Humlab Talk: The musical world of Leonardo da Vinci

Technology and Performance during the Renaissance  The musical world of Leonardo da Vinci

Plinio Innocenzi, University of Sassari, Italy

One of Leonardo's main activities, perhaps less well-known but very important, was as a musician and designer of musical instruments. Among Leonardo's many interests, music played anything but a secondary role; in fact, he was famous for his skills as a performer and an excellent player of the lyre da braccio with an extraordinary ability to improvise. His interest in music was broader than performance, however. He developed a deep interest in the mechanics of musical instruments and, thus, in how he could innovate in this area as well. His skills as a design engineer and deep knowledge of mechanics and human anatomy represented an excellent background for Leonardo to imagine a new musical world, with sounds closer to those of the human voice and more complex and advanced instruments. Leonardo perfectly represents the multifaceted Renaissance artist, scientist, painter and extraordinary entertainer at the centre of life at the Italian courts. It was an extraordinary moment in time, when the various branches of knowledge came together in a perfect synthesis of science, creativity, and entertainment.

The conference will be a short journey to rediscover the Renaissance world, through the figure of Leonardo da Vinci and the court of Milan where an extraordinary encounter of art, music and technology took place.

Bio

Plinio Innocenzi is a full professor of Materials Science at the University of Sassari, where he is director of the Materials Science and Nanotechnology Laboratory. He holds a doctor degree in physics from the University of Padua and was a research associate at Kyoto University in Japan from 1992 to 1996. He has been a visiting professor at Sorbonne University in Paris, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Osaka Prefectural University, and distinguished visiting professor at the United Arab Emirates University. He has served from 2010 to 2018 as a Science and Technology Councellor at the Embassy of Italy in Beijing. He has published over 250 scientific papers, and is in the Stanford list of top 2% most influential scientists. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the International Sol-Gel Society and Member of the European Academy of Sciences. He is very active in popularizing of science and has published several books for a general readership, in particular on the science and technology in the Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci as engineer.