Having helped to develop the Sciencenter in Ithaca, NY by incorporating the buildings of a former wastewater treatment plant, I can appreciate the challenges of this museum in Milan, which is housed in a former 16th century monastery. Many of the galleries consist of long, narrow spaces, with masonry walls that can not be moved both for practical, as well as historical, reasons.
The building, as old as it is, is actually new construction, having itself been built on the site of an earlier 4th century walled area and church. Its interior courtyards are crossed by historic foundations (which also can’t be disturbed).
The museum was started in 1953 to foster democratic knowledge and to circulate scientific and technological culture. Visitors are greeted at the entrance to the exhibit area, for example, by this 184-kW steam-powered generator that powered 1,800 looms in a silk factory from 1895 to 1954. This is a huge, impressive machine, with a 5-m-diameter flywheel. But it is literally stuffed into the space it occupies, and visitors must view it in sections through openings in the walls on 3 sides.The museum is undergoing a gradual transformation to bring its science and technology collections into closer connection with the interests of its visitors. In contrast with Technorama (previous blog entry), which changed its name and simply removed its historical, non-interactive collections, this museum plans to keep its collections and use them for accomplishing its dual goals of: 1) connecting its visitors with their scientific and technological heritage while 2) inspiring them for the future.
To help accomplish this second task, the museum has set up 16 interactive laboratories (i.Labs), each with its own space, where school groups or visitors can sign up for hour-long programs. I sat in on a robotics lab, where 4 boys (ages 8-10) and parents sat with an explainer, learning the basics of robotics through a pre-built Lego Mindstorm unit. The explainer was captivating and held the boys’ attention for a full 30 minutes of discussion before starting to add sensors and program the device on his laptop based on the requests of the particpants.
i.Lab topics include energy, ceramics, copperworking, genetics, and many others. These hands-on experiences give visitors the opportunity to taste many different subjects. What is particularly interesting is that the explainers who teach these sessions use an inquiry approach, often starting by asking visitors what questions they have about the topic and then building a custom program around those questions. This means that explainers must be well-trained because they must respond to a wide variety of questions to avoid delivering a scripted demonstration or activity.
These i.Lab sessions are sprinkled periodically throughout the day, and all are not offered each day. Each i.Lab has its own space, however, so that materials and equipment can be left available for next time.
The museum has also mounted an exhibition of many varied items from its collections with the stories of how they were used by people. This photo shows a plow, and other objects range from an early sewing machine to an early car to a beautifully tooled cash register made by National Cash Register.
There are other wonderful stories that this museum can tell about its collections and some are being told. For example, in one basement room, a nail-making machine here has a label that tells about how a beginning blacksmith would take 2 minutes to make a nail, while a highly experienced blacksmith could make 2-3 in the same amount of time. The machine here changed the face of both blacksmithing and construction forever, however, by making uniform nails at a rate of 250 per minute. Unfortunately, these types of stories are relatively rare, and many of the objects have no labels. In a number of other cases, the low or glaring lighting makes it difficult to read labels that are present. There is a huge potential to bring some amazing objects to life for visitors.
The museum places considerable emphasis on Leonardo da Vinci, who is officially part of the museum’s name. One long exhibition space has many models of Leonardo’s machines, ranging from a pile driver to a helicopter to a printing press to various war machines. I particularly liked the model of a double catapult (see photo) which, according to Leonardo’s plan, was to have been built with bows measuring 50 meters in length (!) and would be capable of hurling 20 kg stones great distances. There is an i.Lab for visitors to experiment with copies of several da Vinci machines, as well.In addition to the main building, there are three additional exhibition venues.
1) a building devoted to rail transport, with a number of locomotives on display;
2) a building with maritime and air transport exhibits, including a full-sized square-rigged ship and an Italian 2-man torpedo (see photo for a look at this ride-‘em-cowboy device)…
3) #506 – a post-WW-II submarine that was decommission- ed in 2000 and brought to the museum with great community interest in August 2005. Curiously, it was dedicated at the museum on December 7th of that year, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the sub also doubles as a full-size exhibit on albedo. Because it sits outside and is black, the sub gets too hot on sunny days for visitors to go inside.
From an educational standpoint, the education staff is working hard to make the collections more intellectually relevant and accessible. In particular, the staff has been at the forefront of transnational collaborations to improve the educational impact of school visits to museums. A major European Union research project, known as SMEC, has produced valuable publications, exemplars of museum programs for visiting school groups, and general experiences that all museums can gain from.
The staff runs literally into a wall at every turn, because of the challenging long and narrow spaces that this masonry monastery building provides. and there are still many holdover objects, such as many religious frescoes that have been removed from their original location, preserved, and displayed in the museum. From the standpoint of curb-appeal, the entrance to the museum is almost invisible because it is small and set back in a side wall of a broad courtyard off a side street. Visitors have virtually no convenient parking These characteristics probably contribute to the annual visitation rate per square meter of exhibit space that is about 20% that of many interactive science centers. However, recent changes have significantly increased attendance in recent years, and the success of the i.Lab program is certainly worth watching as a model for deeper engagement of youth at museums in general.
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Understanding daVinci the Man
Most historians and art historians who do research relative to
da Vinci are largely focused on the artworks, inventions and history of Leonardo one piece of art at a time. Few if any of the serious researchers have concentrated on the man Leonardo “wholistically”, and the application of his written discourse, (codices) philosophy and teachings as they relate to his artworks and inventions.
We feel that most, if not all the scholars and people studying Leonardo da Vinci,(Lionardo di Sir Piero da Vinci) have missed many of the subtleties daVinci cleverly placed within his works and hence many of the points he was trying to make and truths he was trying to convey. The effects of light and how it is perceived by the observer, how light and dark can be used to create illusions, and at a more sophisticated level, how encrypted hidden meanings both within and even outside the frame of the artwork could be achieved have been overlooked even though they are in plain sight.
Leonardo studied nature in its finest detail. He considered the eye and its perception paramount, so he sought to understand the cause and effect of light and shade as perceived through sight in order to make his art as true to life as possible. He also applied his prodigious knowledge in other areas of the physical sciences, of which he was aware, to his works. The resulting combination of sciences and mathematics coupled with his philosophy of telling the truth as he understood it, allowed him to succeed in re-creating animate and in-animate subjects in the most intricate detail imaginable in his art. When portraying life he invented techniques to make his subjects appear totally alive. Few if any artists in history have achieved the perception of movement in a static work of art and a sense of self-awareness on the part of the subject within the art. His understanding of many different aspects of the physical world and his ability to measure and draw to exacting mathematically correct proportions, and the ability to do it repeatedly, combined with his understanding of Light and shade is what allowed him to paint and draw in a manner that made his subjects seemingly have motion and a sense of true life.
He had the ability to capture the essence of spirit and what might be considered by some to be the soul of any animate subject human or otherwise. His unique combination of knowledge and philosophy leaves many who view his art with a feeling of having a connection with the art at an emotional and spiritual level that is all but unique to daVinci,s art.
It is Leonardo’s unique genius and his ability to apply his knowledge to his art, that has enthralled the world for over five hundred years with visible works, while hiding another, until now, totally unrecognized level of communication totally unrelated to the visible art itself. His underlying and hidden meanings depicted through the use of his invention of mirrored encryption and optical illusion, we at the daVinci Project ™ have come to call “Pictures within Pictures” ™ and “Outside the Box outside the Frame” ™.
The recognition of the role played by Davinci’s unique inventions in depicting his hidden messages have opened a door to a dimension of knowledge and field of study that scholars, art historians, writers and the public have thought existed and sought for hundred of years but until 2005 were never able to find.
The daVinci project has achieved the first step in making the connection between inventions Leonardo was known to have used and his art, by understanding the man in all his complexity and applying that knowledge to bring this new element he kept hidden, to light. This new aspect of communication and the constructs found within the art will undoubtedly require many years to decipher and will have far reaching philosophic and perhaps religious implications.
But it must be recognized first and foremost that daVinci was a complex individual who tied many different fields of study together in his work. Recognizing this fact is the first step in understanding the messages. His art and codices therefore must be studied as a work in total, not just as a series of beautiful artworks, if we are ever to understand the “code”, his truths, as he daVinci intended us to do.
http://www.lionardofromvinci.com
Michael@thedavinciproject.org
1-508-843-9902
Da Vinci Mind, A - Lens, New da Vinci site launches New Discoveries within Da Vinci the Man.
www.lionardofromvinci.com
Davinci’s Mind - A Lens Da Vinci was undoubtedly one of the brightest and most diversified intellects to have ever lived… but we are only now beginning to understand the true depth and breadth of that genius…. and it is even more astounding than previously thought! His mind and the ability to project his vision and perception into layers and three dimensions from a variety of perspectives have previously only been seen as a result…. As in the Mona Lisa when her eyes follow you around the room wherever you go…. We are now able to prove that he had the unique ability to visualize in layers and three dimensions and to focus his and the viewer’s attention on one layer while he created and combined layers to produce, until now, unseen secondary images. It was his ability to see things from outside himself and place those images, both of himself and of other subjects within artworks surreptitiously that is coming to light. It is proving that da Vinci was able to use his mind much as a lens focusing on different depths of field, and then create multiple images, some visible others hidden, using his own very clever optical illusions that in modern terminology might be considered holographic in nature. New findings have revealed other capabilities that we will discuss in the near future. http://www.lionardofromvinci.com
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