Great Creator

In Milan, Italy last fortnight opened a prodigious show. Its subject: one of the most prodigious men who ever lived--Leonardo da Vinci. His paintings and drawings were not the half of what filled 25 rooms in Milan's Palace of Art. To Italians the show was meant to proclaim "the bond that exists between this great creator and the realizations of Mussolinian and Imperial Italy." Accordingly, 22 commissions of Italian experts had scrabbled for a year among the notebooks and sketches in which Leonardo recorded his observations and speculations in the fields of engineering, mathematics, physics, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, whatever.

Constructed from Leonardo's drawings, at a cost of $250,000, were more than 200 models of his inventions, in almost all of which he anticipated later inventors. Some of the contraptions: a jack (see cut); a turnspit driven by the draft of a chimney; a machine for cutting files and rasps; a printing press with movable type; an olive oil press such as is still used in Italy; a pile driver; an automatic saw; an automatic gear, like the differential in an automobile; a flying machine, whose bird-like wings were supposed to be powered by the operator, lying on his back and pumping with his feet.

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