Project 2 - Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci was the archetypal example of pursuing intellectual curiosities. He was a polymath, exploring many areas including engineering, painting, drawing medicine, music and architecture.  He was not only diverse in his interests, but showed incredible skill in each one. Once he became interested in something, he used his creativity and inventiveness to learn about it. For example, he taught himself anatomy by performing dissections on cadavers and documented their anatomy with sketches. Similarly to the wax sculptors whose work is displayed at La Specola, he took the knowledge of something previously unknown into his own hands and physically explored it. His drawings left a record of his knowledge that could be used to teach others as well. When looking at the models of his machines in the museum, I noticed multiple machines that seemed to resemble parts of anatomy. For example, he created some flying machines that resembled wings, and had movable joints. This suggests that he may have applied his knowledge of anatomy and its mechanics to his machines. In his drawing of the Vitruvian man, Da Vinci explores anatomy and the proportions of the human body. The drawing was very precise and looked similar to a blueprint to me, highlighting Da Vinci’s combination of engineering and anatomy. He may have thought of the human body in a similar way that he thought about machines, exploring its mechanics and functions.

The intersection of art and science is seen in Da Vinci’s notebooks as he draws the world around him and includes notes and technical descriptions. This helped him turn his ideas and the machines he pictured into tangible plans. The sketchbooks show that he not only thought of an idea for a device, but really considered how it could realistically work. Even though he did not always build scale models of his sketches, his sketchbooks left behind enough detail to be built and tested by other scientists later on. Da Vinci has been cited to say that sight was the most important human sense and the eyes were the most important organ. He believed that learning was best when information was obtained through direct observation. This is quite clear when looking at his sketchbooks, as he sketches with a lot of detail and provides multiple viewpoints of each object. I really appreciated the different diagrams that came with the models in the museum; they allowed me to visualize how the machine would work when I was not able to actually move them.

The main influence for our machine came from the model of Da Vinci’s Aerial Screw in the museum. Although he did not actually build it, this model represents the first concept of a helicopter. The idea was that spinning the machine would compress air and allow the helicopter to lift. Da Vinci believed that if the sails were made out of linen and covered in starch to block the pores, quickly spinning the screw would result in flight. The screw shape and the idea of spiral movement shows up in many of Da Vinci’s other inventions and models, such as the Archimedes screw used to lift water. We saw the spiral shape as a good track for moving balls and a way to make the balls gain momentum. Originally, we thought about using ball bearings or golf balls as they would be heavy enough to pop the balloon in our machine. Since we could not find these, we made our spiral longer to help the balls gain speed and give them more force to hit the balloon with. We also connected the spiral shape to the architecture that we have observed in Italy so far – when we found the octagon shaped box that we used to hold the spiral, we immediately thought of the Coliseum in Rome and the Duomo in Florence.