Art: Great Creator

In Milan, Italy last fortnight opened a prodigious show. Its subject: one of the most prodigious men who ever lived—Leonardo da Vinci. His paintings and drawings were not the half of what filled 25 rooms in Milan's Palace of Art. To Italians the show was meant to proclaim "the bond that exists between this great creator and the realizations of Mussolinian and Imperial Italy." Accordingly, 22 commissions of Italian experts had scrabbled for a year among the notebooks and sketches in which Leonardo recorded his observations and speculations in the fields of engineering, mathematics, physics, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, whatever.

Constructed from Leonardo's...