Leonardo da Vinci. The Inventor

Leonardo da Vinci has become the best prototype of what we understand was the Renaissance. Universal genius, unmatched artist, thinker and scientist. Leonardo is, along with the rest of the architects and engineers of the Renaissance, heir to the great advances and technology of the Middle Ages, of Rome and Greece, but, unlike his predecessors, that were limited to considering machines as global objects, Leonardo dedicated himself to the study of his “anatomy”. His main contribution was to consider each machine as a set of mechanisms.

Leonardo understood that the great variety of machines resulted from the multiple possible combinations of a limited number of components.. The extreme precision of his designs allowed him an exhaustive analysis of its different “organs”: connecting rods, endless screws, pulleys, gear wheels…

The exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: the inventor, presents a set of machines representative of its very varied study topics. The machines are based on the designs collected in the two volumes of the Madrid Codex, preserved in the National Library and in the Atlantic codex preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. From the drawings, architects, carpenters and craftsmen have recreated machines that beautifully illustrate Leonardo's way of conceiving technology..

Each of the machines is contextualized with data from Leonardo's life, his interests and progress in other fields of research such as painting, anatomy and the study of nature.

He had the ability to imagine countless possibilities for those elements: motion transmission systems, speed changes, bearings… Leonardo marked, with its totally new method, the beginnings of technology as we understand it today, the beginning of machine theory. It can be said that with it the transition from technique to technology begins..

New “Roman Baths” space in Toledo. C/ Alfonso, 6.

Open every day 10:30 a 19:00 h on weekdays and 10:30 h a 20 h on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays