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Da Vinci's
visions come calling
New Aerospace Museum to showcase replicas painstakingly created from Italian
master's drawings
By Edgar Sanchez - Bee Staff Writer
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Fourteen months ago, the Sacramento Convention & Visitors Bureau received an intriguing phone call.
The caller asked: Would California's capital like to host a traveling exhibit of more than 60 working replicas of Leonardo da Vinci's inventions?
According to Michael R. Testa, a spokesman for the bureau, the answer was yes, because the show would lure tens of thousands of visitors to the Sacramento area.
On Monday, Testa watched as a father-and-son team of master craftsmen from Italy began assembling "The Da Vinci Experience" at the Aerospace Museum of California at McClellan Park.
The exhibit opens at 9 a.m. Friday as the first of many world-class collections expected to be showcased at the 3-month-old museum.
"What finally sold us on this exhibit is that Sacramento would be the only Northern California stop on its tour," Testa said.
The Leonardo display has been extended through late September, said Roxanne Yonn, director of development and marketing for the nonprofit museum. Originally, the show was to close in mid-August.
"Leonardo da Vinci was the father of flight, so what better venue for this exhibit than the Aerospace Museum?" Yonn said.
Primarily known as the painter of the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and other masterpieces from the Renaissance, Leonardo was, among other things, an architect, a scientist, a sculptor, a master mechanic and an anatomist.
Guests at "The Da Vinci Experience" will walk through a 40-foot Renaissance-era hall lined with replicas of some of his greatest paintings.
It will be surrounded by scale models of transportation, military and mechanical devices developed from drawings and notes left by Leonardo, who lived from 1452 to 1519.
The inventions include an air screw, a forerunner for the modern helicopter; a hang glider with a rudderlike tail; a one-person "helicopter" with two sets of rotor blades; and a life preserver that would enable people to float in water.
There's also a pyramid-shaped parachute that included a hole at the top to promote stability; a movable bridge that could be assembled quickly and taken apart; and a square box that, using an internal candle and mirrors, produces a spotlight.
All of the items were built from materials that were available to Leonardo from Italy's Tuscany region, including oak, maple and other woods, said Godfrey Harris, curator of "The Da Vinci Experience" in the United States.
All of the items were crafted by artisans in Florence under the direction of Carlo Niccolai, 71, and his son Gabriele, 42, who are putting the show together at McClellan.
"The Niccolais have a studio that employs 50 people who build these replicas," Harris, of Los Angeles, said, adding that the younger Niccolai is the curator of the Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Florence.
What viewers won't see are originals of the models. That's because there are none, according to Harris.
"In Leonardo's era, there were no patent laws, no way to protect his ideas" from potential copycats, Harris said.
Partly as a result of the absence of such laws, Leonardo built only a few of his concepts but kept their essential elements a secret.
This version of "The Da Vinci Experience" made its first stop in November 2005 in Auckland, New Zealand. Then it went to Melbourne, Australia, before heading to Palm Springs, its stop before arriving at McClellan.
After Kenneth Katz, co-managing member of The Da Vinci Experience LLC, the firm that was created to bring the show to the United States, made last year's call, the visitors bureau began seeking a local venue.
"When we were approached by the bureau last April, we hadn't broken ground on our new museum ... but everything came together," Yonn said.
The interactive exhibit will occupy about 8,000 square feet of the museum's first floor.
Besides the special exhibit, the museum has a permanent collection of more than 39 retired civilian and military aircraft.