ABSTRACT This study focuses on a handdissection report in Leonardo's anatomical investigations, a page whose reception-history is rich with approbation and lacunae. The hermeneutic of suspicion that the author proposes explores this folio as a case for the claim that Leonardo's meandering page-configurations relay more than is revealed in his overt arguments. At issue is a tacit discourse of the palm as the epitome of selfhood, a site of intimacy that undermines the primacy of sight in Leonardo's manifest texts. The palm, a matrixial organ, is thus linked to the economy of lacks, desires and transferences that underlies Vincian art theory.

ABSTRACT Leonardo da Vinci probably did not consider the possibility of realizing images with real movement. Many centuries later, however, the author's father, Luciano Emmer, had the idea of reinterpreting the images of the famous artist and scientist using the technique of cinema.

ABSTRACT Sculptor MarilÈne Oliver and cardiothoracic surgeon Francis Wells collaborated to deconstruct Leonardo da Vinci's drawing The Great Lady in order to reconstruct it as a three-dimensional sculpture. Employing lessons learned from contemporary radiology, they simulated cross sections of The Great Lady that were drawn in pen and ink onto a stack of acrylic sheets. Here Oliver and Wells give independent accounts of the project, not only sharing how their relationship with Leonardo's drawing evolved over the course of the project but also exposing the differences in approach by the scientist and the artist to a science-art project.

ABSTRACT The article reviews scholarship on Leonardo da Vinci during the 20th century. An initial fascination with a handful of paintings has led to a nearly comprehensive understanding of his art. A catalogue raisonnée for Leonardo and his school has yet to be made. Awareness of Leonardo as a scientist began with a vague reputation of a universal genius who never finished anything. Some praised, others sought to limit him as an artist-engineer. The 20th century revealed that Leonardo made substantial contributions in the domains of physics, mechanics, optics, perspective and medicine. Even so, nearly 500 years after his birth, much remains to be done in understanding fully one of the great geniuses of all time.

ABSTRACT The author examines Leonardo da Vinci's lifelong interest in the depiction of blurred, colored shadows from the point of view of painting technique and optics. She analyzes Leonardo's refinement of the oil technique to capture the instability of colored shadows from the early Annunciation of 1472–1473 and examines the artist's theoretical writings on shadows from the 1490s onward. The author shows how Leonardo analyzed the blurred edges of colored shadows with the geometric rigor that earlier authors afforded only to the clear-cut edges of astronomical shadows. She argues that the very kind of shadows that captured Leonardo's attention indicates his underlying pictorial concerns, despite the fact that his instructions often seemed directed toward teaching a way of seeing rather than a way of painting.

ABSTRACT The accurate perception of a painting's image formation depends upon three concepts: the observer's distance to the perspective plane , the aperture of his or her visual field, and the limits of the perspective plane. A comprehension of these concepts is crucial to the calculation of both the painting's image formation and the observer's vantage point. To approach this problem in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper , the author introduces the reverse outlining perspective method, through which it is shown how the painting's image formation can be deduced.

ABSTRACT The traditional scholarly appraisal of Leonardo's Giant Crossbow design dismisses it as a fanciful object, although often with praise of it as a quintessential example of his technical draftsmanship. The author offers evidence of Leonardo's likely intent that the drawing function as a reliable plan with which readers of a treatise on military engineering could consider a strategy, or an imaginative solution (a fantasia ), for building the full-scale giant crossbow. At issue are the agreements between the illustrated dimensions and the written specifications, the proportional consistency of those dimensions and the possible use of Archimedean geometry to determine the primary dimensions.

ABSTRACT Leonardo da Vinci illustrated several traditional forms of “perpetual-motion machine” in small pocket books now known as the Codex Forster . He was well aware that these designs, based on waterwheel/pump combinations, mechanical overbalancing hammers or rolling balls, would not—and could not—work.

ABSTRACT The author has discerned a deep interest in the occult arts at the core of Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises . Such an interest is confirmed by Russolo's admiration for Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo's writings on music and acoustics constituted in fact a scientific and spiritual paradigm for Russolo; the former's mechanical musical-instrument projects were important models for Russolo's own, from 1913's intonarumori to the nuovo istrumento musicale a corde of 1931. Perhaps because of the futurists' ambivalent position toward the figure of Leonardo (proto-futurist or passatista ), Russolo profusely quoted Leonardo but carefully avoided mentioning any borrowing.

ABSTRACT In one of his lesser-known studies of flow, Leonardo da Vinci in 1513 came upon yet another question he could not answer: When blood hits the wall of the heart, does the flow split in two? In 1977, this question was answered by Albert Libchaber in an experiment that became a cornerstone of chaos theory. Can Leonardo's question, Libchaber's solution and notions of integrated systems be drawn together to create a whole? While this trajectory has its limitations, the journey has some rewards, taking in Leonardo's cosmology, chaos theory, poststructuralist philosophy, the Polynesian worldview, the Internet and the weather.