The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2011

Leonardo’s Lost Robot

To know the body from the inside out, the wrap of layered muscle, ligament, tendon strung like cords. To know their feel and elasticity, their weight. To diagram each joint from any angle, a mastery of mechanics. Drawings—superior to words—make incarnate a vision engendered in the soul’s eye. How like a system of cables and counterweights! Sketched by daylight, by candlelight, the shadows fall this way then that, suggest the movement that could be. Each midnight interview with a cadaver yields insight. Each cadaver lends life to the page. The arm is a machine, levers rotating on fulcrums, kinesiology rendered as art. Spread across pages of notebooks, collected in codices, the idea of man mechanical emerges, a beautiful thing. Oh, to escape the woeful technologies of the day, all his art and ardor shaping each hinged piece. A knight errant to do a genius’ bidding, to sit, to rise, articulated knees and elbows, sinew adapted to iron. To wave, bow, to move the jaw as if to speak.

Sally Ashton