What Leonardo da Vinci design depicts a humanoid machine in armor?

Leonardo da Vinci’s humanoid machine in armor is known as the mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the automaton around 1495 while working in Milan for Ludovico Sforza. The machine was presented as an armored medieval knight and was probably intended for a court festival or theatrical display. Internal cables, pulleys, and a system of cranks were designed to move its limbs.

The surviving notes suggest that the figure could sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and jaw. Leonardo’s drawings were discovered in the Codex Atlanticus and other studies, rather than in a single fully preserved machine.

The mechanical knight is sometimes called Leonardo’s robot, although the word “robot” was not used until the twentieth century. Modern reconstructions have shown that the proposed mechanism is mechanically plausible, but the exact original performance remains uncertain.