What was Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical warrior, built for a Milanese court festival, called?

Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical warrior built for a Milanese court festival is called the mechanical knight.

Leonardo designed the humanoid machine around 1495 for a pageant sponsored by Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Its internal system of gears, pulleys, cables, and cranks was intended to make the armored figure sit, stand, raise its arms, and move its head and visor. The original machine has not survived.

The robot was probably a theatrical automaton rather than a battlefield invention. Leonardo studied human proportions and anatomy, and the knight’s structure reflects that interest in reproducing human movement mechanically. The design was rediscovered in Leonardo’s notebooks in the twentieth century.

In 2002, roboticist Mark Rosheim built a working reconstruction based on the surviving sketches. The machine is sometimes confused with Leonardo’s self-propelled cart, but the knight was humanoid and used a different mechanical arrangement.