A Disappointing Visit with Leonardo

About 6 months or so ago we heard that an exhibition about Leonard Da Vinci was coming to the Des Moines Science Center. Leonardo is the closest thing there is to being my hero, so this exhibit was a “must see” for me. I entered it into my calendar and eagerly awaited its October 2th opening. The day came but we were busy and we also thought that this would be a fun thing to do when Wendy and Zach came for Christmas. Sadly, they are not going to make it here this year. Last Thursday Karen called me on her lunch break and asked if the exhibition was gone. I got right on the internet and found that it will be in Des Moines till the middle of January. I asked her if she could take an afternoon off so we could go see it without having to contend with holiday weekend crowds. The next day, Friday, was the only possible opening before the show left town. We jumped in the car and headed for Des Moines.

I had one other thing I wanted to do in Des Moines. I had corresponded with the Des Moines Public Schools Library Services Department to see if they had any old photos of the schools I went to when I was a kid. They had a few and sent me xeroxes of them but I wanted high quality scans for including in my autobiography. They said I could bring my scanner and copy them and I was determined to do just that. They found five great pictures of the schools, just as I remember them. I set up shop and digitized them. Then, off to the museum.

We were lucky to find an on-street parking place right across the street from the main entrance. By then, it was 4:30 in the afternoon so we only had to pay till 6:00. We got inside and discovered the admission was $19.25 each. They recommended we rent one of the audio tour guide players each so that added another $10. With parking, audio, and admission we were right at $50. If you add in the cost of gasoline to get there and back, we were pushing $100 for our outing. Expectations were high.

The exhibition was divided into 7 or 8 rooms. One for military inventions, one for anatomy, one for flight, like that. There were reproductions of his inventions of all types. There were also 3 art related areas. They included the Vetruvian Man, the Last Supper, and the Mona Lisa.

As you went from area to area, you could look at the models and pictures and read explanations about what you were looking at. We soon discovered that our audio guides added very little to what we were looking at. Each item had a number beside it. You punched the number into the “TV remote-like” guide and it played you a little explanation about what you were looking at too. Only problem, it didn’t add that much at all and mainly served to keep you standing around in one area while you could have been moving on. After about the second room, we hardly listened to it again and were stuck with lugging the thing around for the rest of the tour. Ten bucks out the window. Once in a while it did prove useful, however.

In the first room they had reproductions of 3 of his codices, the illustrated notebooks he kept. They were very well done and looked quite genuine. I was surprised at how small one of them was, just 3″ x 4″ and about an inch thick. I always thought of them as being pretty big, 12″ x 15″ say. The narrative explained that they were a tiny fraction of the things Leonardo had written but that most of his writings had been lost. They also said that in the past, someone had taken his notebooks apart and recolated them in to subject areas; flight, anatomy, etc. These are the codices. Bill Gates has the only Leonardo Codex that is in private hands. Let’s hope he gives it to a museum some day.

Into the next room. We started to realize that the models of his work were a disappointment. They all looked cheaply made out of plywood and 2×4’s and appeared to be constructed more for durability in moving them from town to town than to give you an accurate idea of what it would have looked like in 1490. The pieces were all machine cut with no evidence of hand construction. Delicate wings for his flying machines were heavy and cumbersome. They made no attempt to disguise the plywood and all models were stained and varnished exactly the same. While the items were interesting, as his models should be, the execution was decidedly poor.

The Vetruvian man display had a bench in front of it, a welcome break for my feeble old knees. The video explained what the drawing was about and was pretty interesting. The Last Supper display was also a video and must have been close to full size. It filled the whole wall, but was not quite as interesting.

Pascal Cotte, the inventor of a multispectral camera, was given permission to scan the Mona Lisa at very high resolution. With that he was able to determine the ingredients used in Leonardo’s pigments. This allowed him to reconstruct what the colors in the original painting looked like. He also could see “beneath” the surface layers and get hints into the changes Leonardo made over the course of painting he masterpiece. This was the best part of the whole show.

Overall, while the exhibition did have some worthwhile things it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Especially for what we spent. Not one thing was a genuine artifact of Leonardo’s. All were reproductions. Of course, his paintings and codices are so pricless they could never be put on tour. But for the same price you could get a really, really nice, thick, hard cover coffee table picture book that you could keep forever.