Here is an excerpt from an especially interesting article written by Richard Whiddington that is featured at the ArtNet website (August 19, 2025).

To read the complete article, please click here.

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An exhibition at the French château where Leonardo spent his final years looks at the many inventions the polymath drew from nature.

Nature can be an instructive guide for overcoming technological barriers. In 1969, the American engineer Otto Schmitt coined a term to describe the practice of science pulling from nature’s source code, biomimetics. The word might have been new with Schmitt creating an electrical circuit based on the neural systems of squids, but the inclination was centuries old. One early proponent was Leonardo da Vinci, whose own approach to biomimetics abound in the polymath’s notebooks.

Human flight was a particular fascination. From the 1480s to the 1490s, Leonardo turned to birds for inspiration, hoping to circumvent the limitations of human strength by understanding wings and their flaps. Alas, the weight of the mechanical devices Leonardo conjured up proved too cumbersome and so he turned from flapping to gliding wings. The flying devices were called ornithopters and are best illustrated in the Codex Atlanticus through a group of red chalk and ink drawings that detail wing joints and the system of straps necessary to tie man and machine together.

Ultimately, human flight took another shape with the advent of first propeller and later jet engines, but the team at Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, central France, has brought Leonardo’s flying machine to life in a device made of wood, rope, and canvas. It hangs above visitors as the dramatic culmination of “Biomimicry: Taking Inspiration from Nature,” an exhibition that draws a line from Leonardo to contemporary engineers and shows the instructive genius of nature. The 500-year-old drawing itself sits in a low-lit niche beneath the ornithopter.

Amboise is where Leonardo spent the final three years of his life. Shortly after ascending to the throne in 1515, Francis I invited Leonardo to France to serve as the king’s leading painter, engineer, and architect. Enticed by a generous pension and the promise of creative freedom, Leonardo accepted and settled in the 15th-century château, which was a short walk from the king’s own Château d’Amboise. Ever since opening to the public in the 1950s, Clos Lucé has celebrated this connection and in recent years has held exhibitions on Leonardo’s relationship with perfumes, anatomy, architecture, and unfinished paintings.

As the myth of Icarus shows, Leonardo did not invent biomimetic and in the centuries long gap before the practice was granted a name, nature proved recurrent a font for human creation. In the 16th century, German armor adopted metal plates taken from rhinoceros hides and British shipbuilders designed hulls that took on the shape of fish.

With the Industrial Revolution and the development of wrought-iron and steel, analyzing bone structures helped engineers optimize load-bearing. The cantilever bridge, for one, looked to the spine of a bison. Using photography to study the movements of birds frame-by-frame brought the likes of Otto Lilienthal and Clément Ader ever closer to cracking the secrets of flight.

The modern world teems with examples. Velcro drew from burdock seeds, Japan’s bullet trains looked to kingfishers, airplanes adopt the properties of shark skin, and robotics companies use animal anatomy as a starting point.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Richard Whiddington is a freelance writer based in New York City.