Figuratione dell'invisibile: l'universo sonoro di Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was an eclectic genius, skilled as a scientist and treatise, engineer and architect, painter and sculptor, designer and set designer, anatomist and botanist. He left traces confirming his interest in music, from sketches and projects of musical instruments to the declared qualities as an improviser, from the reasoning in the acoustic field to the aesthetic reflections asserted in the Treatise on Painting. In his manuscripts there is a rich correspondence dedicated to organology; the studies contained in the Madrid Code and in the Atlantic Code, are found alongside different materials and testify to Leonardo's passion and attention to the sound universe. The drawings that refer to organology have an enormous value and allow us to indicate Leonardo's immense skills in mechanics, and his great ability to use them for the design of musical instruments of all kinds. Certainly acoustics provided Leonardo with theoretical paradigms to understand the laws of nature and musical instruments gave him the opportunity to approach acoustic, technical and aesthetic problems. The vastness of his interests meant that the personification of genius was seen in him; Leonardo, artist-scientist, lived and trained in a given historical period, in contact in the Italian courts with various currents of thought, cannot be separated from the self-taught Leonardo, initiator of modern science and technology, who continues to fascinate and surprise a vast and heterogeneous public, academic and otherwise.