The Trip To Da Vinci's Past

The roaring of the buses at the school porch rang in the ears of students as eager voices emanated the coming of the school learning journey to the ArtScience Museum for Leonardo Da Vinci’s museum tour.

We trotted towards the echoing halls of the quiet and majestic in a ‘shopping mall’ towards a small room in the museum where classes 1 Commitment and 1 Respect had a warm welcome from the instructors for our journey. After a small set of museum rules and etiquette behavior were told to us, 1 Commitment was to head for the workshop first while 1 Respect got to do the tour.

In the workshop, teams were to build a catapult using the given items-straws, chopsticks, strong tape, straws, spoons and corks. My team had a lot of setbacks and difficulties but we finally managed to build ours. The other entries were decorated beautifully with the markers given and I thought theirs was going to win. The winner, who was the team next to me, won with their simple structure and managed to get the cork flying to the wall. Nevertheless, all of us had fun.

We then had to wait our turn for the tour. We went over to the room adjacent to the workshop room and started to build “structures” and listened to audios until our turn arrived.

As the class was split by our register numbers, I was in the first 20 people to go first. We were guided by a kind and petite lady to the tour. Upon entering the museum, we were mesmerized by the large screen in an abnormally dark room featuring Leonardo Da Vinci’s quotes. Then we were led through a series of genius artworks and creations of Da Vinci.

First our eyes grazed the timeline on the rounded wall, learning the biography of Da Vinci’s life, next we tried out and learned how Leonardo tried to find if the area (or length) of the square is the same as of the circle by drawing a long list of patterns which ended up as decorations of many buildings.

Trial after trial, room after room, we learned how the genius Leonardo tried to invent the parachute and glider, though he failed miserably. We learnt that he was a musician who created the first automated drum, which could play on its own and how he created an emergency plan in case of intruders in the castle for the Duke. The list goes on.

The museum had managed to show 13 real pages from the notes of Da Vinci, each showing the delicate ideas of his ingenious creations and thoughts. 1119 notes were found and put together a notebook kept in the Codex; notes include the drum, waterwheel and other ingenious ideas.

Some facts about Da Vinci was that he was a procrastinator, he had took 10 years to finish the painting of Mona Lisa. Also, The Last Supper is thought to lead peoples’ attention towards the middle of the painting where Jesus was having his last supper as he predicted that the next day he would die because of a betrayer, leading other guests of the last supper to gasp and not believe who would do such a thing. It was also thought that the betrayer was Judas, who, to me, was the only calm one in the Last Supper.

Due to limited time, we could not view the other displays, thus we bid a sad farewell to the guide and headed back to school.

Photographs and information by Jun An and Michelle from 1 Commitment

Extra information is from the museum and internet extracts.