People gasp as Camargo, a Tech development officer, points to the ceiling and says, “This is the flying machine, the quintessence of Leonardo’s early work. The guests, San Jose State University alumni, were getting a preview of what the Tech calls the biggest exhibition ever devoted to Leonardo and other artist-engineers of the Renaissance. Examining Leonardo through the lens of recent scholarship, the exhibition paints him as a product of the arts-and-engineering revolution of his times, not some lone genius. That revolution is brought to life through working models based on sketches by Leonardo and other engineers; a pair of paintings, loaned by the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, by two of Leonardo’s disciples; and multimedia presentations on “The Mind of Leonardo,” exploring his thought processes and ingenuity. They include the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, whose director, Paolo Galluzzi, is curator of “Leonardo”; he has flown in from Italy to attend a news conference at the Tech this morning. Leonardo had planned to cast it in solid bronze — 70 tons of it — from a single mold as the greatest sculpture of the day.

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