Leonardo da Vinci is best known in China as an artist for his masterpiece Mona Lisa, but an exhibition at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum shows he is also a genius in math, mechanics, biology, astronomy and many other domains.

The exhibition features 80 replicas of the master's mechanical and robotic inventions, 14 anatomical models based on his drawings, 16 reproductions of his well-known paintings and four copies of his manuscripts.

The Renaissance icon of the 1400s has left to the world more than 14,000 pages of manuscripts involving a wide range of scientific topics he had studied from how birds fly to the structure of the kidney. Hundreds of years later, many of his technical fantasies - such as the bicycle and helicopter - are now a reality.

The exhibits are some of his inventions reproduced by renowned Da Vinci experts using the same techniques and materials from the Renaissance period based on the manuscripts.

A remarkable exhibit is a robot that can play the drums, which involved much ingenuity in mechanics and engineering. Rotate a handle and, with the motions of gears, ropes control the limb to play the drums. According to the organizer, Da Vinci did not design the robot on one piece of paper, but drew the components on several pages. Researchers only decided it was a robot in 2010.

Another famous design is an underwater breathing apparatus that resembles modern scuba diving equipment. It has flexible breathing tubes, a sack to collect excess water, a buoy to keep openings above water and a water-proof mask with glass goggles. The design of a parachute is a pyramid-shape device made up with pieces of linen. On the manuscript, the master wrote: "With the device, anyone can reach the land safely from a certain height."

The polymath also devised many vehicles, for land and water, for convenience and military purpose. He designed a heavy tank equipped with cannon and fortified with metal plates. Eight soldiers were supposed to stay inside the turtle-shell-like tank to move it by spinning the gears, which made the cannons mobile and more powerful on the battlefield - considering that during Da Vinci's time, cannon were generally used in stationary positions because they were heavy.

Zhu Dayong, a staff member of the museum who is responsible for the exhibition, says the inventions of Da Vinci epitomized a tireless pursuit of art and science. "He anatomized more than 80 human bodies all his life. I think that partly explained his great accomplishment in drawing - he knows humans to the bones," he says.

wuni@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 10/13/2013 page15)