How Could Da Vinci's Inventions Come True?

Could Florence finance his projects? If no, which power would?
If they truely built, how would it change the tech development in Renaissance Europe?

Thanks in advance!
 
No power in Europe or the world could finance all of them, simply because Leonardo produced ideas the way people produce CO2.

Thing is, that's probably a good thing because most of them would have failed, some potentially lethally. This is where people nmisread Leonardo, really. He wasn't a lone genius inventing an untrodden tech path surrounded by unappreciative morons. He lived in the middle of a highly innovative cuilture, a lot of his designs are probably not his inventions originally but stuff that was floating around, and a lot of the ideas that they sparked were off-the-wall projections with no technical expertise to back them up. In many ways, his notebooks are like finding the working notes of some highly placed, very smart Silicon Valley developer. He'll have outlines for ideas and concepts that came true (and those that didn't) in the hundreds, but that doesn't mean he's the guy who incvented cloud computing and filesharing.

Getting back to the issue, I think he would have had a better chance of more generous funding in a bigger and more powerful state. He went to France later in life, frex. If he really passionately cared to trealise his technological dreams, the Ottomans would have been an option. But either way I don't think the results would have been world-changing. Some concepts might have entered technology earlier (like the idea of streamlining - OTL it shows up in the 1570s IIRC). But he is not going to build an aerial battlefleet or steam-driven tanks, at least not without first changing the laws of physics.
 
There's a pretty fun passage from Lucio Russo's The Forgotten Revolution:

The oft-heard comment that Leonardo's genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But this was not due to a special genius for divining the future, but to the mundane fact that behind those drawings (and Francesco di Giorgio's) there were older drawings from a time when technology was far more advanced.

Leonardo's written explanations are often not on par with his sketches. In the Leicester Codex there is a drawing of a machine moved somehow by steam. Here is Bertrand Gille's comment about it:

The drawing is quite striking. Except for the explanation given on the same page, one could swear that it shows a primitive steam engine. But it is nothing of the sort. ... There are many figures of this curious device - curious above all because of its similarities [with later devices].
Gilles does not seem troubled by the notion that a drawing should not have been understood for what it is by its own author, nor yet by many subsequent generations.
 
History is sometimes made by seemingly insignificant moments that turn out to have been pivotal in hindsight--and sometimes what didn't happen proves to be as important as what did. One such moment came in the Florentine court of Cesare Borgia, when a civil servant named Niccolò Machiavelli recruited a local engineer named Leonardo da Vinci to devise a plan to change the course of the Arno River. Diverting that river, Machiavelli reasoned, would deprive Florence's enemy, the nearby city-state of Pisa, of a dependable water supply. It would also make the Arno River navigable for oceangoing vessels from the inland city of Florence, and as an added incentive, would help limit damage caused by the flood-prone Arno to the surrounding farmlands. Machiavelli and da Vinci devised a hydrological plan for the river that was extraordinarily promising, at least on paper. The flood-prone Arno, however, made the task an impossible challenge. The pair's chances of success were further reduced by poor design, bad timing, and undisciplined workers. Their failure brought official disfavor on Machiavelli and da Vinci alike. Leonardo transferred his studio to Milan and then Rome, where he would produce remarkable work, while Machiavelli retreated from public life for a time and used his forced leisure to write The Prince
(http://www.amazon.com/Fortune-River-Machiavellis-Magnificent-Florentine/dp/0452280907)

This is probably the closest reality ever got to Clockpunk. Find a way for it to succeed an a prolonged Machiavelli/ da Vinici collaboration might produce some interesting results.
 
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