Análisis de la documentación técnica de los diseños y proyectos de Leonardo da Vinci

Abstract

Leonardo da Vinci improved and fully completed the drawings and sketches of the designs of the Italian engineers who were contemporaries or who preceded him. Thus, he improved the machine designs of Paolo Santini and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, or those of the hydraulic devices of Mariano di Iacopo. He also complemented and exceeded Brunelleschi's crane designs for his Arno River detour project, arriving to elaborate specifications and documents with similar characteristics to the current ones. As an example, in his project of the Sforza’s Great Horse, he develops the memory, the general and detailed plans, the legends incorporated into the plans, etc., and in his project of the Mausoleum for Marshal Trivulcio he incorporates a budget with detailed prices by items, almost equivalent to those made today. The article aims to demonstrate the document superiority of Leonardo's designs in front of his contemporaries, showing that the documentation elaborated by him for some of his technical designs allow us to qualify him as a precursor of the modern technical documentation.