The origin of the myth of Leonardo da Vinci as engineer of the Milan canals is connected with a traumatic event of the late 16th century: the failure of Giuseppe Meda’s attempt to make the river Adda navigable. This idea had also occupied Leonardo, and Giovanni Ambrogio Mazenta, in his "Memorie on Leonardo," attributed Meda’s failure to his lack of understanding of the master’s project. Mazenta was thus building up the image of Leonardo as the tutelary deity of an enterprise that in the past he and his brother Guido had unsuccessfully defended. The "Vita of Leonardo" by Du Fresne (1651) then publicized the myth in a synthetic but still more legendary way (Leonardo as the author of the Martesana Canal). Although late eighteenth century studies of Leonardo’s manuscripts in the Ambrosiana Library (by Oltrocchi) and in Paris (by Venturi) contributed to the debunking of some aspects of the myth, they ended up by adding more to it. The last part of this study concerns the influence of the 1826 publication of Luigi Maria Arconati’s collection of Leonardo’s notes on hydraulics, which contributed to a further reshaping of the myth, by relating it to the new image of Leonardo as the founder of the science of flowing water.
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