Leonardo The Last Years

Happy Birthday Leonardo da Vinci!

Leonardo da Vinci, The Inventor by Ton Pascal

The boy took his first breath on April 15 1452, in the hamlet of Anchiano, near the small town of Vinci. It

certainly wasn’t the happiest day in the life of the poor teenage mother, housemaid Caterina, which had been seduced and impregnated by her rich Master. Little did she know that the child in her arms, despite his regretted and unwelcomed arrival, would became a beacon of knowledge that enlightened and revolutionized the world.

Let us forget for now the boy’s childbirth condition, and celebrate the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, this inventor, stranded in a time warp dimension, far behind the reality of his own mind.

Leonardo had his own airplane, and for safety, he designed his own parachute. On other occasions, with his special underwater tank, he would go deep see fishing, or on his glass bottom boat, or floating shoes, he would take a trip to study the marine life. Leonardo gladly helped anyone in need of protection or to defend his territory. For

some he created a military tank with powerful canons rotating in all directions. For others he designed the machine gun that could fire one hundred bullets a

minute. Never mind that most of those trips and circumstances happened only in Leonardo’s brain, but nevertheless he wrote it all down, in minute details, obsessively sketching these far-fetched objects. By the end of his life these notes and designs amounted to over twenty six thousand pages.

The majority of those sketches and notes are still missing. The surviving six thousand pages of Leonardo’s work, accumulated, and caught centuries of dust, until

someone found a way to bring those objects into our own reality.

Five hundred and sixty years after Leonardo da Vinci’s birth, he is still the most distinguished painter, inventor, architect, and writer of our times. Let us take a look at one of his greatest project, the Romorantin, which is almost unknown to most people.

Romorantin, on the boards of the River Sauldre, is the capital of the Sologne region in France. The project, created by Leonardo da Vinci in 1516, consisted of razing the old, and creating a new city that would house all the royal administration departments of the kingdom, as well as the court nobility

Leonardo The Last Years

and the state servitors. Adjacent to it were two magnificent royal palaces, one for King Francois I, and the other for the Queen Mother.

The project as a whole made a nineteen hundred year leap in architecture, sociology and time. Leonardo’s new city was very close to Pericles’ Athens in 400 BC. It would have the most advanced knowledge of medicine, social equality, public education, and the democratic principles of today’s society. For Romorantin, Leonardo created the environment for a society of the cinquecento with the same comfort and values we have now in a modern, cosmopolitan city of the twenty first century. Here, advanced architecture meets art, comfort, and living pleasure.

The project generated a great deal of excitement, but also fear and jealousy. It greatly affected that region’s population on an economic and social level. Had this project been completed as Leonardo had designed it, urban planning, architecture, and living conditions in Europe and the world over would have been drastically changed for the better. The innovations being considered for Romorantin would have affected and accelerated progress, not only on an architectural

level, but also in the fields of hygiene, heating, waterworks, communications, transportation, social interaction and integration.

One of the major advances in urban hygiene, which Leonardo wanted to implement, was an underground collection and disposal of household and street waste. This issue was the cause of serious health hazards all over Europe and of several pestilence epidemics. All of the Romorantin’s residences were meant to have canalized, cold and hot water distributed to kitchens, toilets, and bathhouses, on all floors, as he had already used the same principle on previous work in Italy. For the main water tower Leonardo had designed a new waterwheel using the Archimedean’s screws. He made several improvements to this screw. His new version had much less seepage

Leonardo The Last Years

and friction, so it was more reliable. It could quickly fill the water tower for the town’s water supply.

Parallel to this water system ran the tubes for the cooling, heating, and ventilation scheme of the entire project. Using the power of the river’s current, Leonardo’s crank machines would force air over a cool pool of water and into pipes distributed between the walls of the building. During the winter, this pool would be heated and the hot air would warm the buildings.

The heavy main doors of each building, opened and closed automatically when approached, using sophisticated balance and pressure points on a crank mechanism system, only now put to use with the advent of computers.

For the communication device available in every household, Leonardo created a series of bitumen covered copper pipes running inside clay tubes in all directions and floors of the building. Those tubes, allowed one person to speak through a device installed into the wall to another anywhere in the building.

What made this project even more interesting was the fact that Leonardo had taken under great consideration the reality and necessity of human interaction. He planned wide avenues, large, green open spaces, schools, recreational centers, a profusion of fountains, and artwork at every corner. These social ideas, so dear to the Greeks of 400 BC, had long been forgotten and had never been put to use in any city throughout Europe of the Cinquecento. He was then, in his mind, following very close Plato’s Republic.

Parts of the above text are excerpt from Leonardo, The Last Years by Ton Pascal.

Bio-: Ton Pascal is a writer, designer of all things and artist. He also loves history and is an avid reader, so it is very natural that his latest book is a time leap into the 16th century. LEONARDO THE LAST YEARS (http://amzn.to/HhNUKN ) starts in 1516 and spans three and a half years of Leonardo da Vinci’s life. It is a work of fiction so tightly woven with documented historical facts that it appears seamless. It shows a Leonardo, not only as a brilliant mind, but also as a gentle man who did so while fighting the demons of his past that threatened to destroy him. http://www.leonardo-tly.com/