Leonardo da Vinci was not the inventor of the bicycle after all, says a German academic who believes an apparently prophetic sketch found among the artist's papers was a forgery.
The drawing of the "Renaissance bicycle" may well have been the work of one of the monks who restored Leonardo's manuscripts in the 1960s, New Scientist magazine quoted Hans-Erhard Lessing as saying.The discovery of the bicycle sketch was announced in 1974 by lexicographer Augusto Marinoni. It appeared to predate the next version of a similar bicycle by nearly 400 years.
Because the sketch was of poor quality, historians had concluded it was not drawn by Leonardo, but Marinoni had argued it was a pupil's reproduction of a lost original by the Renaissance master.
The drawing has appeared in many books and museum displays, and a full-scale wooden replica is to appear at an exhibition in New York this month, New Scientist said.
"No one questioned it," Lessing, the retired curator of the Museum of Technology and Labour in Mannheim, told New Scientist. But Lessing found an art historian, Carlo Pedretti of the University of California at Los Angeles, who said he had examined the same manuscript in 1961 and seen no bicycle - just two circles with some curved lines through them.