Da Vinci's Ghost, page 12
Figures 26 and 27. Left: Madonna and child, and a nave-aisle window from Reims cathedral, by Villard de Honnecourt. Right: Wrestlers and church choir, by Villard de Honnecourt, drawn separately but here superimposed to highlight their correspondences.
But Villard didn’t just see the human body in the makeup of churches. He also saw geometrical figures—notably, triangles and squares—in the makeup of the human form (Figure 28). This is a far cry from the ideas of Vitruvius about the relationship between the human body and architecture. Villard reduced the form of whatever he was drawing not to numerical proportions but to geometrical figures, and that—whether or not Villard was actually an architect himself, or thought about geometry in mystical terms—aligns him with the master builders of medieval Europe’s cathedrals.
BY THE END of the fourteenth century, it wasn’t just northern Europeans who were building cathedrals and looking to master builders for help. Many of the big Italian cities had decided to get into the game.
That was certainly the case in Milan. Local leaders there had drawn up plans for a cathedral in 1386, ambitiously imagining that they could erect it themselves. As work got under way, however, they soon recognized that they were out of their depth. Unable to decide such matters as whether the cathedral “ought to rise according to the square or the triangle,” as church records put it, they reluctantly decided to seek the advice of a northern expert. The man they ended up with, in 1399, was a French engineer named Jean Mignot, who, not long after he arrived, having discovered the ad hoc manner in which the project was advancing, threw up his hands in disgust.
One can understand why. A key element of the plan that the overseers had hatched for their cathedral involved the construction of what they called a tiburio—a central cupola, or dome, the vertical dimensions of which, grandly, had been designed to correspond to those of the Pantheon, in Rome. Mignot doubted the soundness of the proposed structure. Oozing scorn, he lectured the Milanese about the need to marry the practical art of masonry and building, which Italians were renowned for, with something northern builders knew much more about: the theoretical science of geometry.
Figure 28. The geometrical underpinnings of everything: a sheet from Villard de Honnecourt’s portfolio.
The Milanese didn’t want to hear it. Geometry was important, they acknowledged, and they made noises to Mignot about having worked with the dictates of geometry in mind. But science was one thing and art another, they told him. They had devised their plan according a symbolic model that involved much more than the mere arrangement of triangles and squares—a model that they knew their artisans could render durably in stone. In their model, they explained, “The Lord God is seated in Paradise in the center of the throne, and around the throne are the four evangelists according to the apocalypse, and these are the reasons why they were begun.”
This kind of talk made Mignot’s blood boil. The overseers were designing their cathedral “in a fashion more willful than sound,” he wrote. They were “ignorant people” who didn’t understand that “art without science is nothing,” which could lead to only one outcome. “If the church were to be made with said towers in this position,” he declared, “it would infallibly fall”—as had happened a century earlier, with the collapse of the choir vaulting at Beauvais cathedral, in France.
The Milanese kept Mignot on for more than a year, during which time he continued to make his case, at one point even appealing to a committee of other northern experts. Not surprisingly, they came down in support of his views, as did a few of the cathedral deputies themselves, one of whom focused politely on the technical qualifications of those currently working on the cathedral. “You have appointed as engineers,” he told his colleagues, “workers in granite, painters, glove-makers, and carpenters, decent men for the rest as I see it, but inexpert in these things.” Another Mignot supporter expressed himself less diplomatically, insisting that a complex building project had to be carried out “by a prudent geometrician, expert in such things, and not by idiots who call themselves masters yet know nothing.” Observing how work was proceeding on the cathedral’s first great northern pier, another of the cathedral deputies couldn’t contain himself. “May God help me,” he exclaimed, “I’ve seen shacks and huts of straw and hay constructed with better order. … The whole thing should be torn down.”
The majority of the cathedral’s deputies remained unconvinced, however, and gradually their patience with Mignot wore thin. On October 22, 1401, they dismissed him and proceeded to build their cathedral as planned.
By the early 1470s, after a succession of failed efforts, a dome of some sort was at last in place—and by the early 1480s it was on the verge of collapse. What happened next isn’t clear. Either the dome actually did collapse, or the deputies, fearing that outcome, had it dismantled. What is certain is that in the early 1480s they summoned another northern master builder to help them build a new dome: this time a German, who for several years grappled with the problem of the dome’s construction. In late 1486, however, after some kind of falling out with the deputies, he returned home, leaving behind nothing to show for his efforts except a newly rancorous debate among the Milanese authorities about how to proceed with their dome.
The whole episode exasperated Ludovico Sforza, who, with the threat of war fading, was eager to forge ahead with his projects of urban renewal and beautification. This endless squabbling simply wouldn’t do—and so, on September 4, he decided to put an end to it. “Because of the departure of the German master who undertook to build the tiburio, and his bad behavior,” he wrote in a letter to his personal secretary, “I wish you to hold a council in the castle with the best engineers in the Duchy, to explain the quarrel to them, to discuss it all with them well, and then to provide for what they will decide.”
IT WAS THE moment Leonardo had been waiting for. “When fortune comes,” he would write in about 1490, “seize her firmly by the forelock, for she is bald at the back.” Already he had made himself known to the Sforza court as a precociously talented artist and engineer. Now he had a chance to prove what he could do as an architect, by helping to solve one of the great building challenges of his age, just as Brunelleschi had done in Florence.
Whether Leonardo attended the initial council meeting isn’t known. But there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he did. In the months that followed the meeting he began to use paper that has been traced back to the cathedral supply. He started doodling designs in his notebooks for the cathedral’s dome, too, many of them distinctly modeled after Brunelleschi’s dome (Figure 29). And in the summer of 1487 he hired a local carpenter to build an elaborate wooden model of a solution he had worked out for the dome, the cost of which the cathedral deputies themselves covered.
Figure 29. Ideas for the tiburio of Milan cathedral, by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1487).
The model took more than a month to complete. When at last it was ready, Leonardo submitted it to the deputies with a cover letter, a draft of which survives in his notebooks. It’s worth quoting at some length.
My lords, deputies, fathers …
You know that medicines, when well used, restore health to the sick, and he who knows them well will use them well if he also understands the nature of man, of life and its constitution, and of health. Knowing these well, he will know their opposites, and being thus equipped he will be nearer a cure than anyone else. The need of the invalid cathedral is similar. It requires a doctor-architect who well understands what an edifice is, and on what rules the correct method of building is based, and whence these rules are derived, and into how many parts they are divided, and what are the causes that hold the structure together, and make it last, and what is the nature of weight, and what is the desire of force, and in what manner they should be combined and related, and what effect their union produces. Whosoever has a true knowledge of these things will satisfy you by his intelligence and his work. … Therefore, I shall try, without detracting and without abusing anyone, to satisfy you partly by arguments and partly by works … fitting them with certain principles of ancient architects.
The letter is classic Leonardo. It shows him thinking by analogy and trying, as usual, to perfect his art by roving among disciplines and tracing everything back to first causes. Medicine requires an investigation of the fundamental nature of life; architecture requires an investigation of the fundamental laws of physics; and both disciplines, at some point, point back to universal principles of design.
What’s especially interesting, however, is that passing remark about “certain principles of ancient architects.” Those survived only in the work of Vitruvius—which means that by 1487 Leonardo had begun thinking about the Ten Books.
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HE HAD PROBABLY been hearing about the work for years. It was a natural source for him to consult in Milan, for example, when he began to investigate problems of military engineering. Its final chapter contained a detailed discussion of precisely the sorts of machines that he was studying and designing in the early 1480s. Renaissance engineers and architects, moreover, liked the idea of Vitruvius, even if they didn’t know his work directly, and in offering their services to Europe’s powerful rulers they often proposed a working relationship modeled explicitly on the one Vitruvius had maintained with Julius Caesar and Augustus. The Romans, they often suggested in the fawning prefaces to their works, had won glorious victories and built the world’s greatest empire thanks to the ingenuity of military and civil engineers—and now you, sire, they told their prospective patrons, have a unique opportunity to help win back and rebuild that empire, thanks to my mastery of ancient and modern engineering techniques. Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico Sforza proposing himself as a military engineer was written in precisely this mode.
Naturally, Leonardo’s growing interest in architecture also led him to Vitruvius, as did the company he began to keep. During the 1480s in Milan, for example, he developed a close friendship with Donato Bramante, the architect who brought the Renaissance style to the city and who, in the early 1500s, would produce the initial design for the astonishing domed Basilica of St. Peter, the largest church in the world.
Bramante was some eight years older than Leonardo. But the two men had much in common. Like Leonardo, Bramante was originally trained as a painter, and in that capacity he may even have preserved a stylized image of himself and Leonardo in Milan in the form of a clumsily rendered portrait of Heraclitus and Democritus, the ancient Greek philosophers whose response to the human condition was, respectively, to cry and laugh (Figure 30). There’s something to this idea: painters of the time often inserted portraits of themselves and their contemporaries into their work. Both men’s features are exaggerated in order to accentuate their identities as crying and laughing philosophers, but if indeed their features are based on those of Leonardo and Bramante, the portrait represents something remarkable: the only picture of Leonardo to have survived from his time in Milan.
Figure 30. A possible vision of Leonardo (left) and Donato Bramante (right) together in Milan: the portrait of Heraclitus and Democritus by Bramante (c. 1490–97). Democritus is round-faced and balding, as was Bramante. Heraclitus wears the kind of clothing and hairstyle that Leonardo was well known for—and, tellingly, he sits next to a page of text written from right to left, like Leonardo’s own mirror script.
Bramante was a model of what Leonardo could become in Milan. He, too, had moved in search of a new life to Milan, just a few years before Leonardo, and had made a name for himself there by playing the lute, composing satirical verses, and staging plays and festivals. Gradually he had also managed to reinvent himself with great success as an architect. By the mid-1480s he was engaged in a number of high-profile projects for Ludovico Sforza, who made sure to include him in the group of engineers he summoned in 1486 to come up with a plan for building his cathedral’s dome.
As a Renaissance architect who worked in the antique style, Bramante knew of Vitruvius and must have discussed ancient architectural ideas with Leonardo, especially after the first edition of the Ten Books appeared in print in 1486. But Leonardo read Latin poorly, and Vitruvius remained ferociously hard to understand even for those who read him well, so both Bramante and Leonardo are likely to have encountered most of his ideas indirectly. Much of what they knew about Vitruvius and the principles of classical architecture, in fact, derived from one hugely influential modern source: On the Art of Building, in Ten Books, by Leon Battista Alberti.
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ALBERTI WROTE On the Art of Building in Rome in the 1440s. It was an audacious act.
In the 1,500 years since Vitruvius had presented his Ten Books to Augustus, not a single writer had produced another practical guide to architecture. Medieval master builders didn’t write books. But the time was now right for a successor volume, Alberti decided, one that would be updated for the modern age. And so he set out to write a monumental survey of architectural history and practice, modeled in many ways on the Ten Books, in which he would explain not only how buildings and towns had been constructed during antiquity but also how they might be constructed better in the future.
The job presented daunting challenges, even for a man as gifted and experienced as Alberti. Much of the problem stemmed from Vitruvius himself, whom Alberti described as “an author of unquestioned experience, though one whose writings have been so corrupted by time that there are many omissions and shortcomings.” Vitruvius was famously hard to understand, but Alberti didn’t attribute this just to the ravages of time. He also blamed Vitruvius himself. “What he handed down,” Alberti complained, “was not refined, and his speech such that the Latins might think that he wanted to appear a Greek, while the Greeks would think that he babbled Latin.”
Alberti felt he could do much better. He resolved to synthesize the best of classical learning about architecture—by making as much sense as he could of the Ten Books and by carefully examining every ancient building he could find. In the latter case he followed the example set by Brunelleschi, who, in the early 1400s, in order to learn all he could about architecture, had spent the better part of a decade studying the ruins of ancient Rome. “He made careful drawings of all the classic arches and vaults that still stood,” Vasari would later write about Brunelleschi,
and if he found fragments of capitals, cornices, or foundations of buildings buried in the earth, he engaged workmen to unearth them. … He never rested until he had drawn every kind of structure: temples, round, square, or octagonal; basilicas, aqueducts, baths, arches, the Colosseum, amphitheaters. In every church built of brick he examined all methods of binding and clamping, as well as the turning of vaults and arches. He made notes on how the stones were joined, and all the means of securing the equilibrium of the parts. … In his imagination, [he] beheld Rome as she was before her ruin.
But Alberti wanted to do much more than just describe the architecture of the past. In the Neoplatonic spirit of his own times, he wanted to get at underlying principles and present a universal theory of design that could guide future architects of the Renaissance. It was a job that turned out to be a nightmare. “My gods!” he exclaimed after finishing. “It was a more demanding task than I could have imagined when I embarked on it. Frequent problems in explaining matters, inventing terms, and handling material discouraged me and often made me want to abandon the whole enterprise.”
But he didn’t. This was the Renaissance, after all. Rome was rising again, and somebody had to revive and adapt the great architectural principles of antiquity for the modern age. How else would his people, the new Romans, be able to build on what the ancients had bequeathed them and at last assemble their own harmonious body of empire?
As Alberti and other Italian humanists saw it, Europe had been plunged into centuries of intellectual decline and social decay after the western half of the Roman Empire had fallen to the Germanic tribes of the north in the fifth century A.D.—those barbarous Goths and Franks. Political structures had fallen apart; temples and monuments had collapsed; moral standards had declined; whole fields of knowledge had gone to seed; Latin had devolved into a divergent sprawl of corrupt spoken dialects; and scientific treatises and literary works had been destroyed or lost. Engineering know-how had disappeared. Nothing more aptly symbolized the general state of collapse than the ruins of ancient Rome itself, which the humanist Poggio Bracciolini would describe, in 1430, after surveying the city from atop the Capitoline Hill, as a jumble of ruins covered in filth, half buried in the ground, grown over with weeds, plundered for the building of modern homes, and ignored by passersby. Those ruins, Poggio was moved to reflect, were all that remained of the imperial body of Rome, which now lay “prostrate and stripped of all its splendor, like a giant corpse with every part corrupted and eaten away.”
Alberti saw the city in the same way, as did the pope he served in the early 1450s: Nicholas V, himself a learned humanist. So when Alberti presented a first draft of his On the Art of Building to Nicholas during those years, the symbolism of the gesture would have been obvious. At the dawn of an imperial age, Vitruvius had written a ten-book guide to the building of empire and had given it to the man in charge of Rome—and now Alberti was doing the same. Not for nothing did he soon come to be known as the Florentine Vitruvius.
Alberti began On the Art of Building by defining what he considered an architect to be. He didn’t mean a medieval master builder—a craftsman, that is, who, following the plans of a patron, oversaw the business of construction. He had in mind a high-level court adviser, a man of rare genius and experience. Thoroughly versed in the liberal arts, as Vitruvius had recommended, and working always with nature as his guide, Alberti’s architect designed and built the things that made civilization and empire possible: towns and cities, houses, public monuments, temples, theaters, streets, walls, sewer systems, wells, baths, bridges, aqueducts, harbors, tunnels, mills, construction devices, machines of war. “Let it be said,” Alberti wrote, summing up the job, “that the security, dignity, and honor of the republic depend greatly on the architect: it is he who is responsible for our delight, entertainment, and health while at leisure, and our profit and advancement while at work, and, in short, that we live in a dignified manner, free from any danger.”
