Leonardo da Vinci repeatedly expressed admiration for Archimedes during his lifetime. Not only was he fascinated by the legend of Archimedes the inventor of prodigious war machines but also by his successful approach to problems of statics and engineering, from which practical applications could be drawn. Leonardo was eager to refine firearms and worked on a special steam cannon (the Architronito), attributing its paternity to Archimedes. He showed similar admiration when examining the properties of burning mirrors and, in the statics field, studied in depth the treatise On Plane Equilibria, even referring to it on the cover of Manuscript F ("Archimedes, de centro gravitatis").