Book Reviews Leonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect. Edited by Paolo Galluzzi. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1987. Pp. xv + 352; il lustrations, notes, bibliography. $C49.95. Also available in French. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has produced a sumptuous catalog to accompany its major exhibit, “Feonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect,” reviewed separately in this issue of Technology and Cul ture. The catalog is in the new style; that is, it contains photographs and detailed information on the artifacts and documents on display, but it subordinates such things to its real purpose, serving as a re pository for scholarly essays. Fike the exhibit, the catalog is a bold remodeling of old-fashioned, conventional views about Leonardo da Vinci. In his essay “Leonardo as Urban Planner,” Luigi Firpo strikes a note to which the entire volume resonates when he dismisses most old Leonardo scholarship. Until the early 1960s most of what was written about Leonardo consisted of florid verbiage celebrating the romantic, pictur esque aspects of his work, or conventional eulogies of the man’s universal genius and sublime dilettantism. The bewildering number and complexity of Leonardo documents led to the most arbitrary theories and a wide divergence of opinions concerning his work. . . . As a vehicle for statements setting forth current professional opinion about Leonardo da Vinci and as a convenient source of up-to-date selected bibliographic information, the catalog is worth the price of admission. Libraries in particular should purchase it for these reasons alone. For the scholar, however, it is the rampantly revisionist tone of the studies that makes this an exciting collection of works. The volume is divided into two roughly equal parts, treating Leon ardo as engineer and as architect, respectively. Each part, in turn, is dominated by one long essay flanked by shorter studies. Paolo Galluzzi, editor of the whole, writes the premier essay on Leonardo as engineer. This is the first piece to present a coherent picture of Leonardo’s engineering since Bertrand Gille’s attempt in the 1960s. It is also the first to reevaluate Leonardo’s engineering in light of the Madrid dis coveries edited and published by Ladislao Red and also the first such Permission to reprint a book review in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 663 664 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE attempt to benefit fully from Carlo Pedretti’s 1979 catalog dating the sheets in the newly restored Codex Atlanticus. The themes of the exhibit are, not surprisingly, echoed in Galluzzi’s essay. Leonardo da Vinci was a product of the workshop; he was deeply influenced by Brunelleschi’s engineering of Florence’s path breaking cathedral; and he was at his best as an engineer while at the Milanese court of Lodovico Sforza between 1482 and 1499. Galluzzi also stresses the manner in which Leonardo analyzed machinery into its components, working by analogy with his anatomizing of the hu man body. Leonardo’s machine elements mark an effort at reductionism comparable to his theory of the four paterae of nature: movement, weight, force, and percussion. The most interesting shift of views that Galluzzi puts forth concerns Leonardo in the context of Renaissance engineering: “He appears in fact to have had a back ground, interests, working method, and type ofcareer similar to other Renaissance engineers with whom traditional historiography had dis dainfully contrasted him.” Lest the reader with a long memory conclude that Galluzzi has entered the Gille camp (recall that Gille’s 1964 effort to reorient our view of Leonardo provoked the enmity of Leonardists all over Italy), Galluzzi follows with a quick dismissal of Gille’s “unacceptable con clusion” that “the characteristic aspects of Leonardo’s technology dis appear into the melting pot of technical solutions . . . typical of all Renaissance engineers.” To me, at least, the distance between today’s orthodoxy and yesterday’s damnable heresy is not as great as Galluzzi assumes, but one hopes in saying so not to scandalize the faithful and force them to defend a view of Leonardo’s uniqueness that is indeed no longer tenable in the current state of knowledge. The ancillary essays in this section are not as remarkable as Gal luzzi’s...