Leonardo, Five Hundred Years into the Future: Part One

Leonardo: 500 Years Into the Future "represents the remarkable achievements of fifteenth century artist-engineers - Filippo Brunelleschi, The Sienese Engineers, and Leonardo da Vinci - and exemplifies the pivotal unity of art, technology and science.
This exhibition brings together over 200 artifacts, including drawings, sculptures and life-size models of the art, architectural projects, machines and mechanisms crafted from the original notebooks of the Renaissance artist-engineers. Didactic tools, including multi-media stations with interactive functions, put the machines and achievements of Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance artist-engineers into modern day context. "

San Jose Tech Museum website

In my welcoming in the beginnings of 2009 I went to pay a visit to the incrediable time of the Renaissance. It just so happened that I was visiting with family in the San Jose area for the Holidays. I found that one of the most intriquing person was also visiting, Leonardo da Vinci! I managed an entire day taking in the wonders displayed at the San Jose Tech Museum.

I spent over four hours experiencing the mind and inventions, animated sculptures, paintings, drawings and notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci. To stand before ten of his personal journals, filled with theories , thoughts and sketches of his incredible mind, gave me "chicken skin" up and down my back and arms. I could almost feel his thoughts as I concentrated on the tiny drawings and writings. Leonardo's thoughts on the movement of water or what causes wind to move and birds to fly.

It was written that Leonardo's journals "often appear incoherent and of no logical order". I saw them as a flow of his ingenious mind. How his thoughts could fragment and then take form again in a perfection of order with all that he visioned and designed.

Leonardo da Vinci included comprehensibly art, technology and science, not separate from one another, but as a whole. His imagination and ideas have and continue to inspire generations of scientists, artists and inventors.