The scientific project of the exhibition is coordinated by the Andrea Palladio International Center for Architectural Studies.

The exhibition deals with the multifaceted relationship between Leonardo (1452-1519) and the text of Vitruvio De Architecura (1st century BC), the famous Latin treatise on architecture that constituted the theoretical foundations of the new way of building in the Renaissance. It is well known that Leonardo’s research is based on a dialectic between experience and authority, between the experimental verification of facts and phenomena and the codified knowledge handed down by the texts of tradition: a dialectic that is resolved entirely in favor of the empiricism of the former. However, the treatise of Vitruvius is, for Leonardo, a referent much more present than what had been imagined until now, and goes far beyond the well-known Vitruvian Man, namely the theory of proportions. Leonardo is in fact measured with the authority of Vitruvius also on problems of plumbing and meteorology, geometry and optics, materials and techniques also. A research group consisting of archaeologists, historians of architecture and art, philologists and technologists has systematically addressed a comprehensive reading of the encounter-clash between two protagonists of the Renaissance – one in flesh and blood, the other than paper and ink. The exhibition at Fano tells the public, for the first time, the story of Leonardo and Vitruvius. It does so in the city of the great Roman architect, place of the legendary basilica, a topos that archaeological investigations are revealing in all its concreteness and on which generations of architects have been measured from the Renaissance forward, including Andrea Palladio himself.