In Rome, Leonardo Da Vinci experience has opened — a permanent museum that offers a fully rounded encounter with his genius, through reproductions of his machines and celebrated paintings.
Bringing Leonardo's genius back to life and concentrating it within 500 square metres was no simple feat: Leonardo Da Vinci experience in Rome is the permanent museum that allows visitors to discover every creative aspect of Leonardo through an exhilarating journey. A collection of 50 previously unseen machines alongside certified reproductions of the 23 most celebrated paintings — from the Mona Lisa to the Last Supper — offers an experience spanning art, science and culture. Not to be missed by anyone who wants to explore every facet of one of the great figures of the Renaissance.
The museum dedicated to Leonardo has five rooms and is housed at via della Conciliazione 19, a stone's throw from St Peter's Basilica — an arrangement that ideally reunites the genius with Michelangelo and Raphael in a fascinating triangulation among the greatest figures of the Italian Renaissance. All the distinctive qualities and abilities of the painter, inventor and scholar are divided as follows:
Room of flying machines and the Last Supper. The first room is dedicated to two themes: flying machines — conceived by Leonardo following his drafting of the Codex on the Flight of Birds — and a faithful reproduction of the Last Supper, perhaps the most famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci alongside the Mona Lisa. This is a work created for the first time in Italy at near life-size scale, produced using the typical procedures of Renaissance workshops and the same materials used by the artist.
Room of war machines. Here visitors can see the catapult, the bombard and the fan-shaped machine gun, all derived from the designs contained in Leonardo's Codex Arundel and Codex Atlanticus, as well as the mirror room: an ingenious cabinet fitted with eight mirrored walls that allows an object to be viewed in its entirety without having to move it.
Room of perspective. The third room of the exhibition displays some of Leonardo's most brilliant insights in the fields of optics and music: the perspectograph and the projector — which interact with the properties and behaviour of light — and the double flute, a wind instrument born of his studies into the physics of sound.
Room of principles. This section is full of curiosities revealing some of Leonardo's lesser-known inventions, such as the spring, the bicycle (whose design was discovered only in 1966 between two glued pages of the Codex Atlanticus), the trench excavator — designed to dig a canal linking the River Arno to the sea — the webbed glove, ancestor of the modern flipper; the life preserver, the jack and much more besides.
The final room is perhaps the most astonishing, because it displays, for the first time in the world, Leonardo's most important works brought together in a single gallery: the painting room contains 23 canvases including the Mona Lisa, the Lady with an Ermine, Ecce Homo and the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, whose originals are held respectively at the Louvre and the National Gallery in London. And further: the Portrait of a Lady, the Annunciation, the Musician and all his most celebrated paintings, faithfully recreated at life size using the typical procedures of Renaissance workshops. All the works were produced by the Bottega artigiana Tifernate using the revolutionary technique of pictography and painted by hand — in every respect masterpieces recognised as conforming to the standards of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage.
The young museum, completed in 2016, appears to be meeting with a positive public response and has an ambitious plan: to enrich itself continuously in preparation for 2019, the year that will mark the celebrations for the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo's death.
Leonardo Da Vinci experience is open every day from 09:00 to 20:00; tickets cost 12 euros.