The October 4, 1999 European edition of TIME MAGAZINE carried the following article.

"DREAMS OF THE MASTER"
BY DANIEL S. LEVY
Unfinished works of Leonardo da Vinci are completed in Milan, Oslo and perhaps even Des Moines, Iowa

TIME, OCTOBER 4,1999
THE PAINTER, ARCHITECT, Engineer and sculptor Leonardo da Vinci embodied the Renaissance, and his sly smiling Mona Lisa and recently restored Last Supper have thrilled viewers for centuries. Yet Leonardo often had trouble completing his grand murals, statues and buildings. This was partly due to the technology of the time not being advanced enough to achieve what he envisioned, but it was also a result of the simple yet unlucky whims of history.

All that has changed. Thanks to latter-day Leonardo enthusiasts, some of the master's great but stillborn projects are finally being completed. A grand equestrian statue, Il Cavallo, that Leonardo planned in 1493 has just been unveiled in central Milan and a second will be christened Oct. 7 in Grand Rapids, Mich. A bridge that Leonardo designed in 1502 to span the Bosporus in Istanbul is scheduled for construction outside Oslo, and there is talk of building similar bridges in Des Moines, Iowa, and in Istanbul itself.

The statue was conceived when Leonardo was 30 and working as "painter and engineer" to the court of Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. There he created settings and costumes for court pageants, painted the Last Supper and designed military fortifications. He also labored on a monumental equestrian statue in honor of Lodovico`s father, Francesco Sforza. At nearly 7 m, it was to dwarf all other sculptures of the day. Leonardo sketched horses in the duke's stable, and when he displayed the clay model in 1493 it met with great acclaim. But war with France threatened, and the bronze for Il Cavallo was turned into cannons. When the French overthrew Lodovico in 1499, their archers used the clay model for target practice.

Leonardo then returned to Florence where he learned that Sultan Bayezid II of Turkey sought to build a bridge across the Bosporus' Golden Horn "I will erect it high as an arch," Leonardo wrote to the Sultan, "so that a ship under full sail could sail underneath it." His bold proposal called for a bridge 350m long complete with a revolutionary system of braces to withstand wind forces. Unfortunately the Sultan didn't think the span was possible and it was never built.

It was the knowledge of the ill fated horse and bridge that five centuries later captivated the imaginations of two men and started the current Leonardo renaissance. The first was Charles Dent, a retired pilot and amateur sculptor who in 1977 read an article on Leonardo in National Geographic. Dent became obsessed with it, bought a farm in Pennsylvania and began modeling his own version of the horse.

Dent died in 1994, but members of the Meijer family, which founded an American superstore chain and established the Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, read about Dent and decided to build one of the horses for their sculpture garden. But when Dent's 2.5m plaster model arrived at the foundry they realized that it contained anatomical errors that would be magnified if enlarged to full size. Enter Nina Akamu, an Oklahoma born Japanese American sculptor who had lived and worked in Italy for more than a decade, and was hired to correct the problem. When that proved impossible, she began her own Leonardo inspired horse. "I didn't have a clue of what Leonardo wanted," she says of the daunting assignment, "so I became a student of Leonardo, and tried to embody a number of characteristics of his work."

Akamu, 44, immersed herself in the art of Leonardo, studied his drawings and in less than a year fashioned a 2.5 m clay model of the trotting beast, its nostrils flaring, its mane a flowing mass of curls evoking Leonardo's fascination with waves and clouds. A 10 ton bronze version was built, and whom Milan officials saw it, they, too, wanted one for their new, cultural park

Like Dent, Norwegian artist Vebjorn Sand became fixated on an unrealized Leonardo dream, the Bosporus bridge In 1996 Sand, 33, attended a show of Leonardo's inventions in Stockholm. There he saw a model of the structure. "It was so powerful and eternal," says Sand. "It looked like it could be a modern bridge." He brought plans for a 58 m version to the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, which agreed to build two of the sleek, bow shaped bridges. The first will break ground this Spring south of Oslo. When officials in Des Moines at work on the city's new master plan read of the bridge, they, too, contacted Sand. The local legislature is scheduled to vote on its construction soon. Engineers in Istanbul have likewise voiced an interest in getting one. Other offers will no doubt result from a traveling show of Sand's work "Ad Fontes: the Art and Projects of Vebjorn Sand", which opened this month at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Wash.

Georgio Vasari, architect of the Ufffizzi Gallery in Florence and biographer, wrote in 1550 of Leonardo: "The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, but sometimes with lavish abundance they bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace and ability, so that, whatever he does, every action is so divine that he surpasses all other men, and clearly displays how his genius is the gift of God and not an acquirement of human art." Yet with all those blessings, Leonardo was not granted the ability to complete his every dream. Thankfully the heavens created others to do the job.