Leonardo da Vinci’s Inventive Arsenal

Artistic prowess allowed Leonardo da Vinci to dream up curious weapon designs in his journals. But what became of these innovations?

 

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For many of us, Leonardo da Vinci’s fame stems from masterpieces like the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, though he was as much a scientist as he was an artist. His artistic prowess allowed him to tinker and invent without actual materials such that half of his portfolio included diagrams for curious devices, from flying machines to artillery.

 

Paintings were among Leonardo’s first professional gigs when he was a teenager, but he quickly graduated to other opportunities. In his youth, he read many scholarly texts that would allow for his prodigious career as an inventor.  

 

In 1482, Leonardo began to complete projects for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Though Sforza busied him with artistic projects, Leonardo would also design machinery, weapons, and buildings for Milan. The duke would be among Leonardo’s most generous patrons, providing 17 years of support. 

 

During the 15th century, Milan was often involved in violent competition with neighboring city-states like Florence and Venice. These conflicts, along with the arrival of gunpowder from the East, provided Leonardo with plenty of opportunities to design weapons. But what weapons did he actually propose?

 

Modern craftsmen bring inventions of the past into the present in this entertaining MagellanTV series.

 

Basic Improvements Were Cheapest Solutions

Among Leonardo’s most basic inventions were improvements to pre-existing weapons. For example, he proposed a giant crossbow with which to launch an explosive projectile. The 86-foot wide behemoth would function identically to a regular crossbow, but the rear half of the projectile would push into the front half to trigger an explosion upon impact.

 

In addition to devastating crossbows, Leonardo worked on improved designs for catapults and other common weapons. His catapult was such a marvel of engineering as to throw projectiles further and harder than any other viable design of the time. 

 

But Sforza and Leonardo primarily valued improvements upon existing weapons for the sake of frugality. Only more firepower would win wars with other city-states, and that firepower came with a cost.

 

Gunpowder Provided the Biggest Bang

Arriving from China, the earliest guns were definitely deadly, but they were also slow to operate. Leonardo’s main task was to hasten the process of loading, firing, or both. For example, he proposed a mortar that could fire a bunch of small explosives, allowing a single shot to destroy multiple targets and reducing the need for reloads.

 

Leonardo also pitched a design for a tank to make devastating guns more mobile. As efficient a killing machine as this rolling dome of wood could have been, it would have required at least eight soldiers to operate.

 

A model of Leonardo’s tank in Hungary (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Among Leonardo’s most curious projectile weapons was a cannon-shotgun hybrid. The device might have shared the frame as well as the wheels of a typical cannon, but ten small barrels would have replaced the thick, single barrel. Furthermore, its three racks of barrels would have allowed soldiers to fire and reload simultaneously.

Were the Weapons Ever Made?

The vast majority of Leonardo’s diagrams never saw the light of day. As the original “Renaissance Man,” he wanted a little bit of everything in his life, so completing projects was unusually difficult for him. A paycheck would often be the difference between a finished project and an abandoned one.

 

Throughout his entire life, Leonardo worked on weapons, among other projects. for several patrons of distinction, including Cesare Borgia, Giuliano de Medici, and King Francis I of France. Even after developing paralysis in his right hand, Leonardo would refuse to halt his studious pursuits until his death in 1519 (he was left-handed anyway).

 

Whether Leonardo was pondering a glider or a machine gun, only a handful of his curious gadgets even became prototypes. But as stories like The Da Vinci Code and Assassin’s Creed suggest, his inventions provide endless fuel for the imagination!

 

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Title Image: Model of the Leonardo da Vinci machine gun in Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise, France (Credit: Elliott Brown, via Wikimedia Commons)