Eli Whitney Museum

The arc of a raindrop on a leaf magnifies its veins and our understanding of seeing.

Egyptian artisans mimicked the curve of eyes in glass to give their statues uncanny spirit. Assyrians in Nimrud may have used a rock crystal to concentrate the sun’s rays into a spot of fire. In the Middle Ages, the polymath Abas ibn Firnas crafted reading stones of glass. Refined lenses awakened the sciences, explorations and arts of the Renaissance.

Just Blown Away

Propagation

Molly Gambardella's dandelion captures the spirit of the 23rd Leonardo Challenge completely. It's cluster of delicate seeds wants to be loosed to launch new growth. Yours is the breath that will give them flight.
Thank you.

Not long ago travelers consulted paper maps distributed by service stations gratuitously, but difficult to refold. Today watches, phones and cars themselves provide directions, sometimes with animated updates and commentary voiced in dulcet but skeptical tones. A decade has transformed the ancient arts of cartography radically. Early maps recorded star patterns that marked changing seasons. Now the celestial robots of GPS guide us to lost car keys. Early maps defined the boundaries of unknown territories. Now we wonder if there is any space unmapped. We need a map to track the changing meanings of all these maps.

Consider the Lady with an Ermine, Leonardo's stunning portrait of Cecelia, the mistress of Ludovice Sforza, the Duke of Milan and Leonardo's patron. The painting brims with movement, with immediacy, and with bold brushwork. Leonardo paints in the new medium of oils.

Numbers
In the late middle ages, a new arithmetic followed the spice trade from India to Italy on Arab ships. It brought place value, simplified calculation, and the digits we recognize as our own. These were the type of numbers Gutenberg needed for his press. These are the numbers that Leonardo learned in his apprenticeship with Verrocchio.

The Mirror
Our earliest ancestor recognized a face reflected in a pool of still water: there began the evolution of our idea of self. Ancient cultures captured reflections in stone, iron, coal, copper, silver, and glass. In mirrors, priests and magicians saw prophecies and vessels of the soul. Mirrors educated artists and scientists. As a child, you noticed your mother's furtive glance at her face in a compact's tiny glass. You suspected this attention was not for you.

Each of us can remember the first ruler that we carried to school: in the beginning useful for drawing lines, hinting at important reckoning yet to come. You may recall improvising applications for that ruler that were neither straight nor measured. A paradox of creativity: sometimes invention requires a broken rule.

The Challenge: Find a key. Twist the key or its meaning. Insert or duplicate or cut or connect or color or conceal keys. Assemble new forms. Unlock new meanings. Let the keys start something.

Leonardo and the printing press were born in the same year. The first transformation of that revolutionary communications technology was, of course, games. Playing cards, made uniform and inexpensive by Gutenberg's press, spoke a universal, popular language.

Just as the printing press spread reading across Renaissance Europe,the pencil spread writing. Wood or metal or paper supported a carbon and clay stylus ever ready to mark, cipher, or draw.

Tools extend the powers of the hand. Tools expand the world to be touched. The spoon was, at first, literally, a splint of wood improvised to collect for sipping the broth of boiled beast. Which came first: the soup (a word also derived from the sound of sipping) or the spoon?

Use buttons and laces to construct or adorn. or adorn and construct buttons and laces. Transform, transcribe, transfigure, transpose. Unbutton your imagination. Lace your work with wit, wisdom or wonder.

Nature turns wheels with muscle, wind and water in dutiful simplicity. Leonardo's mind reconstructs that movement. He collects and contrives twists and turns to compose an infinite choreography: sometimes a dull march, sometimes a graceful waltz, sometimes a jazzy jitterbug.

Draughts are an ancient diversion. Pharaohs played. Like games evolved in China, India, Turkey and Africa. A book on checkers was printed when books were first printed in Leonardo’s epoch.

Leonardo sees through surface. He sees the channels, conduits, and capillaries that structure and animate the flower, the insect, the city the body, the earth. Leonardo sees a universal web of connections.

We asked artists to consider a box of wooden kitchen matches. These are at first the simplest and fullest expression of mass production convenience and uniformity. And yet they can ignite the imagination. These anonymous forms offer an infinitely variable armature for the creative mind.

Consider the spool and the cigar box. They are familiar and natural building blocks which give form to the first creations of children. They offer the experienced designer a universal geometry to explore.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks define the products and processes of design. Leonardo explores his world with the eyes of a Scientist; he reinvents it with the hands of an Artist. He directs students in architecture and landscape design, in fashion and theatrical design, in product design and graphic design: all of the creative expressions that surround humankind.