Leonardo Da Vinci Read online

  That heroic, aspirational sense of the Renaissance man is not wrong – indeed the subtitle of my book is precisely a celebration of the marvellous upward reach of Leonardo’s intellect, those soaring ‘flights of the mind’ which enabled him to see so far and so much, and which I link metaphorically and psychologically to his lifelong obsession with actual bodily flight. But with the dream of flying comes the fear of falling, and we understand this Renaissance man better if we see him also as a trader in doubts and questions, and with them self-doubts and self-questionings.

  The Universal Genius and the Renaissance man are like those ‘gigantic’ shadows in Leonardo’s riddle. They are not quite an illusion, but they are the product of a certain point of view, and as you move closer you start to see, much more interestingly, the man who casts those shadows.

  To pursue the story of Leonardo’s life we must get back to the sources closest to him: the primary sources – contemporary and near-contemporary. Chief among these are his own manuscripts; indeed, this book has become in part a study of Leonardo the writer – a curiously neglected subject, considering his enormously prolific output, though for the most part one must understand ‘writer’ in a non-literary sense. There are something over 7,000 pages of manuscript in Leonardo’s hand which still survive, and thousands more can be deduced to have existed but are now lost. Some of the latter may surface one day – two entire notebooks were discovered by chance in Madrid in 1967, and there have been tantalizing but unconfirmed sightings of the lost treatise on light and shade known as Libro W.5

  The manuscripts survive in three forms: in bound collections, compiled after Leonardo’s death; in notebooks which are more or less intact from the time when he owned them; and in single sheets. The most famous of the great miscellaneous collections is the Codex Atlanticus, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. In its original form, put together in the late sixteenth century by the sculptor and bibliophile Pompeo Leoni, the Codex Atlanticus was a massive leather-bound volume over 2 feet tall. It contained 401 folios, some of them whole sheets of Leonardo manuscript, but most of them a montage of smaller items, up to five or six on a page, sometimes glued down and sometimes mounted in windows so that both sides of the paper could be seen. The name of the codex has nothing to do with the ocean, but refers precisely to its large format – it is ‘atlas-sized’. The name was coined by a librarian at the Ambrosiana, Baldassare Oltrocchi, who listed it in 1780 as a ‘codice in forma atlantica’. In the 1960s this sumptuous scrapbook was dismantled and reordered so that all its constituent pieces are now mounted separately.

  There are two other major miscellanies, both in England. One is the collection of drawings and manuscripts in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This is also an inheritance from Pompeo Leoni; indeed, some of the smaller fragments at Windsor were demonstrably snipped by Leoni out of larger sheets now in the Codex Atlanticus. It was at some point purchased by that avid collector Charles I, though no documentation of this survives. It surfaced in Kensington Palace in the mid eighteenth century: according to a contemporary account, ‘this great curiosity’ had been deposited in a ‘large and strong chest’ during the Civil War, and there lay ‘unobserved and forgotten about 120 years till Mr Dalton fortunately discovered it at the bottom of the same chest in the beginning of the reign of his present Majesty [George III]’.6 Among this superb assemblage of drawings and manuscripts are the famous folios of anatomical drawings. The other major collection is the Codex Arundel in the British Library, a hotchpotch of 283 folios written over a span of nearly forty years, among them that interrupted page of geometrical notes discussed above. The codex is named after the Earl of Arundel who purchased it in Spain in the 1630s.

  To these collections of actual Leonardo manuscripts should be added another kind of miscellany – the Codex Urbinas in the Vatican, a compilation of Leonardo’s writings on the subject of painting, put together after his death by his secretary and literary executor, Francesco Melzi. An abbreviated version was published in Paris in 1651; this digest is generally known as the Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting). At the end of the Codex Urbinas, Melzi lists eighteen Leonardo notebooks, large and small (libri and libricini), which he had used as source material: ten of these are now lost. Another small trove of fugitive Leonardiana is the Codex Huygens, now in New York, which contains late-sixteenth-century copies of lost Leonardo figure studies.

  The collections are magnificent, but the true whiff of Leonardo is to be found in his notebooks. About twenty-five individual notebooks survive – the exact number depends on how you reckon them, as some of the smaller books have been bound into composite volumes: for instance the three Forster codices (Victoria & Albert Museum, London) actually contain five notebooks. The largest concentration of notebooks is in the Institut de France in Paris; they arrived in France en masse in the 1790s, Napoleonic booty expropriated from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Others are in Milan, Turin, London, Madrid and Seattle. There have been some pages lost here and there – a light-fingered bibliophile, Count Guglielmo Libri, stole several in the mid nineteenth century – but these notebooks are essentially as Leonardo left them. Some still have their original bindings: he favoured a kind of wrap-around cover of vellum or leather, fastened with a small wooden toggle passed through a loop of cord (an arrangement oddly suggestive of a duffel coat).

  In size the notebooks range from standard octavo format, looking much like what we call exercise-books, down to little pocket-books not much bigger than a pack of playing-cards. The latter, which Francesco Melzi called libricini, served as both notebooks and sketchbooks, and some show clear signs of having been on the road with Leonardo. An eyewitness account of him in Milan mentions ‘a little book he had always hanging at his belt’.7 He had one such with him when he passed though Cesena in 1502 and made a swift sketch captioned, ‘This is how they carry grapes in Cesena.’8 You would see him there in the street like a reporter with his notebook, intently recording. The painter, he says, should always be ready to make sketches ‘as circumstance permits’:

  Observe people carefully in the streets, and in the piazza, and in the fields. Note them down with a brief indication of forms, thus for a head make an O, and for

  One of Leonardo’s notebooks (Paris MS B) in its original binding.

  an arm a straight or bent line, and the same for the legs and the body, and when you get back home work up these notes into complete form.9

  Sometimes the notations acquire the compressed potency of poetry:

  onde del mare di Piombino

  tutta d’acqua sciumosa

  dell’acqua che risalta del sito

  dove chadano li gran pesi perchussori delle acque

  [Waves of the sea at Piombino; all the water spumy; water which rears up from the place where great percussive weights of water fall.]10

  Or this dangling almost illegible haiku:

  la luna densa

  ogni densa e grave

  come sta la lu

  na

  [The moon is dense; anything dense is heavy: what is the nature of the moon?]11

  Some of the notebooks are self-contained treatises of some sort, or at least a purposeful gathering on a particular subject – Paris MS C on light and shade, the Codex Leicester on geophysics, the small Turin Codex on the flight of birds, etc. – but even these contain plenty of extraneous material. The keynote of Leonardo’s manuscripts is their diversity, their multiple miscellaneity: a jostling, often cramped, agglomeration of interests. Dating pages is sometimes hard, because Leonardo has a repetitive habit of mind, circling like a bird of prey around his many interests, revisiting ideas and observations to work away at them again years later. He is aware of this difficulty, and apologizes to the notional future reader: ‘Do not blame me, reader, because the subjects are many, and the memory cannot retain them and say, “This I will not write because I have already written it.”’12

  The manuscripts are a map of Leonardo’s mind. They contain everything from the b
riefest half-sentence or squiggled calculation to fully worked-out scientific treatises and literary exercises. Their subject-matter ranges from anatomy to zoology by way of aerodynamics, architecture, botany, costume-design, civil and military engineering, fossil studies, hydrography, mathematics, mechanics, music, optics, philosophy, robotics, star-gazing, stage-design and viticulture. The great lesson of the manuscripts is that everything is to be questioned, investigated, peered into, worried away at, brought back to first principles. He sets himself tasks both large and small:

  Describe how the clouds are formed and how they dissolve, and what causes vapour to rise from the waters of the earth into the air, and the causes of mists, and of the air becoming thickened, and why it appears more or less blue at different times…

  Describe… what sneezing is, what yawning is, the falling sickness, spasm, paralysis, shivering with cold, sweating, fatigue, hunger, sleep, thirst, lust…

  Describe the tongue of the woodpecker…13

  Leonardo was, as Kenneth Clark put it, ‘the most relentlessly curious man in history’. The notebooks log his great quest of interestedness. They tend cumulatively towards some grand idea of universal knowledge, but at any given point or page they are focused on the particular and the precise: observations, experiments, questions, solutions. He is the empiricist par excellence, and signs himself with a flourish ‘Leonardo Vinci disscepolo della sperientia’ (which can be translated as either ‘disciple of experience’ or ‘disciple of experiment’).14 His habit of inquisitiveness is even expressed in a little scribal tic, found on scores of manuscript pages: when he wanted to try out a new pen-nib, he habitually doodled the word dimmi – ‘Tell me.’ It is the sound of Leonardo inquiring, seeking another bit of data. Tell me what, tell me how, tell me why – there were doubtless many in Florence and Milan and elsewhere who had heard the challenging tones of the Leonardian dimmi.

  In the Trattato della pittura Leonardo writes that a painting should show

  A typically miscellaneous sheet from about 1490.

  ‘mental events’ – accidenti mentali – through the physical gestures of the figures in it.15 I think of this phrase when I read his notebooks, which are precisely filled with ‘mental events’, large and small, rigorously annotated, mingling curiously with the rich variety of ephemera – jokes, doodles, snatches of poetry, drafts of letters, household accounts, recipes, shopping-lists, cast-lists, bank statements, names and addresses of models, and so on – which is also to be found there.

  The other major source of primary material is in the early biographies of Leonardo. The most famous is the account of him in Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori, commonly known as Lives of the Artists. This famous book, first published in Florence in 1550, is fundamental to any biography of an early Italian artist, and generally justifies the puff it received from the aged Michelangelo:

  You, reilluming memories that died,

  In spite of time and nature have ensured

  For them [the artists] and yourself eternal fame.16

  (The fact that Vasari worshipped Michelangelo, and devoted by far the longest of the Lives to him – about 40,000 words, compared with about 5,000 on Leonardo – may have had something to do with this.)

  Despite Vasari’s stature as a biographical source, and the charm of his style, we must recognize his shortcomings as a biographer: he is cavalier with dates, partial and subjective in his judgements, and tendentiously pro-Florentine (he was a protégé of the Medici). His worst failing, perhaps, is a weakness for narrative clichés. It may possibly be true that Leonardo’s precocious brilliance led his master, Andrea del Verrocchio, to give up painting, but one cannot be sure, because other of Vasari’s Lives feature this master-outshone-by-the-pupil trope. It is an old suit of rhetorical clothes which Vasari likes, and which he expects his readers to like, and it has no real value as historical evidence. But, for all the flannel, Vasari remains invaluable: he is an acute and extremely well-informed observer, and a sensitive critic, and though he had no first-hand knowledge of Leonardo – he was eleven years old when Leonardo died, and had never been outside the province of his native Arezzo – he undoubtedly knew people who did have such knowledge. He was actively gathering information for the Lives in the late 1540s.17

  Vasari is the famous source, but he is not the only, or even the earliest, of Leonardo’s early biographers, and it may be useful to say something about the other, less familiar, sources I will be using. The earliest is a brief biographical sketch written in the zibaldone, or commonplace-book, of a Florentine merchant, Antonio Billi, in the early 1520s – thus shortly after Leonardo’s death. The original has disappeared, but the text is preserved in two sixteenth-century transcripts.18 Almost nothing is known of Billi, but it has been conjectured that he had access to the lost memoirs of the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Billi’s notes were later used, and much amplified, by another Florentine, who compiled an extensive account of various artists from Cimabue to Michelangelo. This unidentified author is generally known as the Anonimo Gaddiano, because his work survives in a manuscript formerly owned by the Gaddi family.19 On internal evidence this 128-folio manuscript was compiled in about 1540. These are independent sources earlier than Vasari (though known to him), and the Anonimo in particular has some fascinating material. He includes some vivid anecdotes supplied by a Florentine artist whom he calls Il Gavina, who had first-hand knowledge of Leonardo.

  Another concentration of contemporary interest in Leonardo was in Milan, where he lived and worked for many years (for more years, in fact, than he lived and worked in Florence), and there is important biographical material in a Latin manuscript by the Lombard historian, physician and emblem-maker Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, entitled Dialogi de viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus (‘Dialogues concerning men and women famous in our time’).20 It was written on the island of Ischia in the late 1520s. Giovio probably knew Leonardo personally. They could have met in Milan, where Giovio was a practising physician from about 1508, or in Rome a few years later, when he was lecturing on philosophy at the Archiginnasio. His material on Leonardo was also known to the ubiquitous Vasari – indeed it was Giovio who first planted the seed of Vasari’s Lives, during a lively discussion about the new art of biography, at a dinner-party in the apartments of Cardinal Farnese in Rome.21

  Another Milanese source is the artist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, a very promising painter until he was blinded in an accident in 1571, at the age of thirty-three. Thereafter he devoted his considerable, somewhat chaotic energies to writing, and produced a series of books of which the most important is his Trattato dell’arte della pittura (Treatise on the Art of Painting), published in 1584.22 He is a valuable commentator, because he was a total devotee of all things Leonardian: a specialist. He knew Leonardo’s executor, Francesco Melzi, he studied the manuscripts of which Melzi had sole control, and he recorded some which are now lost. Lomazzo is sometimes a spanner in the works – he has ideas and information which run counter to the orthodoxies of Leonardo studies (such as his casual assertion that the Mona Lisa and the Gioconda are two separate paintings). He was also the first to state more or less openly that Leonardo was homosexual.

  There are also the paintings, which are in some senses also documents. A Renaissance painting is not a personal statement in the way that a modern painting can be, but it can still tell us things about the man who painted it and about the circumstances in which he was working. It carries messages, both on the two-dimensional picture-plane (with the usual caveats about interpreting works of art biographically) and in the mysterious third dimension of the paint surface, with its micron-thick layers of suspended pigments (1 micron = 0.001 mm) which tell the story of a painting’s composition just as the stratifications of a rock tell a geological story. Sometimes the touch of Leonardo’s hand is recorded on the paint surface – smoothing or smudging – and occasionally a thumbprint. According to certain optimistic scientists,
the paintings may carry the actual message of Leonardo’s DNA, microscopically present in traces of blood and saliva, but at the time of writing this remains in the province of science fiction.

  The most obviously documentary paintings and drawings are those which actually portray him. Anyone asked to visualize Leonardo da Vinci is likely to come up with that image of the bearded old sage in the famous self-portrait in the Biblioteca Reale at Turin. This drawing is controversial: the heavily faded inscription below it, in a contemporary hand, is tantalizingly illegible. Some claim it is not a self-portrait at all. I think it is, but I also think it has excessively suffused our visual sense of Leonardo. It is necessary to remind oneself that Leonardo was not always a druidic figure with a long white beard, any more than Shakespeare was always that bald chap with a goatee depicted in the engraving by Martin Droeshout. These images work their way into the collective unconscious, become a kind of shorthand. It is a moot point whether Leonardo had a beard at all before his late fifties: he is clean-shaven in the presumed self-portrait of c. 1481 in the Adoration of the Magi (Plate 1 ), and in the probable portrait in the Casa Panigarola fresco in Milan, of the mid-1490s (see page 312).

  The Anonimo Gaddiano has a marvellous verbal snapshot of him: ‘He was very attractive, well-proportioned, graceful and good-looking. He wore a short, rose-pink tunic, knee-length at a time when most people wore long gowns. He had beautiful curling hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest.’ There are nuances of fashion and sociology which are hard to catch, but the essential image is of someone very elegantly turned out, a bit of a dandy. This is one of the reminiscences of the shadowy painter called Il Gavina; other material supplied by him can be dated to around