Leonardo da Vinci – a genius of his time

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the major artists associated with the Italian High Renaissance. In addition to being a painter, he also devoted himself to other fields. Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519 and left behind 13,000 pages of notes containing his ideas, thoughts and inventions. The notes were privately owned for many years and were never published during the Renaissance. For this reason, most of his ideas were forgotten. It was not until several hundred years later that some of the material was rediscovered. Today, around 6,000 of the pages are known, but it is thought that many pages have been lost.

The exhibition shows a selection of models made using Leonardo’s working drawings. The main focus is on da Vinci as an inventor and engineer, but you can sense the artist behind the sketches. During the Renaissance, mechanics was described as: ”the art that teaches us how to build machines, instruments and other types of appliances”. Leonardo’s contributions to this science are his studies of weight, striking power and propulsion. The sketches often show the machines in detail. Leonardo was concerned that it must be possible to assemble each component in a machine an infinite number of ways, which would then activate new movements. The energy sources that Leonardo had available were those that have been in use since Antiquity; muscle power, wind power, water power, spring power, weights and counter-weights. In the 16th century, the supply of materials was not like it is today. These factors restricted Leonardo as an inventor and engineer. Many of his mechanical inventions would have been of little benefit with the energy sources available at that time. However, it is the scope of his imagination that is so amazing. That is why many people would say that Leonardo da Vinci was a genius of his time!