500 years later, the world remains in awe of this 'Renaissance Man'
National Post, 08 November 2019
The great lesson that da Vinci offers to our age is that of a gifted mind that ranged widely across various fields of knowledge and refused to be restricted.
ROME — Here’s a helpful travel advisory you won’t get elsewhere. If you are flying out of Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport (Fiumicino) go at least three, if not four, hours before your flight. No, check-in formalities and security have not become nightmarish — though if you find yourself behind a flight’s worth of Chinese or Korean tourists in the tax-free refund queue you could easily expend hours there alone.
Rather go early because in the departure terminals — before security and so accessible to the general public as well — are fascinating exhibitions to mark the quincentennial of the death of the airport’s namesake in 1519. You can easily spend an hour or two and learn a lot about the many things that da Vinci knew, or discovered, or invented, or created — to use the precise term in relation to his works of art.
It’s not the Louvre, which is now staging a da Vinci exhibition worthy of a 500th anniversary, bringing together in Paris almost all the known da Vinci paintings. The airport exhibition focuses on da Vinci’s attempts to invent “flying machines,” including a stunning recreation of “the flying man” — a contraption to fit a man with wings stretching out to an 11-metre span.
The exhibition, entitled “Leonardo’s Wings: The Genius and Flight” explores how da Vinci carefully studied avian flight to see how man might imitate it. How carefully? The exhibition features 32 pages from the “codex on the flight of birds,” which includes da Vinci’s detailed drawings of avian anatomy, with some of his mathematical calculations and engineering sketches. The curators deserve credit for giving harried passengers who might only spend 10 minutes in the exhibits a glimpse into how one of the greatest minds in history worked.
That really is the great lesson that Leonardo offers to our age, that of a gifted mind that ranged widely across the various fields of knowledge. Today, especially in the universities, specialization has become separation, so that knowledge is both deeper and narrower.
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