British Library / Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition

These animated loops were commissioned to help promote the British Library’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion exhibition. I was provided with images of Leonardo’s wonderful sketches and tasked with bringing them to life!

The “perpetual momentum wheel” (above) was especially popular, initially being released on Leonardo’s 500th birthday and re-posted a few more times – this has led to a total of over 120,000 views across their social media, along with thousands of likes / shares / retweets and hundreds of comments! This wheel was one of Leonardo’s ‘thought experiments’, the idea being that the wheel spins perpetually, driven by the weight of these small balls. He concluded that perpetual motion is (sadly) just a mirage.

This animation shows a practical experiment in which Leonardo used a glass-sided tank to study the movement and patterns of water gushing down a sequence of steps. He observed how the water rebounds, forms vortices and is reabsorbed back into the main flow. The lovely sound in this animation has been sourced from the British Library’s sound archive ( BL Wildlife Collection 07/32).

‘Leonardo da Vinci knew how to get his mileage from a page. Judging by the differences in his handwriting here, the colour of the ink, and also by page layout, it’s likely he worked on this sheet at different times.’ Quoted from the British Library’s Twitter page.

‘Leonardo famously used ‘mirror writing’. Moving from right to left there are a number of reasons he may have written in this way: perhaps to conceal his ideas but he was also left-handed so it was possibly easier for him to write in this direction.’ Quoted from the British Library’s Twitter page.