It is undeniable that most reports about contemporary fashion only look at the most superficial aspects of the scene, suggesting us which trend we should follow, updating us about a celebrity's loyalty towards a brand or revealing how much money influencers are making posting sponsored pictures on Instagram. Yet there are more important and serious aspects concerning this industry.
Throughout the centuries technology has indeed played a big part in developing innovative techniques that have helped artisans manufacturing fabrics or fashion designers, houses and brands creating their signature styles.
While it is correct to say that some of the biggest breaks were achieved during the industrial revolution, it should be highlighted that, even before then, new technologies and machines were implemented.
"Leonardo Da Vinci, Ingenuity and Textile", an exhibition that opened yesterday (until 26th May 2019) at the Textile Museum, Prato, Italy, looks for example at the devices and machinery designed by Leonardo da Vinci to develop textiles.
Organised by the Prato Textile Museum in collaboration with the Leonardo Da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan and the Museo Leonardiano in Vinci, the event anticipates the celebrations in honour of the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), while allowing to visitors to learn more about mechanical engineering and its application in the textile industry.
The exhibition itinerary opens with a section featuring large-scale reproductions of selected paintings by Leonardo interpreted through a new perspective that focuses on the Italian polymath's drapery studies.
The latter were aimed at achieving a better result when painting the consistency of cloth and the movement of folds in relation to different types of fabric. By studying the paintings it is easy to see that the artist showed a special attention for decorative motifs in the garments.
Among the paintings examined in the exhibition there are Leonardo's "La Bella Principessa" (The Beautiful Princess), and "La Belle Ferronniere", but also Portraits of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Sforza (some critics attribute them to Bembo, others consider the portraits to be the work of an unknown Lombard artist), impressive portraits depicting the duke and his wife in profile and dressed in luxurious garments.
Selected details in these paintings, such as the fabric of the sleeves, are juxtaposed to fragments of precious textiles from the collection of the Prato Museum.
Quite a few of these samples - from luxurious damasked red velvets to a section of "veste frappata", that is a densely decorated robe covered in gold and silver embroideries and replicating the tail of a peacock, represent the excellent products manufactured by Italian textile artisans in the 15th century in towns such as Lucca, Florence, Siena, Arezzo, Pisa and Prato.
One multimedia experience, based on miniatures, paintings, drawings, treatises and manuscripts of the period, illustrates the wool and silk production process in the Renaissance.
Another multimedia installation looks at the wool and silk production process on which Leonardo focused, accompanied by Da Vinci's drawings from the Codex Atlanticus and Codex Madrid I, the 3D models created by the Museo Leonardiano in Vinci and the historical wooden and metal models, on loan from the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, showing how Leonardo's projects were studied by different engineers and technicians in the 1900s.
The models help visitors understanding how different phases were carried out and include machines for twisting and plying the silk yarn, a gold-beater employed to create coins, medals and grommets to decorate embroideries, and a mechanical loom, one of the most complex machines invented by Leonardo.
The loom was based on manual machines observed in Tuscany and in Lombardy, but it was equipped with an automatic flying shuttle, a mechanism that was only re-visited during the pre-industrial age.
The machine was arranged on two levels - the upper part featuring the actual weaving devices and the lower the organs for unrolling the warp and wrapping the fabric.
The work was to be performed by a single operator who turned the crank and checked that the shuttle proceeded properly, that the fabric was under the proper tension, and that threads were not breaking. Leonardo presented an ingenious solution to the problem of unrolling the warp and wrapping the finished fabric, maintaining the necessary tautness on the threads and the cloth.
There are further projects by Leonardo included in the exhibition dedicated to devices designed to refine wool cloth, such as brushing and shearing machines: all of them prove that Leonardo was familiar with the tools and the machines employed by textile manufacturers and the different stages of spinning and weaving.
The proof of Leonardo's interest in creating innovative projects for technically advanced machines that would have improved the working conditions making the slowest stages of the production faster (Corporations didn't like some of his solutions as they meant the role and power of the Corporations had to be rethought and the workers would have had to be retrained) and of his passion for the different phases of textile manufacturing can be found in the Codex Atlanticus, in which he describes the textile industry as "second to the printing of letters and just as useful. It is worked by men, gives larger profits and it is a beautiful and clever invention".
The exhibition is therefore a way to look at Da Vinci's studies and understand how they represent the foundation of modern automation in the textile industry and it is ideal for young students as it allows to understand better Da Vinci's inventions through 3D reconstructions, multimedia systems and scale models.
Last but not least, "Leonardo Da Vinci - Ingenuity and Textile" is a tribute to the local textile industry: a florid textile district offering high quality products made following the highest craftsmanship standards and with the most advanced technologies, Prato has radically changed throughout the last three decades. Its production is currently focused on manufacturing low cost fashion and there are 35,000 people working in textile industry in Prato and around 6,500 factories in its territory.
Image credits for this post
1 - 3. "Leonardo Da Vinci, Ingenuity and Textile", The Textile Museum, Prato, Italy
4. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
La Bella Principessa (The Beautiful Princess), 1496 ca.
© 2018. Foto Scala Firenze/Heritage Images
5. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
La Belle Ferronniere, 1490-1495 ca.
© 2018. Foto Scala, Firenze
6 - 8. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Codice di Madrid I
Sheet 68, 67 and 65
© National Library of Spain, Madrid
9 - 11. Fragments of textiles, 15th century, Textile Museum of Prato
12 - 13. Portraits of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Sforza, 1480 ca., Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
14. Model of a machine to ply silk, Guido Gallese, 1939, Museo Nazionale Scienza Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan. © Alessandro Nassiri
15. Model of brushing machine, Giovanni Strobino, 1953, Museo Nazionale Scienza Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan. © Alessandro Nassiri
16. Model of gold-beater machine, Alessandro Siriati, 1953, Museo Nazionale Scienza Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan. © Alessandro Nassiri
17. Model of Mechanical Loom, Luigi Baldetti, 1953. Museo Nazionale Scienza Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan. © Alessandro Nassiri
18 and 19. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Atlantic Code, Sheet 985 and 106
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