Renaissance Engineers: From Brunelleschi to Leonardo da Vinci

Above all else, the Renaissance has traditionally been seen as an extraordinary flowering of Arts and Letters. The persistence of this view has long obscured the revival of technical activity that began in the late 14th century notably in Italy and lasted, with undiminished vigour, through the 15th century.
This helps to explain the long-held belief that Leonardo was an utterly unique manifestation in his time. In other words, his extraordinary inventions are regarded as the product of a towering genius who anticipated by centuries the technical achievements of the modern age, instead of as the attempts of a singularly gifted man to satisfy the expectations and aspirations prevailing in his cultural environment.
The exhibition, conceived by Paolo Galluzzi, has two basic goals. The first aims to present the most significant technical achievements of some of the artist/engineers who preceded Leonardo. The second aim is to provide tangible evidence of the fact that Leonardo’s intellectual experience was the supremely creative culmination of a long process: the renewal of technical knowledge that persisted throughout the Renaissance. The exhibition thus restores to its proper place a major cultural phenomenon that can be described as the "renaissance of machines."

Exhibition Dates