What pushed Leonardo to be the multidisciplinary artist and engineer he was? Amidst dozens of artefacts, an exhibition at Gare du Sud in Nice seeks to explore the Italian genius’ mind.
After several short-lived novelty concepts that never quite took off, Nice’s Gare du Sud now seems to have found its raison d’être as a cultural forum. Through June 5, the newly minted Halle de la Découverte celebrates its inauguration with “Leonardo da Vinci: At the Crossroads of Arts and Sciences”, an immersive journey into the world of the 15th century visionary through giant scale models, 3D videos and reproductions of his paintings and drawings.
Painter, engineer, architect or botanist, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) stands at the intersection of arts and technology through the diversity and multidisciplinary nature of his entire body of work. His paintings and his many notebooks, known as codices, have left us an intellectual and cultural legacy that continues to fascinate us to this day and is at the root of more modern technology than one might suspect.
Before stepping into the da Vinci universe, however, it is important to understand why his genius could flourish the way it did. He came of age in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florence – Renaissance Europe’s intellectual powerhouse – and trained in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, the era’s most sought-after artist and craftsman, who counted painting, sculpture, goldsmithing and engineering among his skills. It was precisely that multidisciplinary environment that shaped Leonardo’s own refusal to recognise boundaries between disciplines.
Around 1482 he moved to Milan, entering the service of Ludovico Sforza, and it was there, amid plague and political rivalry, that his most ambitious ideas took shape. Renaissance Italy was not a unified nation but a patchwork of competing city-states, each ruled by a prince eager to outshine his neighbours through art, architecture and innovation. Without this intellectual jousting, there would not have been a da Vinci, a Michelangelo, or a Raffaelo… all the ultimate products, and beneficiaries, of that environment.
Courtesy Ville de Nice
The exhibition sets out to show Leonardo da Vinci in all these dimensions. Through a parcours structured around the topics of engineering, aeronautics, urban planning, anatomy and painting, the visitor gets insight into his many talents and his enduring preoccupation with understanding and representing the world around him as faithfully as possible.
Leonardo and Engineering
Pulleys, gears, screws… Leonardo da Vinci drew these elements from every angle until he had a complete understanding of how they worked. Moving from the study and observation of one field to another, he applied a cross-fertilisation of techniques across all the disciplines he engaged with, including civil engineering, military engineering and architecture. His inventions, such as flying machines, the armoured tank, the rotating bridge, and more, baffled and amazed his contemporaries and laid the foundation of many a modern feat of engineering.
All of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions were inspired by his observation of nature and the results of his experiments. He became the founder, during the Renaissance, of the experimental sciences: “Observe, experiment, and understand.”
Leonardo and Aeronautics
A flying wing, an aerial screw, or an ornithopter… His most daring dream was to make human beings fly. Of all the technical subjects Leonardo da Vinci explored, aeronautical studies were his favourite field. He devoted himself to it with consistency and perseverance for 33 years. In this area, his studies, observations and research rank among the most visionary ever produced.
In 1505, he compiled his knowledge in a landmark work, the Codex on the Flight of Birds, comprising 160 pages and more than 500 sketches. Leonardo imagined, for example, flying machines that replicated the flight of birds, which he called “ornithopters,” their wings powered solely by the mechanical force of the arms and legs.
Leonardo would sadly never know that his dream of humans rising into the air in a machine would become a routine part of life only a few centuries later, and the precursor of bio-inspiration, biomimicry and biomechanics… some of the most innovative fields in contemporary scientific research.
Leonardo and Urban Planning
Leonardo da Vinci completed his apprenticeship in Florence at Verrocchio’s prestigious polytechnic workshop, in an Italy that was already prosperous but politically divided. Driven by the scientific and technical momentum of the Renaissance, and through enormous building projects, each prince sought to construct and beautify his city. Leonardo drew up a plan for a functional city in which the town and its buildings were conceived as a living organism.
Concerned about the sanitary conditions of cities at a time when plague was striking Milan from 1484 to 1490, Leonardo da Vinci envisioned a clean and functional city, clearly separating the movement of people, goods and waste across three distinct levels. It became necessary to rebuild cities by rationalising their functions and circulation flows.
For Leonardo da Vinci, practical and social separation combined with sanitary and hygienist principles were the hallmarks of the ideal new city, and once again, he became a trailblazer for procedures that would become the benchmark centuries later.
Leonardo and Anatomy
His work as an anatomist is inseparable from his work as a painter. His studies nourish his greatest masterpieces and are a tribute to inner beauty. Compared with contemporary medical imaging, Leonardo’s work allows us to appreciate the full scope of his contribution to science, revealing a body of work of astonishing relevance and modernity. He sought to understand the very nature of life in order to attain complete and ultimate knowledge.
A self-taught man who never received a university education, Leonardo developed his own scientific method through direct, unflinching observation. He spent nights in hospital morgues, personally dissecting over 30 corpses of humans and animals by candlelight, defying both religious and legal restrictions on access to bodies. In doing so he essentially invented modern anatomical illustration, developing multi-angle, cutaway drawing techniques that medical science still uses today.
Leonardo and Painting
Leonardo did not paint prolifically – scholars have attributed no more than 20 paintings to him. The exhibition features 18 reproductions, among them the iconic Mona Lisa.
Perspective, the technique of sfumato, and the application of his anatomical knowledge combine to make his paintings true masterpieces of the Renaissance. The signature hazy, smoke-like blurring of outlines and transitions known as sfumato was Leonardo’s own invention, and it fundamentally changed how painters depicted light, shadow and human expression.
The anatomical connection to his painting is direct and specific: his obsessive study of musculature, bone structure and the mechanics of facial expression gave his human figures a physical credibility that contemporaries could not match. As for the Mona Lisa, the androgynous quality of her features has long fascinated researchers. Some facial recognition studies have suggested a structural resemblance to a known self-portrait of Leonardo, raising the possibility that the world’s most famous face is partly his own.
Is it ever possible to capture a genius of the magnitude of Leonardo’s in an exhibition? Does it take a museum dedicated to him or will a snapshot like this one do? Questions that only the visitor can answer for themselves. In any case, Nice made a valiant effort to resuscitate the premises around a show that serves well as an initiation to Leonardo da Vinci. As the maestro himself said, “There is no higher or lower knowledge, but one only, flowing out of experimentation.”
VISITOR INFORMATION
Léonard de Vinci, à la croisée des Arts et des Sciences
Exhibition runs until 5th June, 2026
Halle de la Découverte (Gare du Sud) | Free admission
Monday through Friday 10 am to 7 pm | Weekends 10 am to 6 pm
VENUE DETAILS
Gare du Sud
Halle de la Découverte
35, Avenue Malausséna
06000 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 97 13 54 29
PHOTO CREDITS
- All photos including lead image © RIVIERA BUZZ, all rights reserved
- All other images as credited
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