But watch: A mechanical hammer slams down as a handle is turned. An arched bridge is constructed for traveling armies out of rope and easily found logs. A pipe spiraling around a turning cylinder becomes an Archi-medes' screw, lifting water upward through its rotations.
You can see Leonardo's attempt to formulate a kind of mechanical vocabulary. He was not seeking abstract, universal laws, the way Newton later did. He was disclosing concrete architectural and mechan-ical elements that could be combined into ever more exotic and sophis-ticated creations.
Here is a simple machine that turns circular motion into vertical motion; over there is one that turns vertical motion into sideways motion. Many of these machines and their notebook sources can be seen in a book that could serve as a partial exhibition catalog, Leonardo: Codices and Machines by Carlo Starnazzi (Cartei and Bianchi), sold at the museum.
Another room, Leonardo's Work-shop, is more like a play shop for emulators, aspirants and school-children. The room is dominated by an 2.4m-tall model of a horse's head, meant to reproduce part of Leonardo's design for a7.3m high, 72.6-tonne bronze statue commissioned by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza.
The bronze was never cast, and the head has a pop crudity to it. But this is the place to build a 4m bridge according to Leonardo's instructions. Or to see the effect produced by a camera obscura -- a tool used by many painters of the time -- in which bright, inverted images are projected on a screen in a darkened room. Or to operate a working 2.1m-tall catapult, based on Leonardo's designs, that tosses soft red balls at a rival catapult; both were operated by teams of schoolchildren when I was there.
There is also an enormous touch screen that provides one of the smartest, most elegant interfaces I have seen for exploring complex
material. Created by the company Leonardo3, the program allows the viewer to page through some of the inventions of the Codex Atlanticus, an anthology of 40 years of Leonardo's notebooks (from 1478 to 1518).
At the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Codex's 1,750 drawings, bound in 12 volumes, are annotated by Leonardo's meticulous mirror-image script, but here the machines spring to life and motion with the touch of a finger. A consumer version of the software is available on CD-ROM (leonardo3.net).
The last section of the show is meant to be its climax, but what can possibly follow these inventions?
Certainly not Modern-Day Leonardos, which pays tribute to 40 contemporary inventors, artists and innovators.
However remarkable Laurie Anderson's multimedia presentations are, however brilliant the inventor Danny Hillis is, however provocative the works of the mathematician Stephen Wolfram, or useful the techniques for heart surgery created by Francis Wells (based on Leonardo's anatomical studies), Leonardo's genius casts an imposing shadow over the assembly. And the decision to include tributes to General Electric's new wind turbine and an extensive display of Boeing's design for its new 787 seems like pure pandering, placating two of the show's sponsors with reflected prestige.
In this contemporary company the spirit of Leonardo was most clear, perhaps, when a project combined concrete simplicity and wild imagin-ation, like the speculative model of a space elevator designed by the physicist Bradley Edwards, intended to move passengers and supplies along a cable extending 99,779km from the equator to an orbiting satellite. When you see Leonardo's artworks, their allure and power can lead you to imagine something grand and mysterious -- if not a code, then something dizzying, beyond simple understanding. But here the sensation is the opposite: the surface is stripped away; objects are distilled to their mechanical essences. And you are left in the presence of an extraordinary mind at work, playfully decoding the world.
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