Leonardo Da Vinci’s Studies on the Science of Flight Come to the Air and Space Museum
“Codex on the Flight of Birds” reveals the Renaissance man’s fascination with flight
You’ve heard of the “Mona Lisa”, “The Last Supper” and “Vitruvian Man,” but did you know that Leonardo da Vinci was also an early innovator in the science of aviation? Between 1505 and 1506, the legendary polymath created his “Codex on the Flight of Birds,” an 18-page notebook containing detailed observations on aerodynamics. A digitized version of the d0cument went to Mars on the Curiosity Rover in 2011. This September, the original codex comes to the National Air and Space Museum.
From September 12 to October 22, 2013, ”Codex on the Flight of Birds” will be displayed in the gallery that houses the 1903 Wright flyer—though Leonardo preceded the Kitty Hawk pair by four centuries. According to Peter Jakab, chief curator of the Air and Space Museum, the codex contains the “seeds of the ideas that would lead to humans spreading their wings. . . . In aeronautics, as with so many of the subjects he studied, he strode where no one had before.” Leonardo’s notes even “hinted at the force Newton would later define as gravity.”
The exhibition will feature “interactive stations” allowing visitors to flip through the pages of the codex. This landmark work, which has rarely left Italy, is on loan from the Royal Library of Turin as part of the Year of Italian Culture in the United States.