Why you should experience Leonardo3 in Milan, Italy.
Leonardo3 is an immersive invention museum where Duomo's Renaissance inheritance, nineteenth-century metropolitan ambition, experimental engineering and digital interpretation converge inside Milan's grand commercial passage.
Set within Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II near Piazza della Scala and just steps from Teatro alla Scala, the museum occupies the northern end of Giuseppe Mengoni's great passage, begun in 1865 as the architectural centerpiece of a reconstruction that joined the cathedral square with Milan's principal opera house through iron, glass and an unprecedented concentration of urban commerce. Interactive displays replace the conventional distance between viewer and object with working machines, manipulable three-dimensional reconstructions and large-scale visualizations that turn Leonardo's notebooks into mechanisms whose movements unfold in front of you. More than 200 interactive 3D reconstructions range across flight, hydraulics, warfare, musical instruments, automata and mechanical systems, allowing individual drawings to become comprehensible through motion and physical form. The result is an invention museum where Mengoni's nineteenth-century architecture surrounds a highly technological encounter with ideas conceived four centuries before the Galleria itself existed.
What you should know about Leonardo3.
Leonardo3 is best known for converting Leonardo da Vinci's surviving drawings into working physical machines and interactive digital reconstructions through a project developed by Massimiliano Lisa, Mario Taddei and Edoardo Zanon. The collaboration originated in 2004, when publisher and journalist Lisa joined industrial designers Taddei and Zanon around an independent project combining Leonardo scholarship with three-dimensional modeling and interactive technology. Lisa became a founding partner, chief executive and president in 2005, with Taddei and Zanon directing investigations into Leonardo's machines, manuscripts and artistic works. Their work produced a digital edition of the Codex Atlanticus designed for broad public exploration and an interactive high-definition treatment of the Codex on the Flight of Birds using proprietary L3 HyperView technology. Reconstructions subsequently extended to inventions including the Mechanical Lion, Flying Machine of Milan, Great Kite, Harpsichord-Viola, Multi Cannon Gunship, Rapid-fire Crossbow, Robot Soldier, Mechanical Dragonfly, self-propelling cart and machines derived from the Madrid codices. The World of Leonardo da Vinci exhibition opened at the Galleria on February 28, 2013 with an initial run scheduled through October 2015, yet successive extensions eventually converted the temporary exhibition into a permanent museum. Its Milan incarnation has drawn 1.5 million admissions, and the broader traveling project has appeared across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. An initiative conceived around reconstructing individual drawings consequently developed into a permanent Milan institution and an international exhibition program built around making Leonardo's mechanical thinking physically intelligible.
The Last Supper generated another major strand of the institution's work through an attempt to reconstruct both the painting's original appearance and the room Leonardo knew at Santa Maria delle Grazie. Mario Taddei and his collaborators developed a digital restoration aimed at recovering the colors of the mural around 1500, then expanded the project into a reconstruction of the entire refectory with its original vaults and decoration. Taddei presented the project internationally as an investigation into a painting whose surviving original surface has suffered extensive deterioration, using Leonardo's manuscripts and historical copies to inform the recreation. A physical reconstruction of the Last Supper and its refectory subsequently joined the Milan exhibition alongside digital treatments of Leonardo's other paintings. The collection now spans more than 50 machine reconstructions alongside treatments of 12 paintings and drawings and three codices, with individual objects connected to specific folios from the Codex Atlanticus, Manuscript B, Codex Arundel, Madrid Codices and Codex on Flight. The project received an Award of Excellence from the President of the Italian Republic and Leonardo3 later became an institutional member of the International Council of Museums. The reconstructed refectory, manuscript-derived machines and expanding digital collection turned Leonardo3 from an exhibition about finished masterpieces into an attempt to expose the mechanical and artistic processes concealed within Leonardo's surviving pages.
How to fold Leonardo3 into your trip.
Leonardo3 works as the anchor for a daytime progression through the Renaissance sculptor who inherited Leonardo's drawings, the merchant palace that became Milan's civic headquarters and the nineteenth-century collector who converted his private residence into a public museum.
Begin at Casa degli Omenoni, the extraordinary residence Leone Leoni created after acquiring the property in 1549 and beginning its reconstruction in 1565. Imperial sculptor to Charles V and Philip II, Leoni filled the facade with eight colossal male figures carved by Antonio Abondio, following Leoni's design, beneath a cornice populated by lions, eagles, chimeras and festoons. The connection with Leonardo became still more consequential through Leone and his son Pompeo, whose collection eventually included Leonardo drawings inherited from his pupil Francesco Melzi. Continue to Palazzo Marino, begun on May 4, 1558 for Genoese merchant Tommaso Marino by Galeazzo Alessi, who drew leading sculptors associated with the Duomo into an elaborate residence organized around a courtyard celebrating heroic deeds and episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Alessi departed before completion in 1570, and Luca Beltrami finished the palace at the end of the nineteenth century after Milan had already established its municipal administration there in 1861. Conclude at Museo Poldi Pezzoli, created from the home and collections of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, who inherited his family fortune in 1846, supported the 1848 Risorgimento uprisings, endured exile and returned to Milan in 1849 with plans for an Italian art collection shaped partly by what he had encountered in France and England. His death in 1879 transferred a residence filled with paintings, sculpture, arms, armor, jewelry, clocks, porcelain and other decorative arts toward its public future, and the museum opened in 1881. The progression moves from Leoni and his son preserving part of Leonardo's graphic inheritance through Marino commissioning a palace from one of sixteenth-century Italy's major architects into Poldi Pezzoli deliberately turning private collecting toward public access, tracing three different mechanisms through which artistic culture survived individual ownership in Central Milan.
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