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Pat Carafano
Correspondent
|  The name Leonardo DaVinci instantly calls up an image of the Mona Lisa, his world-famous portrait with the mysterious smile - but a visit to the History Museum now opens the window on a panorama of amazing exhibits including and far exceeding classical paintings. The exhibition at the Santa Fe Street venue runs until July.
Director Julia H. Bussinger thanked her staff of 12 for six months of concentrated preparation for the exhibit at last month’s opening reception. Bussinger formerly was director at the San Diego museum where this exhibit was shown prior to El Paso.
A true Renaissance man, DaVinci’s passionate interests and imagination soared beyond his life and times.
Anatomy, transportation, engineering, botany, astronomy - a wide range of subjects captured his attention as he explored the limits of human life, curious about improving the potential of man’s existence on earth.
“It shows the great strength of the human mind,” said Judge William Moody, District Court 34.
Hands on and off
Sixty exhibits illustrate Da Vinci’s imagination soaring above the earth and into the sea—and 20 of them are “hands-on” models, inviting kids of all ages to marvel at how they work. Other exhibits are carefully labeled “Please Do Not Touch.”
Ball bearings, perpetual motion models, tongs, hydraulic drill and wheel powered by water and worm screws (known today for holding tension of guitar strings) in dark wooden recreations attract the curiosity of youngsters and adults.
Carnival “fun houses” have mirrors distorting the viewer’s image. In DaVinci’s era, mirrors were expensive items, and people rarely got to glimpse their backside. DaVinci’s “Chamber of Mirrors” provides a walk-in view of one’s image from eight sides without the need to move at all.
Mirrors played an important role in DaVinci’s careful protection of his inventions. A lefty, he also wrote all his creative notations backwards, so that they could not be read without the aid of a mirror.
Speculation has suggested that he wrote backwards so as not to smudge his ink. He was an elusive and introspective personality, but it is also possible that DaVinci recognized significant value in his creations and carefully protected his ideas.
Large 12x18-inch page books of designs have been carefully recreated for this touring exhibition. Florence, Italy maintains a permanent museum of DaVinci’s work, including 14,000 of his technical drawings, believed to be only about one-third of his total output.
Luigi Rizzo, who built the machines for the exhibit, attended the opening. His story can be viewed online at abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/01/25/2473884.html
Illegal visits to the morgue
When a subject fascinated him, DaVinci followed with intense study. Considering nature to be a perfect machine, he wanted answers to expand the limits of man’s movements. To that end, he claimed to have performed numerous autopsies of the dead, filling notebooks with detailed descriptions of bones, muscles, lungs and hearts. The fruit of his study shows in his paintings as well as the inventions he sketched.
Soft and sensitive as his paintings were, DaVinci’s technical designs often aimed in the opposite direction. The “Scorpion” was his invention of a wartime sea craft, complete with a set of lethal scythe blades rotating as the oarsmen - protected by roofing - would paddle toward their prey. For land warriors, he designed an eight-man tank with weapons covering all sides.
DaVinci’s air screw, a forerunner for the modern helicopter, was 400 years ahead of his time. And his famous “car” was designed with a complex set of gears to move the wheels.
Begin your DaVinci visit inside the entrance with a quick turn to the left. The intimate video theatre offers a beautifully produced seven-minute overview of the world as DaVinci knew it, repeating every two minutes.
The museum’s well-stocked store offers a wide variety of mementos and books on DaVinci and his contemporaries.
Business support is being sought to sponsor busing school children to the exhibit.
“I think it is the finest exhibit to ever come to El Paso,” said director of development Jim Murphy. Details are online at elpasotexas.gov/history. Admission is $14 for adults, $12 for seniors and free for children.
For more information, call 351-3588.
Comments or questions about this story? E-mail swsenior@elpasoinc.com
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