds of fire. The machine was also turned into a cart on which he mounted three gun-racks each with eleven guns, for a total of 33 gunbursts. The device rotates so that while one rack is fired, the second one is reloaded and the third one cools off. The crank at the back could be adjusted to alter the height and trajectory of the missiles.

Whilst the design was innovative and the character of this device admired, it is believed that such a machine if built, would have been very difficult to re-load in the middle of a battle.

(6)Tank

Confident about his abilities to build terrible and efficient war machines, Leonardo stated in a letter sent to the Duke of Milan, that he could produce:

“covered wagons, safe and invulnerable, which entering through the enemies with its artilleries, there is not any great multitude of armed people that we could not break off, and behind these will be able to follow many infantries, unharmed and without any obstacle”.

This concept became known as his Tank.   The tank was a covered heavy wagon, whose external structure was shaped like the armoured shell of a turtle.
Acting as a protective shield,  this ‘shell’ had to be covered with metallic plates for greater sturdiness. The lower part of the vehicle was designed to contain a series of guns capable to shoot in every direction and in order to move the tank, eight men inside it would turn cranks attached to trundle wheels which were in turn attached to the four large wheels.

Interestingly, Leonardo’s concept of an invincible, armoured, covered vehicle, backed up by foot soldiers, was later introduced by the British during the 1914-18 First World War at the Battle of Somme.  It was used with great success to help break the terrible deadlock of trench warfare which cost so many lives.

(7)  The Submarine

Leonardo was as interested in designing military machines both for defence and offence.

He described his submarine you see here, as a ‘ship to sink another ship’. 

It was a simple shell like construction with room enough for one person to sit inside.   It was topped with a conning tower with a lid.  He suggested that to sink a ship, the submariner would secure a line with a weight to the bottom of the enemy ship’s hull and secure the other end to the sea floor – thus holing the enemy’s hull and hopefully sinking the ship.

In contrast, Leonardo worked on the idea of double planked hull’s to protect ships from underwater enemy action and to solve the problem of ramming or of divers interfering with vessels. 

He also designed air-filled tanks which could be submerged under sunken ships in attempt to refloat them, and also a machine which would extract water and then dry their holds.

Many of his ideas led to further ideas, point and counterpoint.  His designs led to further questioning and the resulting answers produced new design solutions.


(8) The Last Supper

This is a life-size reproduction of one of Leonardo’s most beautiful and famous paintings, The last Supper,  which was  painted on the wall of the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.  Leonardo painted this fresco between 1495 and 1497 for his patron Ludovico il Moro.


Leonardo’s desire for rich colours led him to abandon traditional fresco methods and use a speedy application of pigment before each new day’s applied plaster had dried.  This resulted in the original fresco being in a state of decay in only 20 years and it has been restored over the centuries between eight and twelve times.

Hypotheses have had to been drawn on the creative process of this work due to the absence of Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings .  A more complete collection of his preparatory studies and the documents of the commission would have shed more light over the significance given by Leonardo to the gestures of the apostles which contradict many more popularly portrayed at the time.

We do know that this scene is based on the words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of St. Luke which provoked physical and emotional distress among the apostles:   “The hand of he who will betray me is here with me on the table”.

In Leonardo’s painting, Judas is not isolated but placed amongst the other apostles.  He is portrayed as one who is drawing back in guilt.   The specific tableau is said to reveal the Dominican nature of Leonardo’s Last Supper as he brought to the surface the question of free will, an issue which was a focus of Dominican preaching.  By placing Judas within the group,  Leonardo was depicting him as a man torn by his own indecision and condemned for his voluntarily betrayal of Jesus. 

(9)  The Mona Lisa

While the identity of Mona Lisa has for centuries been clouded in controversy, it has recently been attributed to Lisa del Giocondo of Florence, whose portrait was commissioned by her husband, a cloth and silk merchant. She was mother to six children and led what is thought to have been a comfortable and somewhat ordinary middle-class life.

According to the Italian 16th century artist, architect and biographer Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo surrounded Mona Lisa with ‘persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her remain merry’ while he painted her portrait. Such jollity does not appear to be reflected in her expression.

While the Mona Lisa has become famous for the sitter’s calm and enigmatic smile, it appears that the composition was not always so restful. New scans show that one of her hands was at first painted in a clenched rather than a relaxed position, which Leonardo ultimately altered.

Mona Lisa’s right arm lies across her stomach, and data from scans has been used to argue that the veil worn by the figure is a guarnello, a transparent robe typically worn by expectant or nursing mothers in 16th century Italy. Lisa del Giocondo was said to have borne her third child at around this time.

In 2006, infrared scans revealed that Mona Lisa's hair is not loosely hanging down, but seems attached to a bonnet or pinned back and covered with a veil. In the 16th century, hair hanging loosely down was the customary style of either unmarried young women or prostitutes, while pinned back would denote her status as a married woman.

Leonardo is said to have painted the face of Mona Lisa to fit within a hypothetical golden rectangle, ‘the divine proportion’. Research indicates that the human eye and brain will choose, out of many rectangles, the one whose sides are in the golden ratio as the most attractive.

Scans show that the dark areas around the sitter’s mouth and eyes have the thickest layers of paint, yet other dark areas are comparatively thin. Leonardo employed sfumato, a painting technique that uses many thin layers of paint to create a misty effect, and might partially explain Mona Lisa’s flickering and ambiguous smile.

The painting was among the first portraits to depict the sitter before an imaginary landscape, and in it we see the influence of Leonardo's studies of map-making, watersheds and canalisation. The sensuous curves of the figure’s hair and clothing are echoed in the imaginary valleys and rivers behind her.

Remarkably, the background landscape greatly resembles Leonardo’s drawings of the female circulatory system. In the Codice Atlantico, Leonardo commented on the likeness of branches of veins spreading blood through the human body to branches of the ocean spreading water through the body of the earth. 



(11) The Forster Codices

‘Codex’ is the Latin word for book. The book you see in front of you is the original Forster Codex I, borrowed from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Leonardo da Vinci notebooks, held at the V&A, were part of the library of John Forster (1812-1876), bequeathed to the museum on his death as a gesture of support for its educational mission.

Throughout his life, Leonardo has a systematic process of personal observation and enquiry, which he recorded in his many notebooks, making careful drawings which he surrounded with explanatory texts.  

The three Forster Codices are small pocket notebooks used by Leonardo at various times in his life.

Forster I consists of two manuscripts measuring about 14.5 x 10 cm. , dating from 1505, when Leonardo was in Florence, concentrating on geometry. It shows a rigorous structure and order rarely found in Leonardo’s writings. The notes consider the measurement of solid bodies and the problems of relating changes in shape to those of volume, a branch of mathematics known today as topology.
The mirror-writing Leonardo used in his codices has given rise to much speculation. In fact, he was left-handed and probably found it easier to write from right to left which throws doubt on the speculation that he was writing in code.
The letter-shapes are in fact very ordinary: Leonardo’s father, a notary, would have used this type of script and once your eye has become accustomed to the scripts of the period, it soon learns to decipher the mirror-writing Leonardo used.

Packed full of drawings and details, the codices form a major part of the extraordinary Leonardo legacy and exemplify his unique intellectual enquiry and ability.