Showing Many Sides Of Leonardo Da Vinci

----------------------------------------------------------------- Leonardo in Boston

"Leonardo da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor, Artist" is at the Boston Museum of Science daily through Sept. 1. Tickets ($10 for adults and $8 for children), which are sold ahead of time for times, are available by calling 617-523-1441 from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. For information on Boston hotels offering tickets with rooms, call 888-SEE-Boston. -----------------------------------------------------------------

BOSTON - Leonardo da Vinci was the quintessential Renaissance man, a masterful artist, a ground-breaking scientist, an inventor whose radical ideas were centuries ahead of their time.

He was also a mass of contradictions. A pacificist who described war as "bestial madness," he nevertheless spent much of his life designing diabolical war machines for various Italian princes. (One was a contraption, never actually built, in which long scythes would have whirled around a big center gear, dismembering anyone who came near.) Leonardo was a vegetarian who loved animals but dissected human cadavers to study anatomy.

He also was handsome, charming and tall, a musician with enough talent that Lorenzo de Medici once sent Leonardo to sing and play the lute for the Duke of Milan.

An ambitious smorgasbord of a show at the Boston Museum of Science, "Leonardo da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor, Artist," attempts to show the many sides of the 15th-century Italian. Though the show at times becomes disorganized and is too loosely curated in the sections on Leonardo's artwork, it nevertheless offers some insights into one of history's greatest geniuses.

There are models of many of his cunning clocks, flying machines and other inventions; there are reproductions of his amazingly accurate anatomical and botanical drawings; there are paintings attributed to his students and disciples, (many are controversial among art historians); there are copies of his "notebooks," the information-crammed journals he used for everything from shopping lists to scientific observations.

One thing the show does not have is the Codex Leicester, the Leonardo manuscript that Bill Gates bought in 1994 for $30.8 million. The Codex was on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York last fall and will be shown at the Seattle Art Museum from Oct. 23 through Jan. 4, 1998. SAM is organizing its own show around the Codex, and SAM curators say their goal is to show the fusion of art and science in Leonardo's work, and demonstrate how he inspired artists who came after him.

Still, for anyone who will be in New England this summer, the Boston show is a primer on Leonardo, particularly on his life as a scientist and inventor. The show is especially user-friendly for children.

The Boston Museum of Science has the same ask-Dr. Science cheerfulness and noisy, hands-on ambience as the Pacific Science Center here in Seattle.

The Leonardo show is slightly more low-key than the rest of the museum, though even there, children and others who like interactive exhibits will have plenty to keep them busy. Some of the models of Leonardo's inventions can be touched and operated, and there are interactive CD-ROM terminals everywhere. Some feature the CD-ROM produced by Corbis Corp., of Bellevue, "Leonardo da Vinci," which translates the Codex Leicester, written by Leonardo backwards and in Italian, into readable English.

Organized by the Institute for Cultural Exchange in Tubingen, Germany, the show was exhibited in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria before it opened in Boston in March. It will be in Boston through Sept. 1, before it goes on to Singapore.

The weakest part of the show is the art presentation, which has been criticized by some Leonardo scholars for what they see as its cavalier approach to attributing paintings to Leonardo and his followers.

One of the oldest businesses in the world is making copies of famous paintings. And though private collectors who own works of dubious authorship like to believe that they have originals or semi-originals (student paintings that may have been supervised by a master, such as Leonardo), most museums are excruciatingly careful about attribution. The problem can be particularly thorny with Renaissance painters, since the practice then was for masters to work closely with students. Signing works was not a common practice.

There are only about 12 existing paintings in the world conclusively attributed to Leonardo, including the world's most famous painting, "Mona Lisa," in the Musee du Louvre, in Paris. None of the paintings in the Boston show are described as exclusively Leonardo's.

But several, including "Virgin in the Rocks," are labeled in the Boston show as "Leonardo and Pupils." The work comes from a private collection in Switzerland. And the generous labeling of that painting and others so outraged James Ackerman, professor emeritus of art history at Harvard University, that in December the highly regarded Leonardo expert quit as volunteer adviser to the exhibit.

Most of the drawings in the show are clearly labeled as reproductions.

More enlightening are the sections on Leonardo's inventions and his scientific studies. He designed a hang-glider that looks similar to the ones used today. He designed a helicopter that he thought could be powered by four men pushing a shaft connected to curving "blades" made of fabric. He devised water pumps to generate rotary power, and a bicycle that is only a little clunkier than early-20th century bicycles.

Fascinated by hydrology, he planned a canal from Florence to the sea, which though never dug is now the route of the main expressway from Florence to Venice. Even 20th-century engineering and mathematics could not improve on Leonardo's calculations for the most direct and feasible route. He also designed a quarter-mile bridge to span the Bosporus Strait that would connect Europe to Asia. Included in the exhibit is a letter from a Turkish sultan who expressed interest in the project, though Leonard's bridge was never built.