Motion: Leonardo Da Vinci's Explusions Of Motion

Throughout history humans have attempted to animate or give the illusion of movement. Evidence of this can be found as far back as a 5,200-year old pottery bowl discovered in Shahr-e Sukhteh, Iran. It is a bowl, which uses a series of five images to illustrate the motion of a goat jumping up in order to nip some leaves off a tree. Another example of early attempts to create motion through a series of drawings is Leonardo da Vinci’s Anatomical Studies of the Muscles of the Neck, Shoulder, Chest, and Arm. I like this example mostly because I love the way in which he is able to draw loosely and still get an accurate depiction of human anatomy, but also because it is a good example of how a sequence of drawings and images can imply movement. Vitruvian man, another drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, also manages to get the effect of movement by drawing a series of limbs overlapping to create a sense of motion.

Figure 1: Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies.

Although all three of these and many more early examples are not considered true animation for the lack of a way to depict them in motion and because of their low frame rate, they did however still lay the foundation for animation and set into motion the ground work for what we consider animation today. As mentioned by Stephen Cavalier in the book The world history of animation (2011:68), animation as a definition is generally agreed upon as single frame images viewed in rapid succession by some form of mechanism, to create