Last Sunday, Ian and I enjoyed the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry's visiting exhibit "Da Vinci the Genius," (or rather, I enjoyed it, Ian slept in the stroller the entire time). It consisted of, mostly, semi-operational full-scale and small-scale models of the whirly-gigs and whatchamacallits from the notebooks (they range from the ingenious and practical to the fantastic and preposterous), a few of the notebooks themselves under glass, and a special exhibit focusing on the Mona Lisa--investigations into its creation and its history post-Leonardo. I especially enjoyed the latter, being an amateur painter myself, and marveled at the enormous blow-ups of the painting, the explorations of its layers through special photography, and the extremely detailed photographic facsimile of both sides of the painted panel sans frame. Truly magnificent. I was also intrigued by the attempt at recreating the Mona Lisa's original colors. Anyone who sees the painting today sees, largely, a smoggy yellow-green-brown composition, colors lacking in vibrancy. This exhibit theorizes that originally Mona Lisa's skin was creamier with faint blushing pinks and that the background landscape contained a subtle blend of richer colors--especially the lapis lazuli of the sky.
One oddity was the recreation of a bicycle from one of Da Vinci's notebooks. As I passed by the wooden structure--for all intents and purposes a modern, two-wheeled, pedal-chain affair--I scoffed. There's no way he invented the bicycle! And, as it turned out, I was right. The placard informed me of a hoaxical addition to one of the notebooks that continues, to this day, to sucker in the gullible.
Here are links to OMSI and the exhibit's own page. On the latter, click on the Secrets of the Mona Lisa gallery to get a good idea of what it contains and the impressive scale of the reproductions.
CD
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