Breaking the Da Vinci Code of Italian Inventiveness

This year, thanks to the cultural promotion campaign "Italy in Japan 2001," we have had ample opportunity to admire Italian art and culture in dozens of exhibitions that have focused on the products of Italian genius since the Renaissance. But like the curious kid who wants to see how the mechanical bird sings, or a heckler at a magic show not content merely to see the lady sawn in half, some of us wish to see behind the scenes, to open the box and understand why Italian inventiveness suddenly started to revolutionize the World around 600 years ago, setting it on the path that led to the high tech society of today.

Coinciding with the school Summer holidays there are currently two exhibitions that explore the wellsprings of Italian genius: at Odaiba’s recently opened National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation visitors can enjoy Leonardo Da Vinci and the Innovative Engineers of the Renaissance, while the older National Science Museum in Ueno hosts Science and Technology in Italy from the Renaissance to the 21st Century. Just the thing, then, to give Junior that added academic impetus for next term!

The most popular explanation of the Renaissance is the 'genius theory,' which attributes the advances of the period to the fortuitous appearance of great men such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and others. The exhibition at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation comes closest to this viewpoint with almost half of its space dedicated to the great mind of Da Vinci.

Originally curated by Paulo Galluzzi, the head of Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science, the exhibition, which has already visited Florence, Paris, New York, and London, includes many large wooden models, constructed from plans found in old manuscripts, including the notebooks of Da Vinci. Unfortunately for those who believe genius to be an emanation stored in and emitted by objects touched by the inspired hand, the original manuscripts that appeared at some of the earlier exhibitions are no longer present. Instead pages from the original manuscripts are enlarged and reproduced on boards.

Mechanical sketch by Da Vinci

Although there are some original objects like the bronze "surprise table fountain," designed to pour water or wine, the main feature of the exhibition is the large number of recently constructed wooden devices that reveal the workings of worm screws, toothed wheels, pinions, pin-gear wheels, crankshafts, levers, ratchets, hoists, pulleys, anti-friction bearings, eccentric cams, automatic hooks, leaf-spring clock drives, and other mechanisms of the period.

Around half the devices are from the sketches of Da Vinci, but their originality remains an open question. A large revolving crane reconstructed from one of Leonardo’s illustrations was actually designed by Filippo Brunelleschi who used the original in the building of Florence's famous Cathedral of the Dome.

Perhaps the most stunning work here is a full-sized, 11-meter mock-up of Da Vinci's famous "bird man" flying machine which hangs from the museum ceiling. A more accurate name would be ‘suicide machine’ as this outlandish contraption of wood and rope would have no more chance of keeping aloft than the fabled wings of Icarus. Leonardo is also credited with 'conceptualizing' the helicopter, the submarine, and the tank, but like his aesthetically impressive flying machine, few of these inventions would have worked.

Although they may have lacked the star-quality of a Da Vinci, the exhibition reveals that there were many other ingenuous minds at work at the time, such as Francesco di Giorgio (1439-1502), whose impressive column-lifting machine, used during the building projects of Popes Nicholas V and Paul II, is represented here by a model. The Sienese artist and engineer Taccola (1382-1458?) designed practical devices to help soldiers cross rivers and, indeed, one of his illustrations shows a close approximation to the modern snorkel.

"Head of a Man Composed of Nude
Figures Wrestling" by Filippo Balbi

What set Da Vinci apart from other engineers was his realization that machines were not indivisible wholes, but an assemblage of distinct parts. He clearly saw that a finite number of mechanisms through different combinations would be able to produce an infinite variety of machines. By isolating the components of machines in this way, he was mirroring his studies of the human body, whose organs, including the brain, he regarded as highly sophisticated mechanical devices.

Leonardo da Vinci is the epitome of the "Renaissance Man," the ideal of a educated, knowledgeable man proficient in a wide range of fields. Not only was he interested in mechanics, engineering, and anatomy, but also architecture, astronomy, and painting. Indeed, there were no limits to his interests. Thomas Edison famously said that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. This perfectly reflected the attitude of a hard-headed businessman inventor interested in profitable, working inventions. Da Vinci’s genius, on the other hand, is the reverse of this equation. Compelled by his constant inspirations, he was always starting something while leaving countless projects unfinished.

This exhibition goes a long way to showing the technical details of invention, but as to the source of inventiveness, it only allows a brief hint. This hint lies in the evident eccentricity of the invention process. For example, Leonardo’s flying machine would fit perfectly into one of Terry Gillam's animated sequences for Monty Python or a science fiction comedy. Another candidate would be Francesco di Giorgio’s ridiculous paddle boat, of which there is a model on display. This is driven by a large treadmill in the middle of the ship’s deck, inside which a man runs around like an oversized hamster!

The uneven output of such great minds reveals that there are clearly two stages to invention: first the act of brainstorming when new ideas are jotted down; followed by a second stage in which the more far-fetched ideas are rejected. Of these two stages, the first is clearly the more important, but also the more difficult to explain.

The exhibition at the National Science Museum attempts to explore this stage with an ambitious and challenging exhibition that attempts to delve deep into the roots of creativity. Conceived by a group of Italian academics, including three Nobel prize winners, the exhibition is divided into displays of miscellaneous items linked thematically. Various paintings, models, machines, scientific equipment, maps, documents, and other objects from a variety of eras are mixed together into mentally stimulating tableaus. Six of the sections are named after the senses, including the mysterious sixth sense, while other sections offer "Energy," "Material," "The Body" and "The Cosmos" as their themes.

The display entitled "Smell," for example, rather confusingly throws together an oil painting of a Japanese traveler from 1615 with an exquisite antique model of a Venetian palace and a modern electronic sniffing device. "Hearing" includes an oil painting of Apollo and the Muses by Lazzaro Baldi (1624-1703) as well as a disassembled violin and a bust of Verdi. The theme is extended from language and music to communication in general with a 19th century metal typeface included, along with examples of old Olivetti typewriters and an 1855 prototype of a 'pantelegraph' fax machine.

Although an intelligible theme emerges from the miscellaneous objects in this case, one is also reminded of the works of such surrealist artists as Dali and De Chirico, whose works threw random objects together in an attempt to mimic the subconscious workings of the mind, and its propensity to collect apparently random impressions and ideas. Cabinet of Curiosities (listed here as "Doors of Mystery"), a 17th century painting by Domenico Remps, found elsewhere in the exhibition, anticipates the works of these later painters by showing a glass cabinet filled with various objects, including tools, miniature paintings, and specimens from the natural world. Like an inquiring human mind, this cabinet seems to have collected a jumble of objects from life.

"Cabinet of Curiosities" by Domenico Remps

Despite centuries of scientific advance, nobody can satisfactorily explain how creativity, inventiveness, or genius arise in the human mind, but it no doubt involves a willingness to cross the borders that modern specialization has drawn between areas of knowledge, and an ability to make analogies between different things. At its simplest this is expressed by the trick paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldi and Filippo Balbi. The first of these shows a bowl of vegetables that, turned upside down, reveals a human face, while the latter shows an anatomical human head intricately composed of small intertwined human bodies.

In the great mental awakening marked by the Renaissance it was natural for active minds to switch between different fields of knowledge and to draw inspiration from each. For them there was no dividing point between the mathematics of the engineer and the poetry of the artist, or between the faith of religious belief and the logic of science. So it was that Da Vinci seeing birds with the eyes of an artist, used his anatomical understanding to design his bizarre but beautiful contraption, while also seeing mechanisms as ‘organs’ and the human body as the perfect machine.

Looking at the tableaus with a similar mix of logic and poetry enables us to get the most out of them. For example, the centerpiece of "The Sixth Sense" is a painting by Angiolo Tricca, a 19th century painter, depicting an artist, Piero della Francesca (c.1420-1492), and a mathematician, Luca Pacioli (1445-1514), apparently discussing perspective. This creates an interesting motif of creative opposites reinforced by Sebastiano Ricci's baroque painting, Hercules between Vice and Virtue on the left. Meanwhile the right side of the tableau is dominated by two large globes, one depicting the Earth and the other the Heavens. These two globes are linked to a line of geometric solids, which progress from almost spherical to increasingly jagged, leading the viewer’s eye back to the applied geometry of the central painting. Here we have opposites, conflict, but an overall harmony that is very rewarding. And the best point is that not everyone can see it!

Most exhibitions tend to present and explain, placing the viewer in the passive seat. This exhibition by demanding more, by confusing the viewer and presenting him with the materials to construct his own meanings and see connections that perhaps even the organizers of the exhibition didn’t see, pays a fitting tribute to the Renaissance by arriving at the true roots of creative thinking.

C.B.Liddell
The Japan Times
15th August, 2001