Focusing sound in rooms intended for listening to music or speech is an acoustic defect. Design recommendations provide remedial steps to effectively prevent this. However, there is a category of objects of high historical or architectural value in which the sound focus correction is limited or even abandoned. This also applies to indoor or outdoor concert shells, installations for teaching and acoustic presentations, etc. The...

After introducing Leonardo da Vinci’s (LdV) predecessors in the field of light propagation research, his drawings on the topic of reflecting light by a spherical mirror are analysed. The discovery of LdV is presented, according to which, at an infinitely distant source of rays, a small fragment of the canopy is enough to generate a focus, while the rest of the mirror forms a caustic for which LdV did not indicate an application....