Models of Invention: the Science Fiction of Leonardo da Vinci

In the Italian city of Florence in the late 1400s a young man sat at his desk for hours on end drawing weird and fantastical machines. His books were full of sketches of people in flying machines, human-shaped robots and armoured cars that look like modern day tanks.

We tend to think of science fiction as a nineteenth century invention, when novels appeared about Frankenstein's monster, submarines capable of taking us 20,000 leagues under the sea and rockets to the moon. Yet here was a man sketching flying machines and robots at the end of the Medieval era.

Futurism and Science Fiction meet in Leonardo da Vinci's inventions and designs. Many of his concepts were not realised until hundreds of years later. Some of them uncannily predicted machines from the Industrial Age.

Whilst Leonardo was long revered for his paintings it wasn't until the twentieth century when his technical drawings were "rediscovered" that the full impact of his scientific predictions became widely recognised. Was Leonardo a futurist?

The task of designing inherently looks to the future; it must envision what is to be, rather than what has been. Leonardo's designs for machines that seem like Gothic fantasies raise questions about how we perceived the future in the past. When does 'invention' become science fiction? Can we think of the Renaissance as the beginning of science fiction?

This exhibition presents a series of models of some of Leonardo's designs that seem to predict the future. It explores connections between design, art, science and technology that began in an explosion of possibility that occurred across Europe during the Renaissance.

The models are based on some of Leonardo da Vinci's hundreds of technical drawings and sketches of engines and machines he designed between 1464 and 1519. Some models are replicas of quite mundane objects such as two cog-wheels meshing together. Others are studies of his more fanciful designs for tanks and flying machines.

Interpreting precisely how Leonardo intended his futuristic designs to look and function has been debated by engineers and Renaissance scholars alike. The models on display were constructed by Dr Roberto Guatelli who was renowned for interpreting Leonardo's sketches into working models. They were originally commissioned by IBM and displayed at UTS in 1994 in an exhibition focusing on works of art that "spring from the creative use of technology".