leonardo the omniologist

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Leonardo the Omniologist By Dave DeWitt ©2011 Dave DeWitt Self-Portrait in Red Chalk, c. 1514 1

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I explore the question of was Leonardo Da Vinci a genius, an autodidactic polymath, or an omniologist? Or all of the above?

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Leonardo the OmniologistBy Dave DeWitt

©2011 Dave DeWitt

Self-Portrait in Red Chalk, c. 1514

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Author's Note: In 2006, BenBella Books published my book Da Vinci's Kitchen, which the publisher subtitled “A Secret History of Italian Cuisine.” The book did not sell very well in the U.S., but publishers in other countries loved it and my agent sold it for publication in Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, Russia, Japan (cover, left) and seven other countries. During the course of researching the book, I discovered related Da Vinci material that was not included in the final version, but is now released below. You can buy my Da Vinci's Kitchen book in hardcover, here.

It is astonishing that more than 500 years after Leonardo’s birth we are still uncovering details about his life and work. In 1965, two unknown Leonardo manuscripts were discovered in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid; today they are called Madrid I and Madrid II. Alessandra Fregolent, author of Leonardo: The Universal Man, wrote: “The future may well hold other similar discoveries, but the numerical growth of the manuscripts has not been as important as the philosophical approach to the Vincian notebooks, what has made possible the increasingly accurate clarification of Leonardo the artist, the man of science, and the inventor, thus casting light on areas that had long been in shadow.”In January, 2005 a hidden room was discovered at the Santissima Annunziata monastery in the heart of Florence, and it is believed that this previously sealed room was used as a workshop by Leonardo when he returned to Florence at the age of 48. There are frescoes on the wall in Leonardo’s style, and experts have speculated that he may have used the studio to paint the Mona Lisa. According to Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, near where Leonardo was born, “There is no doubt that researchers found Leonardo’s workshop. This is an important discovery, as it opens up new perspectives for studies and hypotheses on the Florentine context in which Leonardo worked.”Around 1985, Shelagh and Jonathan Routh claimed to have come into possession of a typescript which they called The Codex Romanoff. It was purported to be Leonardo’s missing food notes and recipes. They had the manuscript translated into English and it was published, along with the Routh’s history and analysis as Leonardo’s Kitchen Notebooks, in 1987 by William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd. of Glasgow, Scotland and London. Is this book and the purported Leonardo notes true, or just an elaborate hoax that has fooled publishers in at least ten countries? The latter, of course. I even tracked down the Rouths in London and attempted to interview them. They hung up on me—twice!

The Mind of Leonardo

Because he was born illegitimate, Leonardo was denied a proper education. As Michael White, author of Leonardo, the First Scientist, observes: “Within middle-class or bourgeois society, illegitimacy was despised, and the children of these unions were effectively ostracized. Leonardo was barred form attending university and could not hope to enter any of the respected professions, such as medicine or the law, because it was strictly against the rules of the professional guilds to accept anyone with that background.” So how did he gain all this knowledge? He was an autodidact, a self-taught person. And although he learned a great deal by reading, he was bitter about the fact that he was denied a formal education. He complained about that fact in the Codex Atlanticus:

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If indeed I have no power to quote from authors as they [formallytrained scholars] have, it is a far bigger and more worthy thing

to read by the light of experience which is the instructress oftheir masters. They strut about puffed up and pompous, deckedout and adorned not with their own labors but with those ofothers and they will not even allow me my own.

Leonardo was certainly a polymath, a person of great and varied learning, even if it was self-taught. That he was also a genius there is little doubt. Although there is no way of determining if his intelligence quotient was above 140, the usual rating for genius, he fit the other definition of having extraordinary intellectual and creative power. But some scholars think that perhaps Leonardo had too many gifts. One of his biographers, Serge Bramly, writes in Leonardo, the Artist and the Man: Leonardo explored the most diverse of areas, reached out to the extreme frontiers of knowledge, dreamed up extravagant schemes and went into prolonged pursuit of fantasies. He rarely finished the works he began, and there were, in any case, very few of them.”Bramly goes on to point out that everything about Leonardo seems to

have two sides. He is both serious and trivial, changeable and obstinate, active and sluggish, humble and proud, obedient and rebellious, fantastical and practical.Another biographer, A. Richard Turner, author of Inventing Leonardo, attributes these opposite traits to Leonardo being torn between being a scientist and an artist. “The scientist rationally explains,” he writes, “the artist in an act of faith proclaims. Different though they may be, art and science are opposite ends of the keyboard of human experience, but the same keyboard nonetheless.”Indeed, Michael White views Leonardo as a scientist first and an artist second. “My Leonardo is a colorful, untamable eccentric, a risk-taker, a man who strayed very close to the edge of jersey and necromancy, a man gifted in to many ways that it was almost impossible for him to settle upon any one thing that fascinated him or any one skill above all others. But more than this, my Leonardo is Leonardo: the first scientist.”Richard Turner points out that Leonardo was a “man without a country.” He was born a Tuscan, but lived for a long time in Milan. “He wanted for the last twenty years of his life—on the road with Cesare Borgia, back and forth between Milan and Florence, stayed three short years in Roman, and ended finally in France, where he died an expatriate in 1519. Turner writes that “Leonardo did not have the advantage of the history and traditions of one proud place to perpetuate the facts and myths of his life and work. Instead, his natal and various adopted home had different stories to tell about ‘their’ Leonardo.”Despite being born around the same time as the invention of moveable type writing thousands of pages of notes during the rising popularity of the printed book, Leonardo never published any of his writing. It is curious that a great investigator such as he was ignored one of the most important inventions of his time. It was also odd that did not pursue the dissemination of some of his vast collection of drawings by means of engraving. “One can only speculate that either indifference to or fear of public disclosure of his work constituted an essential feature of Leonardo’s psyche,” writes Turner.I think of Leonardo as an omniologist. Omniology, is of course, the study of all things and how they

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interrelate. I invented the term in my youth, when I read prodigiously on many different subjects and could not make up my mind what I wanted to be when I grew up. After studying Leonardo’s works and notes, that term seems to fit him perfectly and is more accessible than “autodidactic polymath.”

Legends of Leonardo

Despite all of Leonardo’s accomplishments, biographer Alessandra Fregolent writes that “No more that four paintings are universally attributed to him.” There are numerous scholarly debates about controversial Leonardo attributions, such as The Annunciation, which he supposedly painted in the Verrocchio studio between 1472-1475, when he was in his early twenties, and the luminous Madonna Litta, circa 1490. Even his famous painting Lady with an Ermine was only attributed to him in the late 1700s. Additionally, writes Fregolent, “There is a vast number of replicas and works based on lost works by the master; some works are known only from citations in antique catalogs or references made by Leonardo himself; there are paintings that were seen and describedBy reliable sources but are unknown today.”Thus there are numerous mysteries surrounding Leonardo that extend from his time to ours, and many

strange questions linger on. Did Leonardo invent the bicycle, did the theft of the Mona Lisa create the enormous twentieth and twenty-first century fascination with him? Can the Mona Lisa smile be scientifically analyzed? And did Leonardo create The Shroud of Turin?In 1994, HarperCollins published a book entitled The Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. They attempt to prove that the Shroud of Turin was created by Leonardo by using the camera obscura technique, whereby light was passed through a pinhole to project an image on a flat surface. In this scenario the flat surface was the shroud that was saturated with primitive photo-sensitive chemicals. The writer of the website jesusneverexisted.com continues the story: “Living in the age of the Inquisition, a time when merely being a vegetarian might lead to execution, he had to remain ever vigilant of the censure of the Church. For its part, the Church was only interested in Leonardo's ability to artistically

represent the Faith. Commissioned to produce a better Shroud, he pioneered an early photographic technique, using lenses, a camera obscura, chromium salts and–in a wonderful satire on Church duplicity–his own face in lieu of Jesus Christ!”The evidence for such a claim is slim. Leonardo knew about the camera obscura, sketched one, and even created odd optical devices that could increase the breadth of vision in the1490s, and of course, some claim that the shroud first surfaced in 1494 in Turin, which is not far from Milan, where Leonardo lived and worked for many years. True believers in the Shroud, called “Shroudies,” dispute the date of discovery, the carbon-dating, and the photographic theory, of course. In his review of the book, University of Southern Indiana professor Daniel Scavone admits that “Leonardo as author of the Shroud is a wonderfully exciting, if not sensationalist idea.” But he concludes: ‘The Shroud-as-unique-photograph’ theories seem to be founded upon the unlikeliest scenarios, throwing back to a single genius what is common knowledge today.”A similar scenario got all of the bicyclologist’s chains off their sprockets in 1974, when literary historian August Marinoni gave a lecture in Leonardo’s home town of Vinci and presented a drawing of

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a bicycle that he said was found during the restoration of the Codex Atlanticus. (“Bicyclologist” is a term I invented to describe the researchers into the history and technology of bicycles.) The “Leonardo bicycle” revelation infuriated cycle enthusiasts everywhere, but especially in France, who claimed the invention of the bicycle by Karl von Drais 325 years later.The drawing supposedly first surfaced in the 1960s when the monks at the Laboratorio di Restauro of the Abbey of Grottaferrata near Rome, under contract from the prefect of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, pulled apart two sheets, Folios 132 and 133, which had been folded in half and glued together. “On the reverse of a Leonardo sketch of military fortifications,” writes John Stewart Clark on bikereader.com, “next to a couple of obscene graffiti of walking penises and a crude caricature of a youth, there was a drawing of a two-wheeled vehicle with all the mechanical characteristics of a pedal-driven bicycle.” Apparently, the steering mechanism in the sketch was flawed and the bicycle could not be steered. Also, the sketch is crude and is not in Leonardo’s style.Soon after Marinoni’s lecture, the skeptics attacked. A Da Vinci scholar at UCLA, Carlo Pedretti, sniffed that “Folios 132 and 133 hardly deserve the attention that they have received.” He had also examined the sheets prior to their restoration by holding them up to a strong light, and he only saw traces of circles in pen and ink. But the bicycle was out of the garage later in 1974, when an article on the bicycle and a reproduction of it by Marinoni was published in the large-format book, The Unknown Leonardo and the two-wheeled world was divided into true believers and skeptics. The believers point out that in the Codex Madrid there is a genuine Leonardo drawing of a chain with cubic teeth—the same one on the purported bicycle. Skeptics pointed out that a forger could have easily known about the chain drawing and simply re-drawn it. And back and forth, the debate has lasted until the present day.“The vigorous skepticism of the critics has failed to undermine any of the evidence for authenticity set out by Augusto Marinoni, the leading Da Vinci scholar,” wrote James McGurn in his book,” An Illustrated History of Cycling, published in 1987. However, ten years later, Dr. Hans-Erhard Lessing of the University of Ulm in Germany, presented a paper entitled “The Evidence Against ‘Leonardo’s Bicycle’” at the Eighth International Cycling History Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. That paper, later published New Scientist, did not name a possible forger, but the obvious candidates are the monks of Grottaferrata or Augusto Marinoni himself. In1998, research published by the French journalist Serge Lathiere indicated that two inks on the page with the bicycle drawing were dated after 1880 and after 1920.In 2004, at the EICMA bicycle show, the Italian bicycle builder Colnago displayed a new bike call President LdV, named after Leonardo da Vinci, who they called the “inventor of the bicyle.” In January, 2005, a Reuters story carried on CNN.com proclaimed Leonardo to be, again, the “inventor of the bicycle and in August of that year in Toronto, at the 18-day Canadian National Expedition, the “Traveling with Leonardo da Vinci” exhibit featured a wooden bicycle full-scale model. It is significant to note that at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, with the most elaborate Da Vinci technology exhibits, there are more than 100 models of Leonardo’s inventions and machines, but a bicycle is not one of them. However, the Museum of Science in Boston, which has a Leonardo display, makes the following claim: “For him, the most interesting part was the use of mechanical gears, and he studied them. Based on the gear, he came up with loads of different thingamajigs, including the bicycle, a helicopter, an ‘auto-mobile,’ and some gruesome weapons of course.” Like so many of the Da Vinci legends, we shall probably never know the truth about the bicycle because people continually want more from the master—or to possess something created by him.

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Mona Madness

Although, as we shall see, the Mona Lisa (“Mona” is short for “Madonna”) was not particularly admired during Leonardo’s time, probably because it was not displayed publicly, in later times it became a sensation and probably the most recognized work of art in the world. Biographer Charles Nicholl observes:

The elevation of the Mona Lisa to iconic status happenedin the mid nineteenth century; it was born out of northernEurope’s fascination with the Italian Renaissance ingeneral, and Leonardo in particular, and it was givena particular Gallic, or indeed Parisian, twist by the presence of the painting in the Louvre. Her image becamebound up with the morbid Romantic fantasty of the femmefatale: that idea of an ensaring, exotic belle dame sansmerci which so exercised the male imagination at that time.

One of the art critics of the time who fell for Mona was Theophile Gautier, the notorious hashish smoker. To him, she was “this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously,” and the woman who “seems to pose a yet unsolved riddle to the admiring centuries,” and she humbles the viewer: “She makes you feel like a schoolboy before a duchess.” Historian Jules Michelet was similarly impressed, writing: “She attracts me, revolts me, consumes me; I go to her in spite of myself, as the bird to the snake.” Mona had become, as Nicholl puts it, one of a “chorus line of dangerous beauties alongside such luminaries as Zola’s Nana…and Baudelaire’s Creole belle Jeanne Duval.”In the 1870s, the poet Yeats got into the act, writing dramatically:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits;Like the vampire,She has been dead many times,And learned the secrets of the grave;And has been a diver in deep seas,And keeps their fallen day about her….

Oscar Wilde, writing in 1890, wryly noted: “The picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.” And that idea of a secret being held by the Mona Lisa has been a central theme of the painting ever since—viewers want to know the secret and to possess a portion of Leonardo’s mind, if not the painting itself..On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous work of art, was stolen from the Louvre in Paris—and the theft was not even noticed for a full day! The police were called and the museum was searched, but that took a week because the building is 49 acres. A detective found the frame in a staircase, but the painting was gone. Soon, rumors were rampant in the French press: an American collector had stolen it and would send back a copy; the

incident was a hoax to show how easy is was to steal from the Louvre; the Germans did it; or Louvre employees stole it to sabotage the museum.The police even questioned Pablo Picasso because he had inadvertently purchased two stone sculptures

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that had been stolen from the Louvre by a friend named Gery Pieret, but Picasso was exonerated. One of the museum directors was fired and another one suspended. When the Louvre was re-opened a week later, the crowds acted like mourners because their national treasure was gone.“Then, of course, the French temperament took over,” writes Seymour Reit in The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa, “and they began to have fun with it. There were jokes. There were riddles. There were cartoons. Somebody wrote to the newspapers and said, ‘When are they going to take the Eiffel Tower?’ They printed sheet music about the theft of the Mona Lisa, which they sang in cafes. There was a chorus line in one of the cabarets that came out all dressed like the Mona Lisa. I think they were topless!”Years passed and the main theory was that it had accidentally been destroyed in a cleaning process and that the museum was using a theft story as a cover-up. In the spring of 1912, the painting was honored in a traditional mid-Lent parade in Paris. A float showed the Mona Lisa taking off in an airplane! But then in the fall of 1913, a well-known Italian antique dealer, Alfredo Geri, placed an ad in Italian newspapers that stated he was “a buyer at good prices for art object of every sort.” Soon he received a letter from Paris signed by a man calling himself “Leonardo” who wrote that he possessed the stolen Mona Lisa. Geri contacted the museum director of the Uffizi museum in Florence, and they hatched a plan to reply and insist on viewing the painting before they could offer a price. “Leonardo” agreed to bring the painting to Geri in Florence. He arrived at Geri’s sales office and told Geri that he had stolen the Mona Lisa in order to bring it back to Italy where it rightfully belonged. Apparently he was unaware that Leonardo himself had taken the painting to France and had either sold it or given it to King Francis I. “Leonardo,” whose real name was Vincenzo Perugia, said he had the painting in his hotel room. The following day, Geri showed up at the room, and Perugia pulled the painting from a false bottom in a trunk. Geri noticed the Louvre seal on the back of the painting and knew it was the real thing. He told Perugia that the Uffizi museum was interested and that he would go fetch the director. Then he turned Perugia in, the police arrested him, and the Mona Lisa was recovered.

It turned out that Perugia had worked at the Louvre in 1908, so the guards recognized him. He had simply walked into the museum, noticed that the gallery was empty, grabbed the painting, removed it from the frame, walked out with the painting under his painter’s smock, and returned to his apartment only a few blocks away. He stashed the Mona Lisa in his closet for 26 months before reading Geri’s newspaper ad.In December, 1913 the Mona Lisa was displayed at the Uffizi to huge crowds, and then it toured the museums of Italy. On the last day of the year, the painting was returned to Paris in a special compartment of the Milan-Paris express. In January, the Mona Lisa was placed in the Louvre's Salon Carré.

The publicity about the recovery of the painting was as overwhelming as it was for the theft of it. Charles Nicholl notes:

The theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa were the clinchingof her international celebrity. Both unleashed a swarm ofnewspaper features, commemorative postcards, cartoons,ballads, cabaret reviews, and comic silent films.

In June of 1914, Perugia was placed on trial in Florence, but because he was enormously popular for returning the painting to Italy, he was given a minimum sentence of one year, and was released almost immediately for time served. He certainly had his fifteen minutes of fame, and his escapade launched

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the image of the Mona Lisa into the stratosphere.

In 1919 the French Dadaist painter Marchel Duchamp put a mustache a goatee on a copy of the Mona Lisa and inscribed “L.H.O.O.Q.” on the bottom of it. That stood for, phonetically, elle a chaud au cul, or “she has a hot ass.” In 1950 Nat King Cole made famous the lyrics of the song “Mona Lisa”:

Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep;They just lie there and they die there.Are you warm, are you real Mona Lisa?Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?

And let’s not forget the 1962 Jimmy Clanton hit, “Venus in Blue Jeans,” with the lyrics:

She’s Venus in blue jeans,Mona Lisa with a pony tail…

The Mona Lisa visited the United States for seven weeks in 1963–first at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and then at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was seen by 1.6 million visitors, including Andy Warhol, who could not resist fashioning the Mona Lisa into an icon of mass production. Then in 1974, the Mona Lisa traveled to the Tokyo National Museum and to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where she was seen by more than 2 million visitors.

In the world of alternative art, Eric Harshbarger, whose medium is Lego brand interlocking blocks, created a work in November 2000, entitled “Mona Lego.” It uses the standard Lego “primary” colors: red, green, blue, yellow, white, and black and is composed of more than 30,000 blocks. It measures six by eight feet and weighs more than 45 pounds.The website Mona Lisa Mania (www.monalisamania.com) states: “Da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been reproduced (posters, greeting cards, etc.) and reinvented (advertisements, artworks, etc.) more than any other artwork in the world.” The artwork for sale on the site features 38 different versions

of Mona, including neo-pop art, a Miss Piggy Mona, a Monty Python Mona, Mona as an African American and a Native American, a Monica Lewinsky Mona, a Mona Lisa suffragette, Monas by Peter Max, Mona Lisa smoking a huge joint, and, of course, a topless Mona.The Mona Lisa gift items on the Everything Art site (www.everythingart.com) are even more

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incredible. In addition to Leonardo Da Vinci action figure, and a book about Mona Lisa Poetry (Mona Poetica), and Kona Lisa Whole Bean Kona Coffee, there is Mona Lisa doll, blown-glass ornament, beaded curtain ($95), art fraud puzzle, paint-by-number box, journal, button, soap set, apron, socks, pillow or pillow sham, clock, totebag, lapel pin, pony tail holder, coaster set, liquid suspension kaleidoscope, night light, Afghan, mousepad, switchplate, salt and pepper shakers, teapot sculpture, Celibriduck (don’t ask), coloring book, self-stick notes, pocket mirror, magnet, push pins, and a tie.Most people attribute the popularity of the Mona Lisa to her smile, and in fact a motion picture entitled Mona Lisa Smile was released in 2003. Of course, everything involving Leonardo must be scientifically analyzed, so why not the smile? In late 2005, Dutch researchers at the University of Amsterdam subjected a scanned image of the Mona Lisa to cutting-edge “emotion recognition” software developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois. The results of this admittedly unscientific study showed that the “smilemaker” was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry. She was less than one percent neutral and not surprised at all. Some people claim to see sexual suggestion or disdain in the expression, but those emotions where not revealed by the software analysis. Nor did the analysis reveal if the model is Leonardo himself as a woman, as some critics have claimed!

The Pop Culture Legacy of Leonardo

On December 10, 2005 a Google search for the term “Da Vinci” without quotation marks returned 18.7 million results, about three times as many as for “Michelangelo.” A search for “Da Vinci” on Amazon.com revealed 1,209 items in the category of books alone, but it should be pointed out that not all those titles involved Leonardo directly. In all categories on the site there were 3,753 items listed, including such unlikely non-media items as Da Vinci Gourmet Flavored Peanut Butter Coffee Sweetener Syrup. (I am not making this up!) It probably will not surprise many people to discover that in the media categories there are Da Vinci posters (“Mona Lisa”), video games (“Apprentice Adventure! Leonardo Da Vinci”), DVDs (“Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Solves the 2000 Year Old Mystery,” “Unlocking DaVinci's Code”), CDs (“Leonardo da Vinci: Music of His Time”), board games (“Da Vinci Quest”) and other artwork (“Da Vinci Concrete Plaque”). It is evident that Da Vinci is deeply entrenched into popular culture.Many people think that DaVinci is so popular because of the publication in 2003 of The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown, which has become one of the best-selling books of all time, with more than 30 million copies in print in hardcover. While it is true that Brown’s novel inspired an astounding number of spin-off books (such as this one, but more on that later in this chapter), Da Vinci has been famous for 500 years, and this is not the first time that he has sprung back to life. The Last Supper has become and icon over the centuries, with copies in nearly every conceivable artistic expression, including tapestries, paintings, carving, and stained glass. There is even a life-sized mosaic copy in the Minorite Church in Vienna that Napoleon ordered created in 1810. In 1986, Andy Warhol created more than 100 variations on the theme of The Last Supper in silk-screened collages. The Last Supper is the best-selling paint-by-numbers kit; it was first manufactured by Crafts House more than 50 years ago, and of course there are Last Supper t-shirts, candles, refrigerator magnets, patchwork vases, glass frames, tapestries, plaques, trays, scrolls, candles, plates, wall clocks, and Mexican pewter crosses. In a more serious, scientific, and artistic vein, there are many websites devoted to Da Vinci, including virtual musems, art galleries, and historical archives. I have listed these sites in the Bibliography of Da Vinci's Kitchen with brief annotations.At the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, more than 100 models illustrating the designs of Leonardo are on display. The models depicting Leonardo's drawings

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are of great educational value since they allow the non-specialist public, particularly schoolchildren, to appreciate interpretations of drawings which are not always easy to comprehend. Most of the models were constructed for the exhibition of 1952 celebrating the 500th anniversary of his birth.The Science and Technology Museum’s website states: “‘Could these machines really have worked?’ is the question often asked by visitors yearning to ‘touch the world of Leonardo’. Although in Leonardo’s case the answer is often no, credit is nonetheless due to the great artist for the many brilliant intuitions which were to be successfully implemented in subsequent centuries; moreover the ideas, accomplishments and theories represented in his designs hold an extraordinary fascination in themselves.”Leonardo was proven right in the case of one machine, on June 26, 2000, some 500 years after he sketched the design for the world's first known parachute. Adrian Nicholas, an Englishman, using materials and tools that would have been available in Leonardo’s Milan, built a 187-pound parachute.

He was dropped from a hot air balloon 10,000 feet above the ground in South Africa, and safely floated down, saying the ride was smoother than with modern parachutes. He cut himself free when he reached 2,000 feet and deployed a second modern parachute, thus ensuring that the heavy Da Vinci chute did not crash down on top of him upon landing.

Are these myriad developments the legacy of a genius, an autodidactic polymath, or an omniologist?

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