«Musician», «Architect and General Engineer», map-maker, and painter. Because of his studies and of the machines he designed, Leonardo is sometimes defined less as an artist than as a «scientist». Sometimes he is considered as the truest embodiment of the Renaissance man, with the fickleness that we recognize as such a familiar trait of our time, but that resulted troublesome at his; with his curiosity, with his accuracy as an observer and his love for recording every detail as a sign of an (almost) invisible harmony. He used to complain about the separation between theory and practice, and he used to repeat that experience is the basis for a “scientifical” vision.

Leonardo is very close to the contemporary man, who feels the necessity to retrieve the care and the attention to select tools and invent new ones that should be fitter for research, to sharpen his senses to get to observe the world. For this reason, the space designed by Studio Azzurro is a great imagination machine inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s machine, engineering and mechanics studies. This experiential path is made of observation, but also of gestures, and of awareness of the point of view that activates vision and then thought.

Leonardo’s machines here turn into narrative devices and welcome the visitor in a shaded environment where the colours of wood, canvas and paper stand out. Interaction takes place with different systems: presence, action, and voice, too, function as activators through combination of words that gradually reveal the contents of the path. The installations explore the objects of Leonardo’s studies: nature, cities, landscape, machines for production and war machines, the human body, painting.