Abu Dhabi: Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development, inaugurated an exhibition featuring 40 of Leonardo Da Vinci’s inventions in full scale, at the Emirates Palace hotel.
Giorgio Starace, Italian ambassador to the UAE, told Gulf News, that all the displayed pieces are reproductions of original creations of Da Vinci, a 16th century renaissance man on many disciplines including art, engineering and medicine.
One of Da Vinci’s creations, for example, imagined a workable flying machine five centuries before the Wright Brother’s historic flights in the early 1900s.
“The expo focuses on Da Vinci’s contribution to technology and it shows the geniality of this world’s famous man who was not just a painter and sculptor but also an inventor,” commented Starace.
The expo, which is held in collaboration with Genius Srl owned by Augusto Biagi, is grouped into four sections: air, water, earth and fire.
“A further section is dedicated to the mechanical elements, which acts as the true interactive part of the exhibition, allowing visitors to literally animate the machines, putting them in motion, thus understanding the underlying principles of physics and mechanics which Da Vinci discovered and applied at his times,” said Starace.
The exhibition has already been touring Austria, Germany, Turkey with more than 8,000 visitors visiting the displays per month.
“The expo will be open for visitors until July 5 and schools and universities are more than welcome to tour the exhibition,” remarked the ambassador.
“The machines were built by a number of experts and skilled artisans from Florence in Italy.”
“The inventions and designs are lucrative and attractive to students at schools and universities to imitate and take as a model for creativity and innovation,” concluded Biagi.
