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Leonardo the great

The Museum of Science celebrates da Vinci's legacy

by Jeffrey Gantz

"LEONARDO DA VINCI: SCIENTIST, INVENTOR, ARTIST." At the Museum of Science, March 3 through September 1.

He created the most famous painting in the world, yet he didn't consider himself primarily an artist, and neither did his peers. He was born into the world's most glorious cultural arena, but he spent very little of his adult life there. His painstaking observations and drawings of human anatomy and the natural world astonish even today; yet a number of his commissioned paintings went unfinished, and many of his ideas for inventions had no hope of being realized. As for his personal life, it's as enigmatic as Mona Lisa's smile.

Leonardo da Vinci was recognized as a genius in his own time: "Sometimes the heavens endow a single individual with such beauty, grace, and abilities that whatever he does, he leaves all other men far behind, thus demonstrating that his genius is a gift of God and not an acquirement of human art," wrote the historian Giorgio Vasari. We have nobody to equal him -- in our era he'd be Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Thomas A. Edison all rolled into one. Yet he's remained elusive: most of us are better acquainted with the paintings of Botticelli and Michelangelo, and apart from his Vitruvian Man (a T-shirt staple) we know even less about his scientific accomplishments.

In Boston, at least, that's about to change. "Leonardo da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor, Artist" is billed as the largest Leonardo show ever. It was conceived in Malmö, Sweden, and has played there as well as in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. Now it's making its only American stop at the Museum of Science, which has spent a full year preparing and creating its own additions. The result is fully worthy of its subject -- suffice to say that if you somehow got locked into this show for the duration of its six-month run, you'd find more than enough to keep you occupied.

Genius doesn't need gimmicks, and the museum hasn't tried to introduce any into its presentation. You start in the "Object Theater," which combines a 10-minute video with three-dimensional objects -- an owl, Leonardo's Milanese patron Lodovico Sforza, an eight-foot replica of the horse he meant to cast for the Sforza Monument -- projected on a scrim. It's all set in a stage re-creation of Leonardo's studio, with a wooden desk, horse's skull, books, papers, brushes; the scrim itself shows the countryside around Vinci, 28 miles west of Florence, where in 1452 Leonardo was born. From there you move on to the show proper, where an introductory area fills you in on the Italian Renaissance and Florence circa 1470; there are solid objects like a mortar and pestle (for grinding paint), an hourglass, and a polyhedron, but also CD-ROM presentations. This juxtaposition of real-life re-creations (Leonardo's desk recurs in every section of the show) with high-tech background material and interpretation (the CD-ROM stations are everywhere too) characterizes the museum's effort -- and is in the spirit of Leonardo's own endeavors.

Although the presentation is basically chronological, it looks first at "The Natural Artist"; that's followed by "The Restless Inventor," "The Solitary Scientist," and, finally, "Leonardo's Legacy." For all that the museum people underline their interest in Leonardo's scientific achievements, they've done much of their best work in the "Natural Artist" section. There's an interactive station where you can try your hand at Leonardo's characteristic backward writing. (Whether he developed this habit because he was left-handed or because he wanted to protect his ideas is another of the many mysteries that surround him.) "Leonardo's Window" lets you reproduce Leonardo's experiments in perspective; if you can trace a straight line, you too can be a Renaissance artist.

Yet another interactive station re-creates Leonardo's studies of plaster-soaked drapery: with the push of a button you can change the light, as Leonardo did by moving candles, and there's pencil and paper for you to shade in your own impression of what you see. Computer graphics clarify the concept of "sfumato," the hazy blue Leonardo used to represent distant vistas, and in place of the real Mona Lisa -- which doesn't leave the Louvre, and which in any case you'd have to view through plate glass, behind many rows of tourists -- there's the Gothenburg Mona Lisa, circa 1800, clearly a copy and yet you can stand inches from it and see things even the original wouldn't reveal.

In case you're wondering how this show managed to snag actual Leonardo canvases when there are hardly 15 attested paintings in existence -- well, it didn't. What you'll see at the Museum of Science are high-tech reproductions or originals attributed to Leonardo's workshop. This should not be cause for disappointment. Ninety-nine percent of what you'd see in Leonardo's originals (none of which is likely to travel) is visible in these reproductions. And the workshop paintings and copies have enough Leonardo in them to show what's distinctive about his art. Indeed, in the last room of the "Natural Artist" section an entire wall is devoted to a cartoon-like painting of a Florentine workshop, where the apprentices grind and mix paint and study drawing and metalwork, reminding us that Renaissance art was also a craft, and that the finished product, often a group effort, was more important than the identity of the artist.

The workshop room also explains why Leonardo's great frescoes, like The Last Supper in Milan and The Battle of Anghiari in Florence, were too innovative to survive. A "Leonardo and pupils" Virgin of the Rocks (kind of a cross between the Louvre and London versions) juxtaposed with a pale copy by the Milanese artist Bramantino reveals Leonardo's mastery better than any words could. It's all finished off by a nude Mona Lisa -- the "Monna Vanna" -- by his student (and likely lover) Salai, and by his early Annunciation (the one in the Uffizi), through which the museum demonstrates Leonardo's work in perspective, chiaroscuro, and sfumato.

The rest of this show is more straightforward -- mostly it's a dizzying traversal of Leonardo's ideas and inventions. There's a cutout of the equestrian statue with which he was going to commemorate the father of Lodovico Sforza; the museum ceiling tops out at 14 feet, and the statue, which was never cast, would have risen to 28 (a group in Pennsylvania are trying to re-create it). Leonardo's sketches are set against breathtaking museum-built models: a steam-powered cannon, a siege ladder, a machine gun, a tank with guns that fire in every direction and an observation turret. There are interactive models of his experiments with water, its force, its pressure, its turbulence. A 12-foot model of a water pump replicates what was meant to be a 70-foot machine. A hygrometer uses the weight of a cotton ball to measure the moisture in the air; a 10-foot-tall machine stamps out coins. There's a printing press (better than Gutenberg's), an odometer (a ball drops into a box every time a wheel moves forward a certain distance), a screw-thread cutter, a block and tackle. A blue-colored "bird rail" enables you to replicate the peculiar swimming motion by which birds fly. Leonardo's four man-helicopter and his gliders and parachutes bespeak his obsession with mastering the external world and overcoming human limitations.

"The Solitary Scientist" is mostly about Leonardo the anatomist, his endless drawings of animal and human bone and muscle: the lungs, the digestive system, the urinary tract, even sexual intercourse (which he couldn't dissect or observe and therefore didn't get entirely right) and the embryo in the womb. An interactive station has human models whose organs you can remove and study, and an area where you can try your hand at drawing these organs; you can even watch a sheep's eye get dissected.

Finally there's "Leonardo's Legacy," which features a resource room where you can read books about him and watch CD-ROMs (one program runs some four hours). There's also a theater where The Masque of Leonardo, a 20-minute two-person play about his later years written by BU's Jon Lipsky, will run every hour. A "talk-back" station lets you express your thoughts about the show, and there's the inevitable gift shop, where you can pick up the now controversial catalogue (which was produced in Germany, not by the museum) and decide for yourself whether it goes too far in attributing works to Leonardo.

I myself was distressed more by the inaccuracy of the wall labels' guide to the pronunciation of Italian names than by doubts as to whether Leonardo painted everything that's hanging on the walls. This show is not about the niceties of academic attribution (itself more an art than a science): it's about Leonardo's accomplishments. You could have every one of Leonardo's genuine paintings in front of you and you wouldn't learn what "Scientist, Inventor, Artist" has to teach. If he was the ultimate Renaissance man, this is the ultimate Renaissance show.