Da Vinci's Ghost, page 18
Figure 49. Possible copy of a now-lost study of human motion by Leonardo, from the Codex Huygens (c. 1560).
That sounds a lot like somebody speaking from personal experience. Maybe, at some level, Leonardo just couldn’t help drawing himself. At least one person who knew him in Milan believed precisely that to be the case: the court poet Gaspare Visconti. In a few tart lines of verse written at the end of the 1490s, Visconti accused Leonardo of indulging in the very vice that he had urged his own disciples to avoid. “There is one nowadays,” he wrote, “who has so fixed in his conception the image of himself that when he wishes to paint someone else, he often paints not the subject but himself.”
It’s hard to read those lines without thinking of Vitruvian Man. Maybe, while lodging at Il Saracino in Pavia, Leonardo started out by imagining that he would draw the figure as Francesco di Giorgio had—as a dreamy embodiment of a classical idea. Maybe, back in Milan, he imagined that he would draw it as Giacomo Andrea had—as an allusion to Christ on the cross. Maybe he came to the idea even earlier, imagining it as an analogue to Alberti’s geography of the human ideal, to Taccola’s man in a circle and a square, or to any number of medieval visions of the microcosm. Maybe, true to form, he imagined it as all those things and more: as a study of human proportions; as an overview of the human anatomy; as an exploration of an architectural idea; as an illustration of an ancient text, updated for modern times; as a vision of empire; as cosmography of the lesser world; as a celebration of the power of art; as a metaphysical proposition. His genius, in the end, was to bring all of these things together in a kind of universal self-portrait.
“He who understands himself understands much,” Taccola wrote under his man in a circle and a square. That’s surely the spirit, at once individual and all-encompassing, in which Leonardo summoned up the ghost of Vitruvian Man. Animated by the ancient philosophical injunction “Know thyself,” containing worlds both great and small, and ceaselessly reconfiguring himself in the act of self-study, the figure captures a hinge moment in the history of ideas: the intoxicating, ephemeral moment when art, science, and philosophy all seemed to be merging, and when it seemed possible that, with their help, the individual human mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of … everything.
EPILOGUE
AFTERLIFE
ARE YOU READY?”
Upstairs at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice, Dr. Annalisa Perissa Torrini looked over at me as I finished tugging on my tattered white cotton gloves. We were standing at the display table, about to open the folder containing Vitruvian Man. A few others working in the area had quietly gathered round, eager for a viewing themselves.
Nobody knows what Leonardo did with the picture after he drew it. He never had it printed; he made no sketches or mention of it in his notebooks; and not a single allusion to it has ever turned up in the writings of his contemporaries. Illustrated editions of Vitruvius did begin to appear in the early decades of the sixteenth century, including one published during Leonardo’s lifetime, but the relatively crude renderings of Vitruvian Man they contained clearly did not derive from his model. Only one direct reference to the picture survives from the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a cursory description recorded in passing in 1590 by an obscure Milanese theorist of art. The first copy didn’t appear in print until 1784.
All of which brings a certain irony to the fore. Today Vitruvian Man has become one of the best known and most frequently reproduced images in the world. But in Leonardo’s time, and indeed for centuries afterward, the drawing remained almost entirely unseen and unknown.
What little is known about its early history is this. When Leonardo died, in 1519, he bequeathed all of his notebooks and drawings, Vitruvian Man presumably among them, to his favorite pupil and assistant, the Milanese painter Francesco Melzi. Throughout his life, Melzi guarded the works as treasures and showed them off to visitors with great pride, but after his death, in 1570, his heirs allowed the collection to disperse. What happened to the drawing in the two centuries that followed is anybody’s guess, but it seems to have stayed in Milan. That, at least, is where it finally reappeared in 1770, bound by a certain Venanzio de Pagave into a private folio of drawings by Leonardo, which Pagave recorded as having received as gifts from the archbishop of Milan. The folio then soon passed into the possession of the Milanese art historian Giuseppe Bossi, a lifelong champion of Leonardo who, in 1810, published one of the earliest known copies of Vitruvian Man, along with the first accurate transcription of the accompanying text. After Bossi died, in 1815, the folio was acquired, and eventually disassembled, by a Venetian museum eager to expand its holdings: the Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Yet even then the picture remained almost completely out of view for more than another century. Only in 1956 did it at last begin to attract widespread public attention, when the famous British art historian Kenneth Clark reproduced it in a landmark work titled The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. The work became a best seller, and for Vitruvian Man the results couldn’t have been more dramatic. Released into the ecosystem of popular culture, the picture began reproducing rampantly, in forms both serious and lighthearted, and has been doing so ever since (Figures 50, 51, and 52).
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Figures 50, 51, and 52. Vitruvian Man in the modern world. Preceding page, top left: The Skylab II logo; top right: The back of the Italian one-euro coin. Above: Parody images.
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CELEBRITIES, THEY SAY, always seem smaller when you meet them in person. That wasn’t my experience with Vitruvian Man. When Dr. Perissa Torrini finally laid the drawing out on the table, I found it larger than I’d expected, no doubt because reproductions so often shrink it down. Not only that, as I peered in close at the original I found myself arrested, as I never quite had been before, by the fixity of the figure’s gaze. He looks straight ahead with eerie intensity, as if studying his own reflection. He’s a vision of the human ideal, pinned forever in place like a butterfly to a museum wall, yet he’s also a study in perpetual motion. He pushes one leg out to the side and pulls it back, then does the same with the other; he raises one arm and lowers it, then does the same with the other. Playing with the possibilities, trying to understand himself, he shape-shifts though a series of sixteen poses in all.
We spent close to an hour with the picture that morning, studying it from all sides, reviewing its history, peering at tiny details, discussing how and why it might have been drawn, holding it up to the light to see the pinpricks made by Leonardo’s compass dividers. What struck me immediately about it was the quiet confidence of its line. Leonardo had drawn the figure with remarkable delicacy, but at the same time, digging grooves into the paper with his pen, he’d practically etched it. Especially the hands and fingers, the feet and toes, and the outlines of the body: Leonardo had carved their contours right out of the page (Figure 53).
Figure 53. Hands and foot of Vitruvian Man.
The picture is reproduced so often today, and in so many different contexts, that it’s hard not to think of it as ubiquitous, timeless, and inevitable. Looking at the original, however, I found myself drawn to the little things: the brittleness of the paper; the gently fading quality of the ink; the stray marks on the page; the occasional flourishes atop Leonardo’s letters; the name “Leonardo da Vinci” written at the bottom of the page in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century hand; the faint residue of glue on the back of the picture, where Venanzio de Pagave had pasted it down into his folio. It all made me reflect on the utter contingency of the image, which could so easily not have existed. What if the Greeks had defined beauty and the nature of the cosmos differently? What if Octavius hadn’t decided to reinvent himself as Augustus? What if Vitruvius had never written the Ten Books, or if medieval scribes, flummoxed by the difficulty of the text, had quit copying it? What if Christian theologians and mystics hadn’t incorporated elements of Vitruvian Man into their worldview? What if Leonardo hadn’t lived in Florence, studied with Verrocchio, or turned to the study of architecture and anatomy in Milan? As distractible as he was, what if he had just never quite gotten around to drawing the picture? Or what if it had simply disappeared after Francesco Melzi’s death, like so many of Leonardo’s other drawings?
One particular day more than five hundred years ago, I couldn’t help thinking, Leonardo set other business aside, laid this particular sheet of paper down on a table somewhere—and then, after carefully dipping the nib of his pen into a pot of brown ink, began to draw Vitruvian Man. Perhaps he worked with Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara at his side. Perhaps he drew the picture after lodging with Francesco di Giorgio Martini in Pavia, or after discussing Vitruvius with Bramante in Milan. Perhaps he drew it to make sense of an age-old idea, to illustrate an ancient text, or to sum up the essence of the human analogy. Perhaps he flipped back and forth through his own notebooks as he worked, imagining that he’d include the picture in a treatise of his own. Perhaps he drew it to impress Ludovico Sforza, or perhaps he drew it only for himself, as a sort of metrological relief that he could consult privately while working on his paintings.
Perhaps he just drew it, without really knowing why.
Whatever the circumstances, he had much of his career still before him at that moment. He had yet to create his famous giant clay model of the Sforza horse, which would quickly win acclaim all over Italy as one of the greatest sculptures of all time—only to be reduced to rubble in 1499 by French soldiers celebrating their capture of Milan. He had yet to paint The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, the works for which today he is best known. He had yet to conduct the remarkable series of anatomical investigations that would make him a true pioneer in the history of both medicine and art, and he had yet to devise some of his most famous experiments and inventions. He still had countless plans to make, pictures to draw, notebook pages to fill.
When he sat down to draw Vitruvian Man, in other words, the moment was ripe with potential. Already Leonardo had observed and studied the natural world more thoroughly than anybody before him, and now, by marrying his unique talents as a scientist and an artist, perhaps he felt he was on the verge of attaining what had eluded others for so long: the godlike ability to see and understand the nature of the world as a whole. That’s the spirit, at once medieval and modern, and ultimately rooted in the quest for self-understanding, in which Leonardo would go on to live his life—and it’s why, after his death, in 1519, his friend and final patron, King François I of France, eulogized him with the highest praise he could imagine. “I cannot resist repeating the words I heard the king say of him,” a member of François’s entourage wrote. “He said that he could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only of sculpture, painting, and architecture; and that he was a truly great philosopher.”
“With what words, O writer,” Leonardo wrote alongside one of his anatomical studies, “will you describe with similar perfection the entire configuration that the drawing here does?” He might as well have been describing Vitruvian Man. Brought into being more than half a millennium ago and born of concepts far older still, the picture contains whole lost worlds of information, ideas, stories, and patterns of thought. But look its subject directly in the eye, and you’ll also see Leonardo da Vinci, staring out at you from the page. The man himself died centuries ago, but his ghost—timeless, watchful, and restless—remains unmistakably, unforgettably alive.
FURTHER READING
THE ONLY OTHER book devoted exclusively to Vitruvian Man that I’ve been able to unearth is Vitruvs Proportions-figur, a scholarly monograph published in German in 1987 by the Leonardo expert Frank Zöllner. It’s not easy to find, but much of its argument is reprised in the fifth chapter of Zöllner’s giant and beautifully produced Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, which is widely available in libraries and stores. The definitive source of information about the picture itself is I disegni di Leonardo da Vinci e della sua cerchia, a grand catalogue published in 2003, in a run of only 998 numbered copies, that contains facsimiles and meticulously detailed descriptions of all the Leonardo drawings owned by the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice. The Accademia devoted an exhibit to Vitruvian Man in late 2009 and 2010, at which time it produced a companion volume of essays titled Leonardo: L’uomo vitruviano fra arte e scienza, which provides interesting reading for those who know Italian.
Books about Leonardo abound in such quantity and such varying quality that it can be hard to know where to start or which ones to trust. I found three general works particularly useful as I tried to get a handle on his life and thought: Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind; Martin Kemp’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man; and Serge Bramly’s Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci. A less comprehensive but extremely engaging introduction to Leonardo is The Treasures of Leonardo by Matthew Landrus, a lovingly produced volume that includes removable facsimiles of documents, drawings, and paintings by Leonardo and his contemporaries. For those interested in the earliest accounts of Leonardo’s life, a particularly good source is Leonardo da Vinci: Life and Work and Paintings and Drawings by Ludwig Goldscheider, which gathers together several of them in a single place. Giorgio Vasari’s invaluable but not always trustworthy short biography of Leonardo appears in Goldscheider’s work, but it’s also very easy to find in the many editions of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists that have been published over the years.
For Leonardo in his own words, I relied primarily on two works: Jean Paul Richter’s The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, an essential and engrossing two-volume work originally published in 1883 but reissued in 1970; and Carlo Pedretti’s two-volume The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, a staggeringly detailed, entry-by-entry commentary on the contents of Richter’s compilation, published in 1977. Richter painstakingly translated every remark he found in Leonardo’s notebooks and then organized his translations by subject; Pedretti, for his part, updated and corrected Richter’s translations, provided extensive glosses, did his best to date every single entry, and published new material from the two Leonardo notebooks that were accidentally rediscovered in 1967 in the bowels of the National Library in Madrid. I also consulted The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, a popular one-volume abridgment of Jean Paul Richter’s two-volume collection, first published by his daughter Irma in 1952 but often reissued since, and in a few cases I relied on Edward MacCurdy’s two-volume The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1938. Another source I found extremely helpful was Philip McMahon’s translation of and commentary on Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, a work begun haphazardly by Leonardo himself but then cobbled together into book form from his notebooks (including some now lost) after his death by his apprentice Francesco Melzi. For Leonardo’s extensive writings on anatomy, I regularly consulted Leonardo da Vinci on the Human Body, compiled by Charles D. O’Malley and J. B. de C. M. Saunders, and discovered much useful related information in Martin Clayton’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Anatomy of Man.
As for Vitruvius, I found Indra Kagis McEwen’s Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture an invaluable guide, not just to the man and his book but also to the complicated social, political, and religious context in which he wrote it. I also learned much from the two most recent English translations of Vitruvius’s book: the very readable 2009 edition by Richard Schofield, published under the title On Architecture, and the amply annotated 1999 edition by Ingrid D. Rowland, published under the title Ten Books on Architecture. Both include a wealth of very helpful background information. One other English translation is worth consulting: the 1914 edition produced by Morris Hickey Morgan, which has stood the test of time remarkably well.
The remaining sources I consulted while working on the book—on ancient Greece and Rome, on the early reception of Vitruvius in Europe, on Christian symbolism and mystical thought, on medieval master builders, on the early history of medicine, on the artists and architects of the Renaissance, on Leonardo, and more—are too numerous and varied to call out individually. For a representative sampling, see the Works Cited section of this book, which also includes full bibliographic details for the works mentioned above.
NOTES
FULL REFERENCES for all works cited in short form in the Notes can be found in the Works Cited section of this book.
PREFACE
xiii “Leonardo, the complete man”: Betty Burroughs, “Editorial Notes on Leonardo,” in Vasari, Vasari’s Lives, 197.
OPENING EPIGRAPH
xvii “Man is a model”: Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks 2, no. 1162, 291. Translation slightly modified.
PROLOGUE: 1490
1 an inn called Il Saracino: Beltrami, Documenti no. 50, 32.
2 “The building supervisors”: Schofield, Shell, and Sironi, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo no. 209, 183. Unpublished English translation supplied to me by Richard Schofield, professor of architectural history, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia.
