He was captivated by the enormous steel-ribbed model of the planet, the fair’s visionary portrayal of the future, and especially the panorama of New York City that was commissioned by the city planner Robert Moses . The scale model of the five boroughs, with replicas of 895,000 buildings and bridges, remains the centerpiece of the museum on the old fairgrounds at Flushing Meadows Corona Park . For the Queens Museum, which stresses the history of its site — it was also the first headquarters of the United Nations — it is particularly exciting to display the drawings “in a context which made them possible,” wrote Tom Finkelpearl, the museum’s executive director, in an essay introducing the exhibit. Later, when you step out blinking into the real city, and see the big versions of the things you just saw, you get the alternately exhilarating and unsettling sensation that you’ve become tiny and entered the model, or that it has blown up a thousandfold to engulf you.

Tags: application of perspective, and, leonardo da vinci paintings, painting artist, of, sfumato-fumo, facts about leonardo da vinci, the