The Royal Library exhibits thirteen works by Leonardo da Vinci, including the famous sheets with the Self-Portrait, the Face of a Girl, the Male Head in Profile Crowned with Laurel and the Code on the Flight of Birds.

The exhibition is enriched by a rare selection of drawings, manuscripts, incunabula, ancient maps that illustrate the epochal events that accompanied Leonardo's life from 1452 to 1519. From 7 April to 9 July 2023, the Royal Library of Turin offers a 'unique opportunity to get to know and explore the work of Leonardo da Vinci up close, the great protagonist of the Italian Renaissance, through his drawings, his notebook dedicated to the flight of birds and other very rare testimonies related to his time.

The exhibition entitled The genius and his time. Face to face with Leonardo is supported by SMARTART Turin and by OMT – Officine Meccaniche Turin, created in collaboration with CoopCulture and under the patronage of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and the City of Turin.

Set up in the two underground vaults of the Royal Library, the exhibition itinerary opens with the events that marked Leonardo's human and artistic life, from 1452, the year of his birth in Vinci, until 1519, the date of his death in France. An era of great men, from Michelangelo to Christopher Columbus, and of great enterprises that changed the course of European civilization, from the fall of Constantinople, to the invention of the printed book, to the Sistine Chapel. Sixty-seven years of places, facts and people reconstructed on display through rare and precious works from the Royal Library: manuscripts, such as the Treaty of civil and military architecture by Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1486) and the Stories of San Gioachino, illuminated by Cristoforo De Predis for Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476); unique incunabula, such as the sheet from Gutenberg's Bible, the first book with movable type, and the treatise De re militari by Roberto Valturio (1483); ancient maps, such as the Map of Italy and the universal nautical Geomap by Giovanni Vespucci; drawings, such as the Study for the Sibilla Cumana by Michelangelo.