The Renaissance Vulture Thinks Like Leonardo
Adriano Tumino succeeds because Across the Spider Verse does not merely copy Leonardo’s drawings, but transforms his habits of observation, engineering, and visual invention into a living Renaissance villain.
I. A Villain Drawn from Renaissance Inquiry
The Renaissance Vulture who opens Spider Man: Across the Spider Verse looks as though he escaped from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. His enormous wings stretch across the screen in wood, linen, rope, brass, and exposed joints. Crosshatched lines define his body. Parchment seems to replace skin. Gears, braces, pulleys, and weapons surround him as though an artist were still revising the design while the character moves.
Adriano Tumino does not reproduce any single surviving Leonardo drawing. No page in the Codex Atlanticus contains his exact wings, armor, mask, or weapons. The design succeeds for a more interesting reason. It adapts Leonardo’s way of thinking.
Original concept illustration of Adriano Tumino, the Renaissance Vulture, imagined as a Leonardo inspired study sheet with articulated wings, mechanical armaments, and Renaissance engineering annotations. Created for this post with generative AI. Elmer Yglesias (2026).
Leonardo approached flight through close observation. He studied birds, examined the structure of wings, recorded the movement of air, and compared living anatomy with mechanical devices. His notebooks contain ornithopters, articulated wings, pulleys, frames, and the famous aerial screw. Many could not have flown as drawn. Their practical limitations do not diminish their importance. Leonardo treated human flight as a problem that observation, geometry, anatomy, and invention might eventually solve.
Tumino embodies that habit of inquiry. His machinery does not look standardized or manufactured. It appears to have emerged from years of experiments. Wings unfold through visible joints and braces. Control systems remain exposed. Mechanical parts overlap rather than disappearing beneath a polished exterior. Every component suggests that an artist and engineer kept asking how one mechanism might become another.
The wings provide the clearest connection. Leonardo understood that flight required more than attaching a rigid surface to the human body. A wing had to flex, rotate, balance weight, and respond to air. Tumino’s apparatus exaggerates those ambitions. Its broad span gives him the silhouette of a predatory bird, yet its construction remains visibly mechanical. Nature supplies the model, and engineering attempts to reproduce it.
The filmmakers also borrowed the language of Renaissance draftsmanship. Parchment textures, dark ink, construction lines, anatomical poses, and dense technical details place Tumino inside a world of drawings. Leonardo provides the strongest reference, but the disciplined crosshatching also recalls Albrecht Dürer and other Renaissance artists who used drawing as both art and investigation.
Renaissance studies often presented several possibilities on the same page. A hand appeared in multiple positions. A machine appeared from several angles. Notes interrupted diagrams. Geometry sat beside anatomy. Tumino seems to carry that entire page with him. His body becomes a moving study sheet containing armor, wings, weapons, mechanics, and unfinished thought.
His pose strengthens the association. Tumino extends his arms while the wings spread behind him, turning the body into the central axis of a larger mechanical system. The arrangement recalls the Renaissance effort to place the human form within geometry and proportion. Tumino does not merely wear the machine. His body organizes it.
The mask transforms those ambitions into menace. Its long beak evokes a vulture, but it also suggests historical masks and early scientific instruments. Lenses and metal fittings replace an expressive human face. Tumino looks like a man who studied birds so intensely that he rebuilt himself as one.
Weapons follow the same logic. A modern Vulture might carry missiles or electronic systems concealed inside sleek armor. Tumino’s devices resemble mechanical propositions. Launchers, nets, darts, and explosive mechanisms extend from the arms and wings. Even an aerial screw inspired weapon feels less like modern artillery than an experiment from an imagined Renaissance workshop.
Adriano Tumino therefore represents more than Adrian Toomes in historical clothing. A weaker adaptation might have added leather armor, a ruff, and wooden wings to the familiar Marvel villain. Across the Spider Verse creates a distinct counterpart whose identity emerges from another intellectual world.
The filmmakers did not simply adapt Marvel 1602. They created an original Renaissance Vulture and asked a more ambitious question: What kind of flying villain might emerge from a culture that had not achieved powered flight but had already begun to imagine it systematically?
The opening confrontation between Gwen Stacy and the Renaissance Vulture illustrates how Spider Man: Across the Spider Verse transforms Leonardo inspired engineering and Renaissance draftsmanship into a distinctive animated style. Embedded YouTube video by Scarlet Reilly, “Vulture / Adriano Toomes Clips From Edits”; used for commentary.
II. When Animation Becomes a Renaissance Notebook
The opening battle becomes more effective because Tumino arrives in Gwen Stacy’s universe as an artistic intruder. His displacement is visible before anyone explains it. Gwen’s world moves through expressive color and emotional abstraction. Tumino enters as parchment, ink, engraving, and mechanical draftsmanship. He comes not only from another place, but from another visual system.
Animation preserves the appearance of an unfinished drawing while giving it speed, mass, and violence. Lines tremble around him. Shading shifts across his body. His wings open as if an artist were adding new strokes to the page. Mechanical elements sometimes appear too intricate to have been manufactured in three dimensions, yet they remain persuasive as moving illustration.
A live action version would need to translate parchment into cloth, ink into paint, and sketch lines into seams or engraved metal. The character would become a costume. Animation allows Tumino to remain a drawing.
Leonardo’s notebooks rarely present machines as finished engineering plans. They record thought in progress. A wing changes between sketches. A gear appears beside an anatomical study. A note challenges an earlier assumption. Several solutions coexist because Leonardo used drawing to think.
Tumino moves with the same unfinished energy. His wings extend beyond practical proportions. Components shift and unfold. Weapons emerge from mechanisms designed directly onto the body. He never settles into the visual stability of an industrial product. He remains an experiment.
The film’s multiverse depends on such distinctions. Earlier superhero films often separated alternate worlds through costumes, architecture, or color. Across the Spider Verse gives entire universes different artistic grammars. Characters appear as comic panels, watercolor paintings, collages, computer graphics, or Renaissance drawings. Style becomes evidence of origin.
Tumino demonstrates the idea with unusual clarity. His line work tells the audience where he comes from before dialogue supplies an explanation. His materials reveal his technological assumptions. His movement suggests the tools that created him. Form carries narrative information.
The design also shows how artists can use historical traditions without reducing them to decoration. Leonardo’s notebooks have become familiar cultural symbols. Films and advertisements repeatedly borrow the aerial screw, the proportional figure, and the sepia page. Such references can become superficial.
Tumino goes further because the design adopts the relationship among art, science, mechanics, and imagination that defines Leonardo’s notebooks. Observation leads to drawing. Drawing leads to invention. Invention returns to the human body. Failure does not end the process because every unsuccessful mechanism produces another idea.
The filmmakers treat Renaissance art as a working method rather than a collection of recognizable images. They did not merely attach an ornithopter to a villain. They imagined how an entire character might emerge from a culture in which artists studied anatomy, engineers sketched birds, and drawings moved freely between beauty and utility.
Adriano Tumino succeeds because he embodies the central promise of the Spider Verse. Familiar figures can change completely when another era or artistic tradition reimagines them. The essential idea survives through transformation.
The Vulture has always represented artificial flight. Adrian Toomes uses technology to imitate the freedom and predatory power of a bird. Tumino preserves that foundation but relocates it to a world where human flight remains an audacious dream. His machinery looks dangerous because it also looks impossible.
Leonardo never drew this Vulture. He never designed the mask, armor, or weaponized wings. His notebooks supplied something more valuable: a way to connect nature with machinery, anatomy with geometry, and observation with impossible invention.
The Renaissance Vulture succeeds because he is not merely decorated like Leonardo’s work. He thinks like Leonardo.