{"id":15309,"date":"2011-12-02T18:26:08","date_gmt":"2011-12-02T16:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/?p=15309"},"modified":"2018-02-09T15:52:09","modified_gmt":"2018-02-09T15:52:09","slug":"leonardo-da-vinci-automaton-125","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/leonardo-da-vinci-automaton-125\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonardo da Vinci to get second life as automaton"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/h2>\n

Don’t let the retro look of the mechanical men built by Swiss artisan Francois Junod deceive you — they fascinate tech fans from Silicon Valley to Asia and will no doubt gain broader popularity after this week’s launch of Martin Scorsese’s film “Hugo” about a secret hidden in an automaton.<\/h2>\n

The latest of Junod’s time-consuming projects is an 80 cm wind-up Leonardo da Vinci figure that will be able to do intricate drawings and write mirror-inverted texts in Latin.<\/p>\n

“I have been working on the sculpture for ten years and on the mechanism for six years. I do not have a buyer yet so I can take my time,” said Junod, surrounded by a mishmash of tools, machines and sketches in his workshop in the village of Sainte-Croix perched high up in the Swiss Jura mountains.<\/p>\n

His most complicated creation so far, an Alexander Pushkin animated by a complex mechanism enabling it to write down 1,458 different poems, was bought last year by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur for a price kept secret.<\/p>\n

“Complex models can take years of work and cost up to 1.2 million Swiss francs ($1.32 million),” said Junod, proudly showing historical automata that collectors from around the world ask him to restore.<\/p>\n

“Before, I mainly worked for Japanese clients because automata really have a tradition there. But today, I have customers from all around the world,” said Junod, who counts the Sultan of Brunei and the late Michael Jackson among his clients.<\/p>\n

Interest in these sophisticated dolls known as automata is likely to get a fresh boost from Scorsese’s new 3D film “Hugo” that will hit UK screens this week.<\/p>\n

Based on a best-selling children’s book by Brian Selznick, the film tells the tale of a young boy in a Paris railway station in the 1930s who struggles to uncover a secret hidden in his father’s automaton.<\/p>\n

“The film is going to be a good advertisement for my business,” said Junod. “People who watch it may think nobody makes automata anymore.”<\/p>\n

Good-humored, enthusiastic Junod, who went through some rough times when he started making the self-operating machines in 1984, is one of the last craftsmen specialized in an art serving no other purpose than to surprise with its complexity.<\/p>\n

“That’s what makes automata different from robots, which normally have a practical purpose. They are poetic,” he said.<\/p>\n

Junod wants to give his Leonardo da Vinci a transparent back to make the mechanism visible. “It’s part of the fascination with automata that people can understand how they work. These days, ever more objects are beyond our comprehension.”<\/p>\nError, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 9)<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don’t let the retro look of the mechanical men built by Swiss artisan Francois Junod deceive you. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,17,14],"tags":[19343,19342,12009,17105,19339,19340,19341],"class_list":["post-15309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-europe","category-world","tag-alexander-pushkin","tag-francois-junod","tag-leonardo-da-vinci","tag-leonardo-da-vinci-italy","tag-leonardo-da-vinci-second-life","tag-second-life","tag-swiss-artisan-francois-junod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}