This is the first in a series of six articles on my travels to three cities to view Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings and drawings in 2023.
When I returned to my friend Laurie’s flat in Wimbledon from Windsor Castle on my last full day in London, she asked: “What would you say was the highlight of your trip?”
I had just eagerly showed her my iPhone photos of Leonardo da Vinci's exquisite anatomical drawings from the nearly 600 sheets of his manuscripts housed at the castle's library.
“It was my trip to the Louvre,” I answered matter-of-factly, given that days before I had taken an early morning high-speed train from London to Paris to view several of da Vinci’s paintings, including the Mona Lisa.
“I think it was your time at Windsor,” she said just as straightforwardly.
At first, I thought she was simply seizing on the fresh enthusiasm I exuded when describing my experiences at Windsor hours before. When I returned from Paris late at night, she and her husband Gethyn were already asleep. Yet her conclusion gave me pause to reconsider.
Windsor was the last and culminating stop of my nine-day trip to London in early September that included a day-trip to Paris. This was preceded in August by an Amtrak ride from my native New York to Washington D.C. to attend a da Vinci exhibit. All of my travels were centered on seeing the Renaissance man’s paintings and notebook folios. Everything that went into my da Vinci-themed summer—including extensive planning that involved scheduled visits to multiple museums and libraries to view his works—had the desired effect of further cultivating the values and motivation I need to write and publish my book about how the Italian polymath used his mind.
In a series of articles, I’ll explain how this was accomplished, chronologically weaving tales of each experience. These will include discussing my book project with library employees and encountering unexpected yet energizing experiences that are the wonder of travel.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library hosted an exhibition of a dozen sheets from the Codex Atlanticus, the largest single set of Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving notebooks. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library
Washington D.C.
August 19, 2023
“Leonardo da Vinci offers us models designed to improve the quality of life, in the belief that technological progress must also necessarily involve progress of the mind and spirit.”
Twelve sheets of mostly mechanical drawings that were displayed in a small, light-controlled room in the library’s downstairs. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
Here, Alberto Rocca captures the essence of the exhibition “Imagining the future. Leonardo da Vinci: in the mind of an Italian genius” that I attended at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington D.C. in August. Rocca is director of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, a partner in presenting this show that was the first in the United States to feature folios from the Codex Atlanticus, a notebook of da Vinci’s manuscripts that the Milanese library acquired in 1637. Rocca was quoted in a booklet for this exhibit that featured a dozen sheets from the codex’s 1,119 pages, the largest single set of da Vinci’s surviving notebooks. While I was excited to see his original drawings and writings again, I left the exhibit thinking mainly about the ideas, values and mission that inspired it.
Perhaps the most well-known page in da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus features his self-moving cart or “automobile,” given that it appears to envision modern mechanics for automated locomotion. Photo: Joseph Kellard
The Codex Atlanticus is a posthumous compilation of da Vinci’s studies on wide ranging topics, from architecture, astronomy and algebra to mirrors, motion and maxims, spanning from 1478 to 1519, virtually his entire adult career. But most of the dozen sheets displayed in a small, dimly lit room in the library were related to mechanical and engineering-related subjects. Some were drawn with exceptional precision typical of da Vinci’s studies in mechanics, such as a pair of earth excavation machines and a cloth-cutting machine. Others are more cursory sketches, including a rotating crane and self-propelled cart or "automobile.”
This drawing of a shearing textile machine was done in pen and ink. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
The 1495 drawing of the cloth-cutting machine drawing, designed to simultaneously work four scrolls of fabric, reminded me of when I read Ross King’s book Leonardo and The Last Supper and discovered that da Vinci designed multiple machines for Florence’s prosperous cloth and textile industries. He devised concepts for handlooms, a weaving machine, and a needle-making machine “that he calculated would produce forty thousand needles per hour and revenues of a mind-boggling sixty thousand ducats per year,” King wrote.[1] Also, I recalled that in his book Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, Frank Zöllner noted his visionary designs for mechanical devices, writing that the cloth-cutting machine in the Codex Atlanticus, as well as a rolling mill, spinning machines and rope-manufacturing machines, seem “to be anticipating the spirit of industrialization.”[2]
Da Vinci produced this sketch of a two-armed digging machine during a time when he worked on canal projects in Florence in the early 1500s. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
The sign for one of the two studies of digging machines—both dated 1503-05, when da Vinci engineered canal construction projects in Florence—states that he designed them “to automate the excavation of a canal, reducing time and effort” (emphasis mine). Again, as with Rocca’s quote above, I relate this reference to the fundamental values of the Industrial Revolution, its time- and labor-saving machinery, to what I’ve learned from reading dozens of books about da Vinci. King observed that these machine designs and canal projects “reveal the breadth of Leonardo’s interests, the scope of his ambitions, and the depth of his conviction that there was no task that could not be improved through technology and invention.”[3]
This pen-and-ink drawing of a rotating crane, circa 1478-80, was inspired by lifting machines similar to those used to build the Florence cathedral. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
Da Vinci’s early mechanical studies are generally derivatives of his predecessors and contemporaries, particularly engineers Mariano Traccola (1382–1453) and Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501). His rotating crane, dated 1478-1480, was probably based on a model Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) likely employed to build the cupola for Florence’s cathedral.[4]
Yet these studies do reveal da Vinci’s inroads in drawing techniques. On one sheet from the exhibit, dated 1480, he drew various devices for transporting water from lower to higher plateaus, whether by Archemedian-type screws, buckets or hydraulic pumps. Martin Kemp included this sheet in his book Leonardo da Vinci: The 100 Milestones that highlights the polymath’s most significant developments in art, drawing and studies across various fields. Kemp highlights da Vinci’s methods of illustration—the new perspectives used to render mechanical compositions, and the transparent views of otherwise unseen underground mechanisms—that exceed standard drawings by early Renaissance engineers. Kemp also touches on da Vinci’s method of making connections when he notes another water-related sketch on the left margin of a man wearing a snorkel-like apparatus.[5]
This sheet features several machines to raise water and a sketch of a man using an underwater breathing device equipped with a float. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
The exhibit also featured studies of spring mechanisms and gears, a bird-like wing for a flying apparatus, and a pump-powered fountain. There was also a sheet devoted to his conception for perpetual motion, an impractical idea he later abandoned.
Signs of the Future
Despite that this was my first time engaging with original da Vinci drawings since I viewed other pages from the Codex Atlanticus at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 2019, the most memorable and promising feature of the Washington exhibit was the adjoining “Imagining the Future” room.
Confindustria, a major trade association in Italy representing some 150,000 manufacturing and service companies with 5 million employees, partnered with the Washington and Milan libraries in presenting the exhibit. On opening a new headquarters in Washington in June, Confindustria wanted to represent Italian industry from a fresh perspective with an exhibit on da Vinci. Toward this end, the association and companies it represents—including Dompé, a pharmaceutical company, Dolce & Gabbana, a fashion house, and Pirelli, a tire manufacturer—displayed several poster-sized signs in this room.
The signs aimed to connect da Vinci’s life, work and especially his intellectual virtues, such as his insatiable curiosity, to their technological and entrepreneurial enterprises. Confindustria’s sign read:
“The philosophy of the Italian genius, based on observation and experimentation, mirrors the most significant aspects of Italian entrepreneurship. Imagining the Future is an invitation to think about how mankind can make use of the resources offered by the mind to build a better world.”
The most representative and encouraging sign was Dompé’s, which read:
Several signs like this one from Italian pharmaceutical company Dompé were displayed in a room called “Imagining the Future.”
“The Curiositas [curiosity] that inspired Leonardo da Vinci to imagine inventions ahead of his time, remains a stimulus for those doing scientific research today. It is by drawing inspiration from his tireless drive to know and improve that we have come to support the Confindustria project.
“Research and the courage to experiment, even at the risk of failure, are what has guided us for more than a century to engage in Life Sciences to improve people's lives. It is precisely this focus that has led us to invest in artificial intelligence and supercomputing and to turn the Nerve Growth Factor, discovered by Nobel laureates in medicine Rita Levi Montalcini and Stanley Cohen, into a ‘breakthrough’ drug for the treatment of a rare and orphan disease.”
The room also featured Dolce & Gabbana’s 6.5-foot tall reproduction of da Vinci’s mechanical drawings in the Codex Atlanticus that are based on observing Milan’s astronomical Chiaravalle Abbey tower clock. He attempted to improve the clock’s gears, introducing a worm drive to increase its accuracy by reducing its number of wheels. Dolce & Gabbana also designed the “Leonardo,” whose design also draws on the Chiaravalle clock and da Vinci’s studies of the heavenly bodies. The fashion company’s sign for these timepieces noted “that there will always be something that the mind and hands of men will be able to do better than any machine: creating beauty that endures.”
Dolce & Gabbana’s reproduction of da Vinci's drawing of Milan's Chiaravalle Abbey tower clock was displayed at the exhibit. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)
The "Imagining the Future" exhibition did invite visitors to reflect on how we use our greatest resource, the reasoning mind, to create a better world. It reinforced my belief that there are individuals in influential positions who are guided by da Vinci's intellectual attributes to drive technological progress and business to improve human life. Overall, this experience provided further evidence that there is a market for my book that aims to foster these ideas and help spawn a second Renaissance.
Sources
1. Ross King, Leonardo and The Last Supper, (Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2012), p. 119.
2. Frank Zollner, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (Taschen, 2011), p. 574.
3. King, Leonardo and The Last Supper, p. 119.
4. Zollner, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, p. 574.
5. Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The 100 Milestones, (Sterling, New York, 2019), p. 35.