in History, Technology | November 6th, 2025 1 Comment
To imagine ourselves into the time of Leonardo da Vinci, we must first imagine a world without such things as helicopters, parachutes, tanks, diving suits, robots. Yet those all existed for Leonardo himself — or rather, they existed in his imagination. What he didn’t build in real life, he documented in his notebooks, leaving behind material for appreciations of his genius that would continue half a millennium later. One such appreciation appears above in a new video from Lost in Time, which renders his inventions using the kind of 3D animation technology even the paradigmatic Renaissance man couldn’t have begun to foresee.
This helps us see Leonardo’s work from the perspective of his contemporaries, and to feel how surprised they would’ve been to encounter a seated knight who stands up, opens his visor, and reveals that there’s no one inside the armor. That sort of thing might even amuse us here in the twenty-first century, but accustomed as we are to seeing machines that move around under their own power — and now, seeing them take more credible humanoid form every day — we wouldn’t be inclined to credit it with any kind of life force.
