History - Retrospective - Milano 1997

• Host town
• List of prize winners
• Jury members

Fondazione Stelline - Pallazo Marino, Comune di Milano

Milan is probably the most European of all Italian cities, as well as one of the industrial and thus technological centres of Italy. This is properly confirmed by its National Museum of Science and Technology, which encloses twenty-eight sections going from information technology to engines and astronomy, and some 40,000 square metres of displays. However, art and architecture are fortunately very well represented too: Il Duomo and the Teatro alla Scala is just a couple of widely known examples.
Art and science go hand in hand in Milano. It comes as no surprise that Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most illustrious geniuses of all times, lived and developed most of his visionary work in that city. Leonardo (1452-1519) was the epitome of the Renaissance man. He was a great painter, and also an architect, engineer, designer of futuristic mechanical contrivances. In brief, he was a man with apparently inexhaustible knowledge of practically everything.

Some famous reproductions of his drawings and notes can be downloaded from the Internet at http://banzai.msi.umn.edu/leonardo and http://www.museoscienza.org/english/navi/

It is difficult to define the words science and scientist at Leonardo's time. He was never a professor of natural philosophy and never struggled to develop and publish theoretical concepts about how the world works. Yet he wanted to discover for himself how certain things work and, to judge from his notebooks, he did in fact have a thorough understanding of forces, levers, winches, and the mechanics of flight. Much of these we would surely include within the realms of science today.
Leonardo left Florence for Milan in 1481 to offer his service to the local Duke, and during this period he painted the "Madonna of the Rocks" and the "Last Supper", alongside with the model of the segmented dome cladding for the Milan "Duomo". Nevertheless, from 1509 he would devote much of his time to scientific studies. He would undertake some research into optics, town planning, anatomy, and engineering projects such as channelling the course of the river Adda.
Still a curious and not widely known fact about Leonardo: his undaunted left-handedness forced him to write his manuscripts backwards, in mirror image.

PRIZE WINNERS

FIRST PRIZES

SECOND PRIZES

THIRD PRIZES

NOBEL PRIZE AWARD

JURY MEMBERS

Sue Kingsman
Claudia Ambrosch-Draxl
Juan M. García Ruiz
Joseph Geraedts
Pedro Guerreiro
Kerksti Hermansson
Kristinn Andersen
Patrice Le Calvez
Unni Pia Løvhaug
Sauro Pasini
Tytti Varmavuo
Eugene Meieran