Leonardo: the Genius is in Brussels!



The exhibition “Leonardo Da Vinci - The European Genius” is presented by Collection & Inheritances as part of the festivities for the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. This exhibition is being held from August 18th, 2007 to March 15th, 2008 in the National Basilica of Koekelberg (Brussels).

Covering an area of 3,000 m², the exhibition is meant to be the most important and the most complete ever organised in the world about this genius. The show gathers original paintings, drawings and codices, models, as well as inventions derived from his research in all the fields of scientific knowledge. Going through it we can discover the man, the artist, the engineer, the humanist.

The exhibition opens with a presentation of the man and the stages of his life. In the tracks of Leonardo, the visitor discovers his native village of Vinci, his childhood in Tuscany and his nascent interest in the sciences and nature. This is followed by a depiction of his training as a painter under the greatest masters in Florence, and then of his service to rich patrons such as the Medici and the Sforza of Milan. His journeys to Rome, Venice and the coasts of the Adriatic are also well documentated in the exhibition. Finally, the visitor follows the last tracks of the Master leaving Italy for the Loire Valley where, protected by the King of France, he can devote himself freely to his research in Clos Lucé.

Leonardo da Vinci is at one and the same time a painter, a sculptor and an architect. The exhibition approaches the work of the Artist and his many masterpieces, in particular through the artifice of many previously unseen films. The visitor discovers the architectural projects and the treatises of Leonardo. As for the famous “Vitruvian Man”, this makes it possible to illuminate the quality of his drawings and his research into the proportions of the human body.

In spite of the legacy from his predecessors, the technological work of Leonardo da Vinci remains unique in its breadth and empirical dimension. The extraordinary machines of Leonardo are practical applications created starting from the elementary principles and very few obtained by observing nature. The prodigious genius of Leonardo invents mechanisms for the transformation or the use of movement. The applications of his research relate to fields as various as hydraulics and civil engineering. This survey of the anatomy of the machines makes it possible to understand the operation of the principal inventions of Leonardo.

The section on Leonardo da Vinci as a Humanist gives a glimpse of the exceptional documents that he left us with a particular emphasis on his extraordinary sketches of anatomy and his reversed writing. The visitor discovers the famous codices of the Master, who, trustful in the progress of Humanity, preaches the quest for and popularisation of knowledge. It is Leonardo’s “testament”, overflowing with drawings, notes, rebuses and mysteries. From Forster to Atlanticus, the exhibition displays for the first time the complete collection of Codices.

For more information: Leonardo Da Vinci - The European Genius