Imaginary Gadgets 0005: The fantastic machines of Leonardo
Who: Leonardo da Vinci
What: plans and sketches of imaginary objects from Da Vinci's surviving codices.
When: circa 1480 – 1519
Where: Florence, Milan, Rome, Bologna, Venice, Amboise
How: schemes of cosmopolitan polymathic artist-engineer.
Why: glory, intellectual mastery, royal commissions.
Leonardo da Vinci is the world's most famous inventor of imaginary objects. At his death, he left some 18,000 pages of plans, schemes, drawings and writings. About 6,000 pages have since been rediscovered and published. They are the largest trove of writing by any Renaissance technologist.
These works were never published in his lifetime. Some of his writings seem clearly intended for an audience other than himself. Yet the pages of his journals are intermixed with accounts, lists, personal jottings, and so forth.
Da Vinci did built some real and functional devices: they were festival stage machineries, musical instruments, and (in one case) some palace plumbing. His other devices – and there were hundreds – never came to fruition. He also trifled with painting, a minor aspect of his work.
What was he thinking?
Da Vinci was extremely intellectual active. He also had a long career, so his engagement with physical objects came in intellectual phases.
A. The apprentice period. At fourteen, Da Vinci enters the Florentine atelier of Verocchio, an artist-engineer whose busy cultural factory involves drafting, painting, plaster casting, sculpture, metal-casting, architecture, carpentry and mechanics. As a famous craftsman in the most advanced city in the wealthiest region in the world, Verocchio is an urban contractor and a general factotum. Verocchio works on large-scale commissions and can be depended-upon by his patrons to carry out broad-scale commissions in a high style. The crew in his employ has a can-do attitude, similar to a movie crew. They do not much trouble themselves with specialization, because the technical professions have not yet been invented. There are no formal schools of engineering. Artist-engineers tackle creative problems as they find them. They rely on rules of thumb, revived ancient learning, and gossip.
As a teen, Da Vinci carefully studies the advanced machinery in Florentine construction sites, and draws the public works in detail. As an appentice to Verocchio, he likely has his first exposure to the semi-secret manuals of machines and engines, known as "theaters of machinery," that were circulated in manuscript among adepts. He starts keeping notebooks of his own.
B. Hoping to ingratiate himself into the urban canal-building craze, Da Vinci studies dredges, locks, hoists, and dams. He becomes convinced that water is poorly understood, and that canal-builders get poor results because they rely too much on rules of thumb.
Da Vinci spends several years drawing water in motion. He creates a private physics / metaphysics of fluid mechanics. Occasionally he's a minor consultant in urban water projects. He is never in charge of one, but these mighty efforts have such large budgets that his modest fees vanish into the haze. Da Vinci doggedly sketches and maps many superbly ambitious water projects which are never carried out.
C. Hired by an aggressive Duke of Milan, Da Vinci amuses his patron by creating large numbers of sadistic cartoon war machines, none of which are ever built or deployed in battle. The years in Milan are his most commercially successful period. He mostly works on directly-commissioned toy special-effects for Milanese court masques and parades. At this work he truly excels. Eventually a real war breaks out, the Duke is swiftly defeated and Da Vinci has to flee.
D. Da Vinci is introduced to geometry by a learned friend from the
court of Milan, now also in exile. Since geometry is composed from "elements," Da Vinci becomes convinced that machines also have "elements." Da Vinci now excels at drawing all the parts of all extant known machineries.
He spends many years ingeniously recombining the "elements" into
more-or-less plausible contraptions. Many look prophetic, and vaguely
anticipate future technical developments, but none are actually built.
Other Renaissance engineers such as Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio create illustrated catalogs. Da Vinci is familiar with these works. At one point he is employed by Cesare Borgia to loot a major library. Da Vinci never publishes any such catalog himself. He seems torn between an urge to publicize himself and and urge to hide his actual plans.
"Imaginary gadgets" are common rhetorical devices in the Renaissance.
Artist-engineers will take a relatively straightforward device, publicly known, and throw in a few excess working-parts to give the gadget an extra baroque gloss. These fantasy-machines are promotional brochures, meant to snow aristocrats into hiring their authors as wizardly experts.
No strict guidelines exist to separate practical from impractical machines, so most anything visually plausible will pass muster among high-ranking but technically illiterate patrons. Genuinely functional devices have a high risk of being stolen by rivals, since a patent system does not exist.
A great deal of borrowing, swapping, stealing and annotation goes on as gadget manuscripts are stolen, borrowed, looted or copied. Many Renaissance machine designs survive and thrive for centuries, although the names of their artist-engineer originators are lost or deliberately obscured.
E. Having broken machines into constituent "elements," Da Vinci becomes obsessed with similarly dissecting animals and human beings. He becomes heavily reliant on first-hand visual observation. He distrusts the Latinate literary "learning" of traditionalists, who excel as political courtiers and can therefore frustrate his schemes.
Da Vinci regards the human body as a complex of machine elements and hydraulic forces. He invents a private physics involving "movement, weight, force and percussion" as the four powers uniting the macrocosmos and man, the microcosm. Drawings such as the famous Da Vinci "Vitruvian Man" are a scientific visualization of his theories.
F. Da Vinci further refines his drafting skills, becoming the best technical draftsman in the world. He is convinced that he has attained a new, more complete comprehension of nature, which combines precise perspective drawing with a deep understanding of primal forces known only to himself. Since he lacks any functional, experimentally grounded physics, he becomes convinced that an accurate, properly scaled drawing of an object implies that it will function in real life.
Da Vinci also creates a few three-dimensional models, mostly modelling human body parts.
A combination of bad luck, political turbulence and a well-deserved
reputation for missing deadlines denies Da Vinci any large-scale technical commissions. He never gets a chance to field-test his giant fantasy machines, yet his public reputation is extremely high. He works for powerful patrons and is widely considered one of the cleverest people in the world. His personal charisma frees him of any need to rely on publication for fame. He is accused of necromancy at one point, but the charge doesn't stick.
Da Vinci spends a great deal of effort and time drawing flying machines. The machines look very much like living birds and bats. After years of drafting effort, Da Vinci manages to do some weight-ratio analysis. He then realizes that the human body lacks the strength to lift itself with flapping wings. He turns his attention to gliders but, since gliders don't exist in nature, he can't copy them by direct visual observation. His attempt to fly is stifled.
G. Da Vinci announces various plans to create a comprehensive encyclopedia of his immense hoard of autodidactic knowledge. This plan is never carried out. He is defeated by old age and the colossal size of his own archive. He spends a peaceable retirement chatting about philosophy with the young King of France, who is an ardent and generous admirer.
H. The posthumous period. Leonardo's works are scattered by his heirs. Collectors and curiosa hunters have a hard time making any coherent sense of the great man's eclectic musings. The papers are bundled in various ways that destroyed their original chronological order. Two thirds of the writings vanish.
I. Moderns re-interpret Da Vinci's work. They are considered prophetic, although Da Vinci never describes futurity, or casts his work as something that people will do in the future. He is never plotting a future course for civilization; he is always planning schemes that he himself, his followers or patrons might care to do, if they can find the resources.
He makes no effort to advance learning in general. If a project fails to find financing, he abandons it. In certain especially hasty sketches, he seems to be ridding himself of nagging ideas in order to free himself to turn his attention to something more mentally refreshing.
Leonardo leaves no direct intellectual heirs; he founds no schools of thought; he invents nothing that goes into common technological practice. His ideas about physics are entirely idiosyncratic and see no further development.
His imaginary devices become extremely popular and are much admired
five hundred years later. Even then, however, nobody builds full-scale
replicas of his machines; nor do they develop them.
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Atemporal Leonardo, or, a design exercise in the prepostmodern archaeofuturistic
Let's now turn our attention to what it might mean to create Leonardo-style imaginary devices "in the Leonardo tradition." How might his efforts achieve some vitality in contemporary circumstances? Is it possible to create/recreate an imaginary Leonardo imaginary-gadget?
A. Find and unite a group of "Renaissancepunks." Attempt to please their tastes. These pastiches would lack "authenticity" – they would be pastiches of a period aesthetic. However, they might have pop-appeal. Fifteenth-century devices of wood and bronze would be fairly easy to mimic with contemporary hobby techniques. It should go without saying that few or none of them would "actually work."
B. Study the Leonardo oeuvre with care. See if there are any obvious gaps in his combinations of the "elements of machines." Since so much of his work is lost, Leonardo must have created hundreds of imaginary gadgets now lost. By filling any missing combinations, one might re-invent these. They would seem very Leonardo-like, and no one but a scholar would be able to tell that they were modern fakes/recreations.
C. Study Leonardo's "machine elements" and create a generative-art program that combines them, generating thousands of "potential Leonardo machines." Select the most appealing candidates and manufacture them.
D. Start a design-school project that models "Renaissance society." Appoint a "Renaissance Lord" as judge. Distribute wood and bronze tinkertoy elements. Tell the students to create amazing model "war machines" so as the please the tyrant.
E. Model Leonardo's elemental design approach, then apply it to modern materials such as plastics, aluminum, epoxy and so on. Alternately, take clearly implausible Leonardo schemes and see if they can work with more advanced materials. Alternately, take functional objects and make them unworkable in a Leonardo style.
F. Release an actual Leonardo plan as an "open-source instructable." Pretend that you invented the device yourself. Give it to the "community." See what happens.
G. Find a gifted painter who fully understands drafting and perspective. Hire him to become an engineer strictly *because* of his ignorance
of math and physics. See what he "invents."
H. Reinvent "Leonardo physics." Pretend that these late-medieval concepts represent actual physics. Make applied devices that would "work" in those parallel-world conditions. Game physics could be adapted to this.
J. Choose an imaginary Leonardo device, build a full-scale prototype, then tinker with it until it functions.
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