Teleidoscope

Fri, Apr 04, 2008

Da Vinci's Face

Posted at 9:33 pm MDT to Media

Neil Gaiman has posted a link on his blog to a wonderful discussion of what Leonardo Da Vinci looked like, by an artist who has drawn 1100 portraits and caricatures for newspapers.

I love the internet. It's full of such wonderful things.

I have only been outside of North America twice, both times on Geek Cruises (now InSight Cruises). The second cruise (October 2004) started and ended in Venice, and I spent a couple of days in the city before and after the actual cruise.

While walking around the city, I came across a church that was hosting a display of mechanisms that had been built based on designs from Da Vinci's notebooks, with pictures of the notebook pages they were based on. It was a working church (I was raised Catholic: I can recognize an active altar when I see one) but most of the floor space inside the church was taken up by the displays. Some of the more complicated mechanisms were marked "Please don't touch", but many of them were set up so you could move the various parts and really see how they worked.

The architecture of the church itself was lovely, too. And there were some nice pintings (probably frescoes) on the walls.

I will put a couple of pictures below the cut. I took more than 20 of the different gadgets. (I am such a geek.) I love digital cameras, too: if I had been carrying film I certainly would not have taken so many near the end of my trip. And I wouldn't have been able to take pictures indoors without a flash: the camera is smart enough to figure out the time it needs to make the image.

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