Da Vinci's Ghost, page 16
But that didn’t stop Leonardo, who now turned his attention from the brain to the interior of the skull that housed it. Observing what he could, and processing that information in the context of medieval brain theory, he then proceeded to produce a series of hauntingly beautiful illustrations (Plate 8).
What tends to impress viewers most about these illustrations today is their attention to anatomical detail and their artistic beauty. But their main point, quite literally, is metaphysical. With the confident precision of an architect and an engineer, Leonardo imagined cutaway views of the skull’s interior—and then coolly proposed coordinates for the seat of the human soul. “Where the line am intersects the line cb,” he wrote, referring to the grid he had superimposed over the lower skull, “will be the confluence of all the senses.”
It’s an astonishing moment: an act of visual speculation in which art, modern science, and medieval philosophy all come together in a statement of boundless investigative possibility. The hidden proportions of body and soul are not beyond discovery. Everything can be known; the microcosm can be mapped in full.
8
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
Painting is philosophy.
—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490–92)
IN 1488 OR 1489, in the midst of all his other activities, Leonardo launched yet another vast project: an exhaustive survey of human proportions.
According to a contemporary who copied some of his now-lost notes, Leonardo envisaged a survey of nothing less than “the universal measure of man.” At the most basic level, this meant that his focus would be not anatomy but anthropometry, or the measurement of the body’s parts. He was by no means the first to take this on, of course. It was precisely the sort of information that the sculptor Polykleitos had codified in his Spear Bearer statue and lost Canon; that Greek builders had embodied in their metrological reliefs; that Vitruvius had summed up in his Ten Books; that Augustine, in The City of God, had suggested might allow a superior human mind to grasp the nature of the soul; that Hildegard and so many other medieval theologians had used to connect the bodies of Adam and Christ to the order of the heavens; and that Alberti, in On Sculpture, with the help of his finitorium, had begun to chart in his geography of the human ideal.
In the scope of his ambition, however, Leonardo outdid all of his precursors. Basing his work on the comparative study of a number of live models, he conducted a series of almost unimaginably thorough studies of human proportions. From head to toe, from back to front, he scrutinized every part of the body and meticulously recorded the results of his observations. Even the briefest sampling of his notes and illustrations reveals the obsessive attention to detail that he brought to bear on his task (Figure 44).
Figure 44. Proportions of the human body standing, kneeling, and seated, by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1489).
From the top of the ear to the top of the head is equal to the distance from the bottom of the chin to the lachrymatory duct of the eye, and also equal to the distance from the angle of the chin to that of the jaw—that is, of the whole. The small cartilage that projects over the opening of the nose is halfway between the nape and the eyebrow.
The distance from the top of the throat to the pit of the throat, below qr, is half the length of the face and the eighteenth part of a man’s height.
The smallest thickness of the arm in profile zc goes 6 times between the knuckles of the hand and the dimple of the elbow when extended, and 14 times in the whole arm, and 42 in the whole man.
The foot, from where it is attached to the leg to the tip of the great toe, is as long as the space between the upper part of the chin and the roots of the hair ab, and equal to fivesixths of the face.
Significantly, he didn’t just analyze the body in one static pose, as others had before him. He asked his models to move. They twisted their bodies and bent their limbs, they stood and sat and kneeled—and at every step of the way, peering close, he tried to capture the changing proportional relationships of their bodies’ parts (“yl is the fleshy part of the arm and measures one head; and when the arm is bent this shrinks ⅔ of its length”).
On and on he went, month after month, gradually amassing reams of data. Today the whole enterprise seems radically misguided, but to Leonardo it must have felt vital. If he could carry out his task with enough determination, rigor, and insight, if he could somehow make sense of his data and synthesize them with what he was learning in his anatomical investigations, then perhaps he really might be able to take the universal measure of the human body—and soul.
MEANWHILE, THE DEBATE about the cathedral of Milan’s tiburio was at last coming to a head.
Leonardo had submitted his model in 1488. But he later returned to the project with renewed interest, fussing with his design and asking that the overseers return his model to him for modifications. On May 10, 1490, they did just that and even advanced him money for the job: a sign, it would seem, that although they had received at least nine other submissions, they still considered him a contender. But he had precious little time to make his changes. Eager to move forward with the project, the overseers had invited Francesco di Giorgio Martini of Siena to help them evaluate the proposals they’d received—and he was due to arrive in a matter of weeks.
Francesco had made quite a name for himself in the preceding fifteen years. Despite his humble beginnings in Siena, he had enjoyed great professional success in Urbino, serving Duke Federico as a master of artillery and building some 136 structures in the area, mainly forts and churches. He had also written a number of technical treatises, most notably his Treatise on Architecture, Engineering, and the Art of War—the influential work, replete with all those images of the human body inhabiting architectural forms, that Leonardo himself would later own. In 1489 he had finally returned to Siena, where, celebrated as one of the town’s most distinguished citizens, he had set to work on a number of local projects and begun a busy new life as a traveling consultant.
By the time Francesco arrived in Milan to weigh in on the tiburio project, he had also transformed himself into an expert on classical architecture. Over the years he had regularly visited Rome and other cities to examine ancient ruins, which he had sketched, annotated, and gathered in a manuscript he called Ancient Monuments, the first illustrated survey of classical architecture ever compiled. And in the late 1470s or early 1480s, as a natural complement to that project, he had decided to take on an even more ambitious task: translating Vitruvius into Italian.
Nobody had ever attempted a translation of the Ten Books into any language. It was a daunting job, and when Francesco began he was almost laughably ill-prepared to carry it out. His Latin was weak, his Greek nonexistent, and his understanding of ancient history and literature neither broad nor deep. But he plunged into the work, spurred on by his career ambitions and his developing fascination with the architecture of antiquity. For months, perhaps even years, he stole as much time as he could to work on the project: teaching himself Latin, reading widely, consulting scholars of Latin and Greek, combing through Alberti’s On the Art of Building, studying classical ruins all over Italy—and, gradually, based on what he was learning, applying himself to the actual job of translation. By the mid-1480s, through sheer force of will, it would seem, he had in his possession something unique in Europe: a translation, however partial and imperfect, of the only ancient guide to the classical art of building. He felt justly proud. “The art of architecture has been almost rediscovered anew,” he wrote, alluding to both his translation and his study of ancient monuments, “and with no small effort.”
By June 8 Francesco had arrived in Milan, and less than two weeks later he was in the company of Leonardo, traveling south across the Lombard Plain to consult on the design of the cathedral in Pavia.
No record survives of whether the two men had met before that trip. It would be more than a little surprising if they hadn’t, however, given their mutual involvement in the tiburio project, their shared connections in Milanese architectural circles, their overlapping interests in architecture and military engineering, and Leonardo’s insatiable desire to seek out experts on matters that interested him. By the second half of June, at any rate, the two were together in Pavia. Of that there’s no doubt, because the overseers of the Pavia project recorded payment for their lodging. “Item for 21 June,” it reads. “Paid to Giovanni Agostino Berneri, host of Il Saracino, in Pavia, for expenses he incurred because of Masters Francesco of Siena and Leonardo of Florence, the engineers with their colleagues, attendants and horses, both of whom were summoned for a consultation about the building. Total: 20 lire.”
At this point in the story, with Leonardo and Francesco having arrived and lodged together in Pavia, a fog of uncertainty sets in. How much time did they spend together? Did they get along? What did they talk about? The details are lost. But the two had so many common interests and concerns that one can imagine them engaging in a series of extraordinarily wide-ranging conversations. What they had to talk about was almost endless. Designs for the cathedral in Pavia and the tiburio in Milan. Questions of physics and mechanics. Specialized building techniques and materials. Fundamental principles of architecture, engineering, and mechanized warfare. The challenges of self-education, and techniques for winning the favor of powerful rulers. The list goes on and on. They could have discussed the treatises of Alberti and Filarete, and treatises of their own; the importance, in art as in architecture, of studying both anatomy and proportion; the correspondence between architectural forms and the human body; the need, especially in churches and temples, for designs based on not only the human form but also the circle and the square. And inevitably they would have brought up the subject of Vitruvius, whose work tied so many of these strands of conversation together.
The odds are that Francesco had his translation of the Ten Books with him when he traveled to Milan and Pavia. In 1490, after all, he was actively relying on the work to help him make sense of and classify the classical ruins he came across in his travels—a job he liked to refer to, echoing Vitruvius (and anticipating modern literary theorists), as “reconciling the sign with the thing signified.” In the late 1480s and early 1490s he was also borrowing directly from his translation as he revised and expanded his Treatise, working on the edition that Leonardo would later own. Given the amount of time he spent on the road in 1490 as an architectural consultant, it would seem to have been almost necessary for him to have carried both his Treatise and his translation of the Ten Books with him, so that he could not only consult and work on them in his spare time but also discuss and share them with friends, colleagues, scholars, and employers. If indeed this is what he did, it’s easy to picture him showing both books to Leonardo—and to picture Leonardo, for his part, pouncing at the chance to have a look.
WHICH BRINGS US, at last, to Vitruvian Man.
He was now some fifteen hundred years old. From the day of his birth, in the age of Augustus, he had been kept alive by a succession of anonymous scribes—but in written, not visual, form. He was an abstraction, a ghostly figure who existed in words alone. To be sure, as the centuries wore on, reflections of the idea did flicker across the pages of medieval manuscripts, embodied in all those mesmerizing illustrations of the microcosm: the diagrams of the cosmos, the guides to the constellations, the maps of the world, the pictures of Christ on the cross, the medical and architectural drawings. But throughout that entire period, as best it can be determined, nobody had ever attempted to conjure up an image of him based directly on how Vitruvius had described him in the Ten Books. Nobody had tried to work out in visual form, that is, exactly how the ideal human body might be made to fit inside both a circle and a square—until the 1480s, when, in the margins of one of his Treatise’s opening pages, Francesco di Giorgio Martini sketched the first known picture that can legitimately be called Vitruvian Man (Figure 45).
The illustration has a dreamy quality to it. But it was no idle fancy. It was an attempt to sum up the essence of the human analogy—the idea, as Francesco put it in his Treatise, that “all the arts and all rules are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body.” Many of the other human figures who inhabit Francesco’s architectural drawings bear an uncanny likeness to this figure, and that’s no accident. They are all Vitruvian Men.
Figure 45. The first drawing of Vitruvian Man known to be based directly on the description in the Ten Books. From Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s Treatise (c. 1481–84), owned by Leonardo.
Francesco was more suggestive than precise in drawing his Vitruvian Man. He drew him as an idea, it seems, but didn’t worry much about the details. The circle and square that surround him are imperfectly drawn. So is the figure himself, whose proportions don’t correspond terribly closely to those described by Vitruvius—and who, in general, doesn’t fit especially neatly inside the two shapes. In drawing the picture Francesco also chose to sidestep a basic problem with the Vitruvian text, one that Filarete had called out some two decades earlier in his own architectural treatise. “Vitruvius,” he wrote, “says that the navel is the middle of the figure of man.” So far, so good. “However,” he went on, scratching his head as he confronted the obvious, “it does not seem to be exactly in the middle.”
The navel indeed does not occupy the halfway point between the human head and feet—as is obvious to anybody who takes even a cursory look at the human body. Roughly speaking, the pelvic region occupies the halfway point, and Francesco drew his young man accordingly. Anatomically, that was the right choice, but, as he must have recognized, it meant that his figure did not live up to the Vitruvian ideal. Not that this seems to have troubled him much. In theory, he explained in his Treatise, following Vitruvius, a building’s measurements should derive from an ideal canon of human proportions—but as a practical matter, he continued, they “can be decreased or increased somewhat at the choice of the artisan.”
Did Francesco show Leonardo his drawing of Vitruvian Man? If so, did seeing it prompt Leonardo to draw his own? It’s impossible to say for sure, but enough circumstantial evidence does survive at least to suggest a link between the two drawings. Before the 1480s, when Francesco summoned up his image of Vitruvian Man, nobody in the fifteen-hundred-year life of the Ten Books had ever translated the work into the vernacular, and nobody is known ever to have explicitly illustrated its famous man in a circle and a square—but then, in 1490, the very year that Francesco and Leonardo lodged together in Pavia, Leonardo decided to illustrate that very same figure. Leonardo didn’t date his drawing, which ultimately makes its dating to 1490 a guess—but as guesses about Leonardo go, it’s about as good as they get. The style of draftsmanship, the type of handwriting, and the kind of paper and pen that Leonardo used for his Vitruvian Man all correspond closely to other drawings that he is known to have produced in 1490. And that’s the very period in his career when he was immersed in his intensive study of human proportions and had a special interest in comparing his own measurements to those listed in the Vitruvian canon.
AFTER ONLY A few days in Pavia, Francesco returned to Milan to help write a final report on the tiburio project. The report, dated June 27, detailed how the structure should be built. Not long afterward, the cathedral overseers at last picked two local architects to carry out the project.
Leonardo was not among them. Perhaps, having just spent time with Francesco, he knew already what the outcome would be and so decided to linger in Pavia rather than returning home to be let down. He does seem, at least, to have allowed himself some time in Pavia for research and sightseeing. In his notes he not only mentions the contents of the Witelo book he wanted to find, which suggests he spent time at the Visconti library, but he also praises the town’s ancient equestrian statue, describes the design of the chimneys at the Visconti Castle, sketches one of the town’s churches, and records the techniques he observed local workmen use as they shored up the foundations of the old city walls.
Leonardo made no mention of how long he stayed in Pavia. But sometime before July 22 he was back in Milan, because that night, according to his notes, he had dinner in the city with another architect and military engineer who may have helped inspire him to draw Vitruvian Man: a mysterious figure known as Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara.
What little is known about Giacomo Andrea derives primarily from a remark made by the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In one edition of his On Divine Proportion (1498), which contains geometrical illustrations by Leonardo, Pacioli included a dedication to Ludovico Sforza that began with a list of the “many very famous and wise men” who served the duke at his court in Milan. Pacioli placed Leonardo prominently on the list, describing him in the most glowing of terms—and then, immediately afterward, singled out Giacomo Andrea as one of Leonardo’s closest friends. “There was also Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara,” Pacioli wrote, “as dear to him as a brother, the keen student of Vitruvius’s works, but who is nonetheless well versed in his special military field.”
That single, tantalizing sentence represents virtually the full extent of what survives of Giacomo Andrea in the historical record. One of the few other known references to him concerns the circumstances of his death. In 1499 the forces of the French king Louis XII invaded and occupied Milan—and the following year, evidently because of his continuing loyalty to Ludovico Sforza, they hanged Giacomo Andrea. Not only that, they quartered his body and displayed its pieces on the gates of the city: a gruesome warning to those harboring like sympathies.
Leonardo himself seems to have had substantially better relations with the French, but at the end of 1499 he decided to leave Milan. He would return to live there some seven years later, in the summer of 1506—whereupon, if he hadn’t heard the news already, he must have learned of Giacomo Andrea’s death. No doubt still grieving for his old friend, he soon made another reference to him in one of his notebooks. “Messer Vincenzo Aliprando, who lives near the Inn of the Bear,” he wrote, “has Giacomo Andrea’s Vitruvius.”
