As you pitched up to work this morning in your driverless submersible gyrocopter, you probably didn’t stop to consider that pretty much every bit of kit at your disposal (well, some of it, at least) began life in the mind and on the drawing board of sixteenth-century painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. Yet, as revealed by this mind-boggling offering from the Science Museum, without Leo and his restless desire to shake up the bits of the world he knew and divine the bits he didn’t, we’d be stuck – possibly in the sixteenth century.
Befitting the scope of the renaissance polymath, the show is a whizzy, breathless affair, bombarding you with info about the ways in which da Vinci pioneered engineering, manufacturing, getting from A to B and (most excitingly) injuring and sabotaging your enemies. It throws into sharp relief the relative achievements of your day/week/life, if never quite getting to the molten core of his motivation.
Instead, at its heart are models of Leonardo’s designs for marvels such as a giant crossbow, a wind-propelled chariot, a rotating cannon (more deadly than your average cannon), a diving suit and various aircraft. Most were made with a degree of poetic licence in 1952 to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of his birth. The disarming clunkiness means that, despite the addition of touch-screen whatnots and interactive doo-dahs, the show retains the charm of a retro toy shop. As such it’s possibly more of a draw for big kids than little ’uns. And, as it lacks a single original Leonardo sketch, for art fans it’s not much of a draw at all.