La guerra di Leonardo. Disegni vinciani di architettura militare

The Code B of Leonardo da Vinci, presents designs related to military, religious and civil architecture. A careful study of the signs allows to build digital models congruent to the representation and thus to unveil the Leonardo's design thinking. The application of a methodology aimed at producing diplomatic and interpretative edition of the papers, appears to be very useful in making the graphic heritage of Leonardo more accessible and to enhance the design and spatial aspects of his architectural thoughts. Some of the most interesting architectural drawings by Leonardo da Vinci are kept in so-called Code B at the Institut de France. They likely date back to the period when Leonardo was at the court of Ludovico il Moro in Milan (1482-1499), most properly to the years between 1487 and 1490 Specific studies on the architectural contributions in Leonardo's papers were addressed especially after the war, by Firpo (1963), Pedretti (1978) and Galluzzi (1987; 1996). Similarly, proportional assumptions and both twodimensional and three-dimensional reconstructions from the architectural drawings in the Codex B have already been attempted both in a systematic way, by authors such as Carpiceci (1978), and Guillaume De Jonge (1988), and occasionally by Frommel (2006) or Di Teodoro (2015), generally with traditional graphical methods. In this work, I used an original methodology for the analysis of Leonardo's papers. This is an integrated process that goes from the careful analysis of the graphical "signs" to assisted drafting and infographic techniques, and whose objective is the production of a diplomatic and interpretative edition of what is present on the sheets. In addition to viewing the original, the first level of decoding and understanding of Leonardo's design is what in philology is called "diplomatic edition". Borrowing the concept from philology, the diplomatic edition of Leonardo's papers allows first, to reveal the graphic textures visible on the sheet: it starts from a rewriting of the texts using a special character akin to that Leonardo, inspired to the Cancellaresca font by Ludovico Vicentino, the mirroring of the texts and a more adequate spacing between words. The text is fully preserved, without making changes to acronyms, initials, or regrets. The next step is the interpretative edition which unlike the critical interpretation, bases strictly on the exclusive contribution of the "witnesses" in the document. Applying this concept to architectural designs resulted in their three-dimensional reconstruction by means of digital solid modeling, in order to obtain the views comparable with the original sketches. The construction of these models involves the formation of a chain of hypotheses that depart from the redrawing of the plan in a geometrically structured and regular shape to attain to the volume evoked by the sketch with as less "exogenous interferences" as possible. Occasionally, the scarcity or ambiguity of the information assumable from the scheme made it necessary to decline the methodology from a purely interpretative edition to an architectural critical edition, taking into account the contribution of "indirect witnesses" firstly in other Leonardo’s drawings related to the design concept in question for chronologic and graphology issues.