Leonardo's Machines

Blog 2

Leonardo da Vinci was the definition of a Renaissance man who understood a wealth of fields from art to engineer. In adoration of the mastermind himself, the basis of our machine attempted to incorporate several different devices that Leonardo da Vinci himself created. The first machine that was utilized was the toy car that mimicked the oxen horsepower that Leonardo used to design a reversible set of gears for developing pulley systems. This idea was supposable derived from Brunelleschi who used oxen power and a reversible hoist system to effectively build the Duomo. The second piece of the project used a wheel made out of recycled plastic containers and aluminum tins. The picture of the Vitruvian made was also placed on the front of the circle container. The Vitruvian man was an amazing encapsulation of Leonardo’s understanding of anatomy and proportions. As each part is a fraction of the entire system, our machine incorporated the Vitruvian man as a part of the greater picture of the artwork.  The proportions were precise as the arms were as wide as the body was tall in each outstretched limb. Leonardo tried to blend man and nature as he thought that understanding the man in the best ways to model the world.

While our project did not have the preciseness of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, we did integrate the Vitruvian man into nature through the use of recycled materials and environmental science. The popsicle sticks, plastic water bottle, orange juice containers, aluminum tin, wire, and plastic container are recycled or could be reused materials in the future. This idea of using these materials further highlights our impact and footprint on the world around us as we attempt to be the best model citizens by reusing materials. Nature and man will always be linked together in society, but the decision for prosperity or destruction of nature is driven by human choices. Each person contributes a portion of the proportion of waste on this Earth.

The next piece of our project was a nutcracker turned into a slingshot. This piece of the machine was derived from Leonardo’s mutte device. As many devices are invented and elaborated on further in the future, it is presumed that Leonardo may have used the Mutte in Metz France at St. Stephen’s Cathedral as a model for his own bell-quieting device. The semi-rotation around the axle of the bell as well as the sound was minimized by the mutte in order to decrease wear and tear over time. The mutte was stripped of its original purpose and was used as a nutcracker slingshot in the developed machine. The slingshot needed more horsepower in the end but the design utilized elastic bands, a chocolate bar, and a bouncy ball. The final piece of the machine was the pyramid machine that Leonardo developed which later helped with the building of the great Egyptian pyramids. Looking similar to a seesaw, the machine assimilated this element as the final stop of the machine before the creation of the art. Leonardo dabbled with figuring how balances, weights, and counterweights worked effectively which was a key piece to our development of the pyramid machine. The artwork created was a playful “pin the nose of the cinghiale”, reveling a Florentine traditional animal. Just as the cinghiale runs away from angry farmers the machine cinghiale dodged the nose pining operation of the bouncy ball’s mission. The machine represented a small sampling of some of Leonardo’s great works, and focused on various components that he masterfully accomplished.