Da Vinci

The San Jose tech museum is currently hosting a traveling Da Vinci exhibit. Because it's mostly about his work relating to machines and the anatomy, it's being hosted at the Tech Museum rather than the art museum. In fact, the two painting that they did have on display, and made a HUGE deal out of having (it's own special room! 24 hour security! Never let out of the Uffizi Gallery!) are not even painted by Leonardo. They're copies.

Cool things I learned:
-he was one of the first to draw a batman (see left) :p
-the notebooks we have right now is roughly 1/5th of DaVinci's work. Apparently he left all his notebooks to one apprentice (to the other apprentice he left the Mona Lisa), who left it to his son, who didn't treaure it so much of it is lost or destroyed. Given all the amazing stuff we know about Leonardo's work based on his notebooks, I can only imagine what's in the other 4/5ths.
-he was a bastard so he couldn't go to college
-he studied the human anatomy much like he studied machines. He looked at human joints and how they moved and tried to relate it to machines. Based on his studies, he might've built the first robot. (Maybe he was a cylon...)
-Apparently he did NOT rob graves to study anatomy. There were enough dead bodies around with all the wars going on that he could have just walked off with them.
-he didn't want anyone to steal his ideas. So he would often leave things out of his drawings or draw them from just one perspective.
-he wasn't appreciated until the last 100 years (who knew?)
-if you turn your head to the right when you look at the picture to the right, you can see his study of the bones and muscles that hold up and operate our heads. The drawing reminded me of a lot of a boat.
-he was really bad about finishing his work, almost as if he had ADHD (per the docent). Often one noble would write the other about getting DaVinci back to finish some project.
-when he painted he wanted to capture the motion of his subjects. There was a computer animation of the Last Supper that posited how each desciple would react to the news and hence arrive at their "poses" in the painting.
-he compared the nervous system to root systems for trees and the system of rivers and their tributaries and saw many connections between the way our bodies are arranged and the way things in nature appear.
-below is something i thought was kinda cool. On the left is his sketch of human arms, on the right is a picture of the Three Shades by Rodin, which I saw last week at the Stanford Art Museum. When I saw DaVinci's notebook I immediately flashed back to those statues.