Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Bringing Life to Machines Centuries Ahead of Their Time

Da Vinci’s machines were so uncanny it feels as though he glimpsed the future and left behind sketches of what he saw.

Tom Rizzo with Leonardo da Vinci's "tank" constructed by the Museum of Leonardo da Vinci in Florence from the polymath's instructions and drawings, created hundreds of years before the first actual tank. Courtesy of Tom Rizzo, Artisans of Florence

Imagine reading backwards in a forgotten dialect, piecing together Renaissance-era instructions, and then breathing life into machines first dreamed up 500 years ago.

That’s the work of three generations of Italian artisans who not only learned to read da Vinci’s “mirror” writing, but are now sharing his visions globally.