Sketched across the pages of his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci drew the machines of the future. He pencilled flying airships and helicopters hundreds of years before aviation became a reality and envisioned giant cannons and armoured tanks well ahead of their use in modern warfare.

It is these mechanical drawings that are to form the foundation of a major new exhibition at the Science Museum, celebrating the scientific genius of the Renaissance polymath.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Genius, which was first exhibited in Milan and then Munich, will focus on the skilled mechanical drawings sketched out by Leonardo over his lifetime, and display - together for the first time in the UK - 39 wooden models of his inventions, first built in Milan in 1952.

A smaller set of nine models, first built in the UK in the same year for a show at the Royal Academy (RA) will also open the exhibition. The RA show was the first to embrace Leonardo’s place in both the art and scientific world.

Leonardo may be known worldwide for his great artworks, from the Mona Lisa to the Last Supper, but he dedicated much of his life to dreaming up machines that mastered miracles he saw reflected in nature, from flight to breathing under water. They were often military commissions for his royal patrons, but as far as scholars are aware, it was only his cranes that were ever actually built.

A model of Leonardo’s aerial screw, an early version of the helicopter. Photograph: Alessandro Nassiri/Archivio Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci/Science Museum

“Some people have theorised that Leonardo put a deliberate mistake into his drawings which is why they didn’t work, and others believe he never designed them to actually work,” said Sue Mossman, project leader of the exhibition.

The models that will be on display will include three dimensional interpretations of machines such as his aerial screw (an early version of the helicopter), his giant crossbow and his menacing-looking diving suit, as well as his celebrated weaving machine.

Sculpted from wood, pieces such as the crossbow model (one of the first psychological weapons of warfare, designed to instil fear in the enemy rather than for fighting) reach almost three metres across. The model of Leonardo’s ornithopter, a flying machine that evokes a bat or an eagle, will be suspended in the air as part of the exhibition, as if finally taking flight five centuries after Leonardo dreamed it up.

This flying machine with beating wings evokes a bat or an eagle. Photograph: Alessandro Nassiri/Archivio Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci/Science Museum

A key part of the exhibition, added Mossman, is to place Leonardo the “engineer and inventor” within the context of his environment. Rather than showing Leonardo as an isolated genius, the exhibition focuses on his influences, which were drawn both from the natural world but also other engineers working at the time.

Jim Bennett, Keeper Emeritus for the Science Museum, said it was important to acknowledge that many of Leonardo’s inventions were inspired by, and even copied from, fellow engineers; he would then draw and tinker with them on the page.

Instead, it was Leonardo’s study of both the mechanical and the natural world, in which he spendt as much time obsessing over wind currents, caves and bat wings as he did over the minutiae of cogs and gears, that made him such a “radical thinker” of the renaissance.

Leonardo’s version of a parachute. Photograph: Alessandro Nassiri/Archivio Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci/Science Museum

“Leonardo had this tool for unifying knowledge and that was drawing,” said Bennett. “He felt that by drawing he could understand both the natural world and machines, and that the two areas could influence each other. That was very radical in Leonardo’s time, when nature was made by god and machines were made by man, But he didn’t see them as different and it is a key reason that we see him as a genius today.”

The exhibition will also draw parallels to the present day, demonstrating how even in modern aviation and robotics, the natural world remains as much of an influence today as it did in Leonardo’s time - from robots built to move like eels to plans to save fuel by flying airplanes in flotillas.

Leonardo’s drawings may have foreseen a future of flight and diving, but after his death they were bound up and given to his loyal apprentice Francesco Melzi. It was only in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries that the knowledge they contained began to be disseminated widely.

“Leonardo was quite visionary, he was dreaming of the future, and the fact that his drawings and inventions were locked away may have cut down on advances,” said Mossman. “Perhaps if they’d been in the public domain, maybe they would have pioneered future inventions centuries earlier.”