An exhibition in Prato on Leonardo da Vinci's textile processing machines

Prato ’s Museo del Tessuto dedicates an exhibition to Leonardo da Vinci that highlights the artist’s interest, sensitivity and ingenuity in developing and inventing devices and machines for one of the preponderant economic activities of his time, textile art.

The exhibition, scheduled from Dec. 16, 2018 to May 26, 2019, is organized by the Textile Museum Foundation in collaboration with the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan and the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, and is sponsored and supported by the National Committee for the Celebration of the 500th Anniversary of the Death of Leonardo da Vinci. The exhibition, titled Leonardo da Vinci, Ingenuity, Textile, aims to be an effective tool for understanding and popularizing Leonardo’s inventions through 3-D reconstructions, multimedia apparatus and scale models, and also an opportunity to highlight the importance of mechanical engineering applied to the textile industry, an element that firmly links it to the history of the Prato district.

Main sponsor of the initiative is ESTRA, the Tuscan holding company among the top ten industrial groups for energy sales in Italy. The exhibition is also supported by the Region of Tuscany, theAcimit Association and the companies of the Mechanotextile Group of Confindustria Toscana Nord.

The exhibition opens with an initial section featuring large-scale reproductions of some of Leonardo’s paintings. The portraits and religious subjects in the exhibition are read with a new and unusual slant to highlight Leonardo’s studies on drapery and his observations for a better rendering in painting of the texture of fabrics and the movement of folds according to different types of fabric. The paintings also reveal his attention to the decoration of garments emphasized by the famous “knots” that further testify to his “universal” approach to nature. The visitor will also be accompanied in the visit by a sound installation created by Giorgio Ferrero and Rodolfo Mongitore of Minus&Plus, inspired by an imaginary score conceived from Leonardo’s designs of musical instruments. The cyclical nature of the composition is a reminder of motors, repetitions, and circular mechanisms at the vincian knot, while in the concreteness of the dull sound of the woods resonates the raw material behind the inventions. In the second section of the exhibition, a scenographic set-up evokes the cogwheel mechanisms found in Leonardo’s drawings and introduces the theme of his studies on devices and machines. Studies that during his Milan sojourn, in addition to mechanics, engineering and architecture, were devoted to textiles, an industry that in the Lombard area-thanks to the court of the Visconti and then the Sforza-knows a significant development during the 15th century. Representative of this historical moment is the presence in the room of the two famous portraits in the Pinacoteca di Brera, “Portrait of Francesco Sforza” and "Portrait of Bianca Maria Visconti," by an unknown Lombard painter in about 1480.

The sleeve detail in both nobles dialogues with a fabric fragment from the Museo del Tessuto (a red worked velvet with a white background from the late 15th century), an example of the excellence of Italian textile production for court clothing. Also from the collections of the Museo del Tessuto is the extremely rare fragment of a “frappata” robe with a peacock-tail motif, made of gauzed wool cloth embroidered in gold, spun silver and silk to which is applied a spun gold chevron.

In this second section, a system of video projections illustrates the different stages of the wool and silk processing process, in which frescoes, miniatures and paintings come to life illustrating the stages of textile production in the Renaissance.

An immersive multimedia, which flanks Leonardo’s drawings found in the Codex Atlanticus and Codex Madrid I and dynamic 3-D models created by the Museo Leonardiano in Vinci and the Museo del Tessuto through the kind collaboration of Lorenzo Barni of Lido Barni, presents to the public the parts of the wool and silk production process on which Leonardo focused, guiding the viewer on an emotional journey through his genius mind, capable of anticipating the times with an unparalleled engineering vision.
Thanks to historical wood and metal models on loan from the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, visitors will be able to appreciate at their best the devices for twisting and doubling silk yarn equipped with stop mechanisms, a beating hammer for the production of embossing foils, medals, coins and studs that found application in embroidery, a mechanical loom - among the most complex machines he conceived-developed from the manual specimens but equipped with an automatically launched shuttle, a mechanism that would later be revived only in the pre-industrial era. The process of finishing woollen cloth also becomes Leonardo’s object of interest, with designs for gauzing machine and shearing machine visible in the exhibition through models at MUST.

The exhibition thus provides an understanding of how Leonardo’s genius and studies were geared toward optimizing work since a smoother, faster and more perfect process could bring economic benefits consequent to production time and personnel employed.

The exhibition also benefits from the technical sponsorship of Unicoop Florence and Trenitalia. Co-op members and holders of a valid regional rail ticket or season ticket to Prato will be eligible to purchase tickets at a reduced rate for admission to the Museum and the exhibition. For the occasion, the Museo del Tessuto and the Museo Leonardiano di Vinci have entered into an agreement that provides-for the duration of the exhibition-a reciprocity of reductions for admission to the two museums. The exhibition opens from December 16, 2018 to May 26, 2019.
For all information you can visit the official website of the Textile Museum.

An exhibition in Prato on Leonardo da Vinci's textile processing machines

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