Leonardo da Vinci: Experiment and Design at the V & A
“Truly marvellous and celestial was Leonardo,” proclaimed Giorgio Vasari, his first biographer; “and in learning and in the rudiments of letters he would have made great proficience, if he had not been so variable and unstable, for he set himself to learn many things, and then after having begun them, abandoned them.”
Vasari’s thumbnail portrait of the quintessential Renaissance man, in his Lives of the Artists , conveys better than any other document the mixture of wonderment and exasperation that Leonardo da Vinci was capable of inspiring in his contemporaries. On the one hand, Vasari sings the praises of Leonardo’s incomparable intellect, which enabled him to move, apparently effortlessly, from one abstruse problem to another:
“he was the first, though but a youth, who suggested the plan of reducing the river Arno to a navigable canal … he was continually making models and designs to show men how to remove mountains with ease, and how to bore them in order to pass from one level to another; and by means of levers, windlasses, and screws, he showed the way to raise and draw great weights, together with methods for emptying harbours, and pumps for removing water from low places, things which his brain never ceased from devising; and of these ideas and labours many drawings may be seen, scattered abroad among our craftsmen…”
But Vasari also bemoaned Leonardo’s incurable dilatoriness, explaining it as a by-product of his perfectionism: “Leonardo, through his comprehension of art, began many things and never finished one of them … since he conceived in idea difficulties so subtle that they could never be expressed by the hands, be they so ever so excellent.” The late-eighteenth century artist and writer Henry Fuseli expressed such reservations less charitably, damning Leonardo as “an intellectual libertine who wasted life, insatiate, in experiment.”
“Leonardo: Experience, Experiment and Design”, a new exhibition at the V & A, attempts to encompass the full range of his ever-enquiring mind. The exhibits are drawn principally from the extensive holdings of Leonardo’s drawings, sketches, notes and doodles held by the V & A itself, by the British Museum, and by the Royal Collection. The focus is not on Leonardo the arguably failed painter, the famously unreliable creator of just a handful of finished works, but on Leonardo the thinker – mathematician, geometer, anatomist, hydraulic engineer, and much more besides.
By way of introduction to the main event, the entrance of the museum has been stocked with a number of modern reconstructions of Leonardo’s designs. These include the circular wooden tank, never tested in warfare, that he dreamed up for his Sforza masters in Milan; and two of his flying machines, namely the hang-glider inspired by his study of the anatomy of the wings of hawks, and other hovering birds of prey, and a kind of parachute. Built from the only materials available during the Renaissance they seem almost as unwieldy and improbable as the inventions of Heath Robinson. But a couple of nearby video displays prove that each has, in fact, been put to successful use by modern aviators of the more intrepid kind. This is presumably meant to be one in the eye for those who, down the centuries, have accused Leonardo of being hopelessly impractical.
The exhibition proper occupies a single, spacious, low-lit gallery, where two long glass display-cases contain the assembled drawings of the maestro himself. Some 6,000 sheets of Leonardo’s sketches and notebooks still survive – those same pieces of paper recorded by Vasari as being “scattered among our craftsmen” – and it has been reliably that during the course of his long and peripatetic life he produced about another 24,000, which have been lost. The V & A’s exhibition includes just 62 sheets by Leonardo’s hand, offering a partial view of him, to say the least. But they have been skilfully chosen to reflect the diversity of his preoccupations
In addition, a number of screens display looped animatronic interpretations of Leonardo’s designs – moving versions of his still pictures, realised using the latest graphic technology. Computer-modelled versions of the geometric solids that fascinated him – the dodecahedron, in particular – circle slowly in virtual space; Vitruvian man, arms outstretched within the sphere of perfection, suddenly goes walkabout; and Leonardo’s tank finally springs into action, raining down destruction on busy crowds of cartoon-animated musclemen. This is easy to dismiss as cheap and sensational – a nervous curatorial attempt to adapt Leonardo’s drawings for an age of chronically short attention-spans – but the effect is both engaging and sympathetic to the spirit of the artist. Leonardo himself, who loved gimmicks and optical trickery of all kinds, would have been mesmerised by it.
The opening section of the exhibition, entitled “The Mind’s Eye”, focusses on Leonardo’s interest in optics, mathematics and geometry. Here he is to be found plotting angles of incidence and calculating – for the purposes of his work as a painter – precisely how the rays of light from a particular source illuminate the features of a rather stolid and thickset model. But even this early on, the attempt to coral his studies within a limited set of themes is defeated by the butterfly tendencies of his intellect. Complex notes on the effects of light are interrupted, for no apparent reason, by a cartoon strip of a man wielding a sledgehammer. The very first drawing in the show, the splendid large double page known as “The Theme Sheet”, is itself a microcosm of Leonardo’s multifarious enquiries. It contains, inter alia, a wonderful caricature of a beak-nosed old man, juxtaposed with a branching oak tree (in reference, perhaps, to Leonardo’s observation that human lungs resemble plant forms, which reinforced his belief that all forms of nature follow the same principles of design); a complex series of interlocking geometrical forms drawn with a compass; a comparative study of curling human hair and the wave-like forms of water in a whirlpool; a study for an equestrian monument; a study of clouds illuminated by sunlight; and two designs for a screw-like winch mechanism designed to lift very heavy objects by gradual degrees.
As the exhibition and its excellent catalogue by Martin Kemp amply demonstrate, Leonardo’s diversity was not simply the product of his mysterious, scatterfire genius. He simply responded, more diligently and conscientiously than any of his contemporaries, to the vastly expanded Renaissance notion of the skills to which an artist – or man of ingenuity, to use a phrase closer to the ideas of the time – should properly aspire. When Leonardo went to work for the Sforza in Milan, he was expected not only to paint and draw, but to design machines of war, to work on pageants, festivals and theatrical performances, and generally improve the life of the city with bright ideas for anything ranging from sanitation to new and improved sundials.
Occasionally, the sense of his patrons’ unrealistic expectations palpably gets him down. One of the holy grails of Renaissance engineering was the design of a perpetual-motion machine. Several versions of such contraptions can be seen in the V & A exhibition, multi-cogged arrangements of toothed wheels and pulleys which, it seems clear, Leonardo himself knew very well would never work. In one of his notebooks, he recounts the “debacle” of a contest between prominent engineers, staged in Venice, the aim of which was to create a watermill that would move in dead water. Needless to say, none of the designs worked, and the assembled engineers slunk off in disgrace. “Tell me if ever a thing was done”, Leonardo writes in the margin of one of his own studies for perpetual-motion machines, sounding a note of infinite world-weariness, not for the first or last time.
Yet it was precisely because Leonardo was obliged to think across the boundaries of several disciplines that he came to some of his most brilliant insights. The second section of the exhibition finds him investigating human anatomy, the better to paint the human form, while simultaneously designing dams and canal systems, studying hydraulic engineering and investigating the behaviour of fluids. He did not get quite as far as understanding the human circulatory system, held back as he was by the preconceptions of late antique and medieval science. But because he was thinking about the motion of the blood through the heart, and studying it with the eyes of a hydraulic engineer, he came to comprehend certain crucial aspects of mitral valve function – for example - that would not be understood even by cardiac specialists until the late twentieth century. Some of the most elaborate and beautiful drawings in the exhibition are his studies of cardiovascular system, in all its branching intricacy.
The last two sections of the exhibition focus on Leonardo’s studies of motion, and on his multifarious activities as an inventor. There are brilliant drawings for his famously tempestuous, and never finished, fresco of The Battle of Anghiari , as well as numerous studies of the deluge, in which his thoughts – like the thoughts of so many men, at the turn of the fifteenth century – seem overshadowed by a genuine fear that the end of the world might be nigh. There are designs for water-clocks and underwater breathing apparatus; for devices to measure the force of the wind; and for a stageset intended to create the illusion of mountains that open to reveal a vision of “Pluto’s Underworld”. There is an anatomical study of the human tongue complete with all twenty-seven of its muscles, accompanied by a memo from Leonardo to himself in which he resolves to procure the lungs and trachia of a dead animal and “blow them like bagpipes” in order to undertsand better the mysteries of the human voicebox. There are numerous intriguing little touches of unexpected humanity, drawings that seemingly amount to little more than graffiti, such as a curious diagram – interrupting an otherwise quite unrelated chain of speculations – showing the male penis in various stages of erection. The author of the generally informative captions to the display notes, drily, that “the drawing of the penis may not be by Leonardo’s hand”. No explanation is given for this summary act of disattribution, and given the improbability of someone else [in italics] having chosen to decorate a Leonardo page with phallic graffiti, the judgement seems, well, a little half-cocked.
Despite the odd caveat, this is a thoroughly engrossing show. No exhibition can hope to paint a picture of Leonardo in all his formidable breadth and depth, but the V&A’s display serves none the less as an admirable introduction to him – a whistle-stop tour of the many mansions of his rambling, restless mind.
Date: 17-09-2006
Owning Institution: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010
Subject:
Renaissance
“Truly marvellous and celestial was Leonardo,” proclaimed Giorgio Vasari, his first biographer; “and in learning and in the rudiments of letters he would have made great proficience, if he had not been so variable and unstable, for he set himself to learn many things, and then after having begun them, abandoned them.”Vasari’s thumbnail portrait of the quintessential Renaissance man, in his Lives of the Artists , conveys better than any other document the mixture of wonderment and exasperation that Leonardo da Vinci was capable of inspiring in his contemporaries. On the one hand, Vasari sings the praises of Leonardo’s incomparable intellect, which enabled him to move, apparently effortlessly, from one abstruse problem to another:
“he was the first, though but a youth, who suggested the plan of reducing the river Arno to a navigable canal … he was continually making models and designs to show men how to remove mountains with ease, and how to bore them in order to pass from one level to another; and by means of levers, windlasses, and screws, he showed the way to raise and draw great weights, together with methods for emptying harbours, and pumps for removing water from low places, things which his brain never ceased from devising; and of these ideas and labours many drawings may be seen, scattered abroad among our craftsmen…”
But Vasari also bemoaned Leonardo’s incurable dilatoriness, explaining it as a by-product of his perfectionism: “Leonardo, through his comprehension of art, began many things and never finished one of them … since he conceived in idea difficulties so subtle that they could never be expressed by the hands, be they so ever so excellent.” The late-eighteenth century artist and writer Henry Fuseli expressed such reservations less charitably, damning Leonardo as “an intellectual libertine who wasted life, insatiate, in experiment.”
“Leonardo: Experience, Experiment and Design”, a new exhibition at the V & A, attempts to encompass the full range of his ever-enquiring mind. The exhibits are drawn principally from the extensive holdings of Leonardo’s drawings, sketches, notes and doodles held by the V & A itself, by the British Museum, and by the Royal Collection. The focus is not on Leonardo the arguably failed painter, the famously unreliable creator of just a handful of finished works, but on Leonardo the thinker – mathematician, geometer, anatomist, hydraulic engineer, and much more besides.
By way of introduction to the main event, the entrance of the museum has been stocked with a number of modern reconstructions of Leonardo’s designs. These include the circular wooden tank, never tested in warfare, that he dreamed up for his Sforza masters in Milan; and two of his flying machines, namely the hang-glider inspired by his study of the anatomy of the wings of hawks, and other hovering birds of prey, and a kind of parachute. Built from the only materials available during the Renaissance they seem almost as unwieldy and improbable as the inventions of Heath Robinson. But a couple of nearby video displays prove that each has, in fact, been put to successful use by modern aviators of the more intrepid kind. This is presumably meant to be one in the eye for those who, down the centuries, have accused Leonardo of being hopelessly impractical.
The exhibition proper occupies a single, spacious, low-lit gallery, where two long glass display-cases contain the assembled drawings of the maestro himself. Some 6,000 sheets of Leonardo’s sketches and notebooks still survive – those same pieces of paper recorded by Vasari as being “scattered among our craftsmen” – and it has been reliably that during the course of his long and peripatetic life he produced about another 24,000, which have been lost. The V & A’s exhibition includes just 62 sheets by Leonardo’s hand, offering a partial view of him, to say the least. But they have been skilfully chosen to reflect the diversity of his preoccupations
In addition, a number of screens display looped animatronic interpretations of Leonardo’s designs – moving versions of his still pictures, realised using the latest graphic technology. Computer-modelled versions of the geometric solids that fascinated him – the dodecahedron, in particular – circle slowly in virtual space; Vitruvian man, arms outstretched within the sphere of perfection, suddenly goes walkabout; and Leonardo’s tank finally springs into action, raining down destruction on busy crowds of cartoon-animated musclemen. This is easy to dismiss as cheap and sensational – a nervous curatorial attempt to adapt Leonardo’s drawings for an age of chronically short attention-spans – but the effect is both engaging and sympathetic to the spirit of the artist. Leonardo himself, who loved gimmicks and optical trickery of all kinds, would have been mesmerised by it.
The opening section of the exhibition, entitled “The Mind’s Eye”, focusses on Leonardo’s interest in optics, mathematics and geometry. Here he is to be found plotting angles of incidence and calculating – for the purposes of his work as a painter – precisely how the rays of light from a particular source illuminate the features of a rather stolid and thickset model. But even this early on, the attempt to coral his studies within a limited set of themes is defeated by the butterfly tendencies of his intellect. Complex notes on the effects of light are interrupted, for no apparent reason, by a cartoon strip of a man wielding a sledgehammer. The very first drawing in the show, the splendid large double page known as “The Theme Sheet”, is itself a microcosm of Leonardo’s multifarious enquiries. It contains, inter alia, a wonderful caricature of a beak-nosed old man, juxtaposed with a branching oak tree (in reference, perhaps, to Leonardo’s observation that human lungs resemble plant forms, which reinforced his belief that all forms of nature follow the same principles of design); a complex series of interlocking geometrical forms drawn with a compass; a comparative study of curling human hair and the wave-like forms of water in a whirlpool; a study for an equestrian monument; a study of clouds illuminated by sunlight; and two designs for a screw-like winch mechanism designed to lift very heavy objects by gradual degrees.
As the exhibition and its excellent catalogue by Martin Kemp amply demonstrate, Leonardo’s diversity was not simply the product of his mysterious, scatterfire genius. He simply responded, more diligently and conscientiously than any of his contemporaries, to the vastly expanded Renaissance notion of the skills to which an artist – or man of ingenuity, to use a phrase closer to the ideas of the time – should properly aspire. When Leonardo went to work for the Sforza in Milan, he was expected not only to paint and draw, but to design machines of war, to work on pageants, festivals and theatrical performances, and generally improve the life of the city with bright ideas for anything ranging from sanitation to new and improved sundials.
Occasionally, the sense of his patrons’ unrealistic expectations palpably gets him down. One of the holy grails of Renaissance engineering was the design of a perpetual-motion machine. Several versions of such contraptions can be seen in the V & A exhibition, multi-cogged arrangements of toothed wheels and pulleys which, it seems clear, Leonardo himself knew very well would never work. In one of his notebooks, he recounts the “debacle” of a contest between prominent engineers, staged in Venice, the aim of which was to create a watermill that would move in dead water. Needless to say, none of the designs worked, and the assembled engineers slunk off in disgrace. “Tell me if ever a thing was done”, Leonardo writes in the margin of one of his own studies for perpetual-motion machines, sounding a note of infinite world-weariness, not for the first or last time.
Yet it was precisely because Leonardo was obliged to think across the boundaries of several disciplines that he came to some of his most brilliant insights. The second section of the exhibition finds him investigating human anatomy, the better to paint the human form, while simultaneously designing dams and canal systems, studying hydraulic engineering and investigating the behaviour of fluids. He did not get quite as far as understanding the human circulatory system, held back as he was by the preconceptions of late antique and medieval science. But because he was thinking about the motion of the blood through the heart, and studying it with the eyes of a hydraulic engineer, he came to comprehend certain crucial aspects of mitral valve function – for example - that would not be understood even by cardiac specialists until the late twentieth century. Some of the most elaborate and beautiful drawings in the exhibition are his studies of cardiovascular system, in all its branching intricacy.
The last two sections of the exhibition focus on Leonardo’s studies of motion, and on his multifarious activities as an inventor. There are brilliant drawings for his famously tempestuous, and never finished, fresco of The Battle of Anghiari , as well as numerous studies of the deluge, in which his thoughts – like the thoughts of so many men, at the turn of the fifteenth century – seem overshadowed by a genuine fear that the end of the world might be nigh. There are designs for water-clocks and underwater breathing apparatus; for devices to measure the force of the wind; and for a stageset intended to create the illusion of mountains that open to reveal a vision of “Pluto’s Underworld”. There is an anatomical study of the human tongue complete with all twenty-seven of its muscles, accompanied by a memo from Leonardo to himself in which he resolves to procure the lungs and trachia of a dead animal and “blow them like bagpipes” in order to undertsand better the mysteries of the human voicebox. There are numerous intriguing little touches of unexpected humanity, drawings that seemingly amount to little more than graffiti, such as a curious diagram – interrupting an otherwise quite unrelated chain of speculations – showing the male penis in various stages of erection. The author of the generally informative captions to the display notes, drily, that “the drawing of the penis may not be by Leonardo’s hand”. No explanation is given for this summary act of disattribution, and given the improbability of someone else [in italics] having chosen to decorate a Leonardo page with phallic graffiti, the judgement seems, well, a little half-cocked.
Despite the odd caveat, this is a thoroughly engrossing show. No exhibition can hope to paint a picture of Leonardo in all his formidable breadth and depth, but the V&A’s display serves none the less as an admirable introduction to him – a whistle-stop tour of the many mansions of his rambling, restless mind.
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