Leonardo da Vinci’s Pendular Mill: Towards a Physical Model for Museum’s Exhibits

Physical or virtual models of ancient machines often play a key role in museum’s exhibits, as well as in cinematographic works somehow focused in technological heritage. To obtain such models, complex design activities are required, characterized by strict co-operations among different stakeholders (i.e. designers, historians, artisans, museum staff, etc.). In recent publications, the systematic design methods originally conceived for industrial purposes, have been considered as valid supports also for the reconstruction of ancient machines. In this paper, a specific systematic design procedure is applied to support the fuzzy front-end of the process, concerning the reconstruction of a machine devised by Leonardo da Vinci. The machine is the Pendular Mill, which is characterized by important criticalities such as the enormous size, the complexity of the mechanism, and the missing information about key details. The result obtained in this paper points out a set of different possibilities for the design of physical models for a museum’s exhibit, highlighting the issues to be faced for each hypothesized direction. The obtained information constitutes the underpinning for the next planning and design activities of a brand new model of the machine.