Da Vinci Secrets: Anatomy to Robots

First published on 30 Mar 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

A few years ago, Italian artisan Gabriele Niccolai set about building a robot based on a design by Leonardo Da Vinci. The result looked like a knight in armour made of gears, ropes and pulleys – and the damn thing wouldn't work. The handles wouldn't turn; the gears would chafe. The mechanical failure of an android designed 500 years ago may not exactly surprise, but the problem did not tally with what Niccolai knew about Leonardo's genius.

"They had to go back to Leonardo's drawings and codices [notes]," explains Margaret Harris of Cruz Art International, the folks who have brought the Da Vinci Secrets exhibition to Australia. "Gabriele, being one of the few people in the world who can read Leonardo's writing, found something hidden elsewhere in his notes relating to the robot that was the key. Back in the 15th century there weren't any patent laws, so to protect his inventions so Da Vinci couldn't record it all in the same place. Gabriele uncovered that and was able to build the robot."

As any Dan Brown fan knows, Da Vinci was a canny one, big on secret codes and hidden symbols. The Florentine master's journals – some 13,000 pages of codices – were written backwards in dialect and voluminously illustrated. These pages form the basis of Da Vinci Secrets: Anatomy to Robots, on show at Town Hall – an exhibition spanning Leonardo's explorations into art, medicine, and engineering.

On loan from the Leonardo Da Vinci Museum in (where else?) Vinci, the show includes life-like models of anatomical drawings made by the artist during his gruesome studies into the human body. "Many people don't realise that Leonardo was an anatomist," says Harris. "He performed over 30 autopsies, which is a lot of bodies, and 500 years ago there was no refrigeration or disinfectant. The discoveries he made were astounding."

Da Vinci concluded that an elderly man he dissected had died due to the thickening of his arteries, which he attributed to "too much nutrition" in the blood. ("Leonardo discovered cholesterol 500 years ago!" marvels Harris.) Considering the human body to be a machine, Leonardo applied what he learned to the design of apparatus such as flying machines, underwater breathing gear, gym equipment, and robots. Gabriele Niccolai's company, Teknoart SRL, has constructed 30 of these machines for Da Vinci Secrets and the public may interact with them.

The third strand to the exhibition deals with Da Vinci's art: full-size reproductions of all 15 existing paintings and frescoes are included. And while we may think we know major works such as ‘The Last Supper' pretty well, in actual fact the work that exists in the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan has been retouched so many times that it no longer resembles the 1498 original.

Enter contemporary Florentine artist Antonio de Vito, who is painting a full-size recreation of ‘The Last Supper' using the same pigments and techniques as Leonardo used (see sidebar). "The exhibition is touring the world and with each major city Antonio will come back and paint another portion," Harris says. "It will be just like watching Leonardo at work.'" Nick Dent