Da Vinci's Ghost, page 8
The most influential of these was On Painting, a work he composed in the 1430s, hoping it would help bridge the gap that had long existed in art between theory and practice. No longer, he believed, should there be one class of people who worked only with their minds, and another only with their hands. To that end, unusually for his time, he produced two versions of the treatise. The first he wrote in Latin, for the edification of well-born patrons and scholars; the second he wrote in Italian, for practicing artists. Both were circulating widely in Florence by the 1460s. Leonardo would come to know it well—and would take many of its lessons profoundly to heart.
In many ways, On Painting represented the perfect supplement to the medieval Craftsman’s Handbook. It introduced and explained, for example, one of the most important artistic developments of the early Italian Renaissance: linear perspective. The technique, which involved organizing the space of a picture into a mathematically consistent grid, enabled artists for the first time to render a three-dimensional subject realistically on a two-dimensional surface. It had been perfected earlier in the century by Brunelleschi, and in On Painting (the Italian edition of which was dedicated to Brunelleschi) Alberti codified it for the very first time, a move that would have profound consequences for Renaissance art and science.
But explaining artistic technique wasn’t the point of On Painting. Whereas The Craftsman’s Handbook had taught that proper materials and practices were the foundations of good art, On Painting put its emphasis elsewhere: on the cultivation of a painter’s mind and character. Learning how to paint still meant learning how to prepare to paint—but now that preparation involved not grinding bone and mixing colors but educating oneself roundly in the liberal arts. Only then could one tap into the unified principles of harmony and proportion that governed the makeup of the world. As an art rather than a craft, painting as Alberti described it provided a powerful visual means of capturing truths about the natural world and human nature, and then conveying them to others in beautiful, instructive works of art. Hence the importance of linear perspective: it gave an artist of exceptional ability and great learning the almost godlike ability to re-create the world in miniature. “Painting,” he wrote, “possesses a truly divine power.”
That Leonardo knew On Painting well is clear from his notebooks, which are shot through with echoes of Alberti’s ideas. One that recurs repeatedly is the notion of the artist as a figure who, thanks to his careful study of the workings of the world, has become a Creator. “The divine character of painting,” Leonardo wrote at one point, “means that the mind of the painter is transformed into an image of the mind of God.” At another point he elaborated on the idea. “The painter is lord,” he wrote, and then continued, “In fact, whatever exists in the universe—in essence, in appearance, in the imagination—the painter has first in his mind and then in his hand; and these are of such excellence that they can present a proportioned and harmonious view of the whole, which can be seen simultaneously, at one glance, just as things in nature.”
A small sketch in one of Leonardo’s notebooks, datable to sometime between 1478 and 1480, gives this idea a strikingly visual form. It shows a young artist, possibly Leonardo himself in his studio, drawing with the help of what he calls a “perspectograph,” a device that corresponds nicely to one described by Alberti in On Painting. And what the young artist is putting into perspective, so that it can be seen at one glance, is surely not just a random choice. It’s a miniature model of the cosmos, known as an armillary sphere—a device at the center of which artists and theologians of the period sometimes imagined they could see the figure of Christ embodying the earth (Figures 17 and 18).
Figures 17 and 18. Top: A possible self-portrait of the young Leonardo, drawing an armillary sphere with the help of his “perspectograph” (c. 1478–80). Above: A sixteenth-century illustration of an armillary sphere with Christ at the center, embodying the world.
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IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO say when Leonardo first embraced the idea of the artist as a kind of creator-god, but the idea was one he would carry with him throughout his life. It wasn’t only Alberti who taught him to think this way. By the time he had begun to work independently, this sort of idea was part of the air he breathed in Florence, especially after he began interacting with the city’s elite. In Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle, Neoplatonism was all the rage—and one of the movement’s central tenets was that the human spirit, if properly cultivated through the study of the liberal arts, could partake of the divine.
The idea had an ancient pedigree. “Understand that you are god,” Cicero had declared in his Dream of Scipio, a widely studied metaphysical fable written not long before Vitruvius composed his Ten Books. “You have a god’s capacity of aliveness and sensation and memory and foresight, a god’s power to rule and govern and direct the body that is your servant, in the same way as God himself, who reigns over us, directs the entire universe.”
The Neoplatonists in Florence, who emerged as a cultural force in the latter half of the fifteenth century, latched onto this analogy between the human and the divine. The movement’s hugely influential leader, the scholar and translator Marsilio Ficino, deployed it in a vast treatise titled Platonic Theology. Human nature, he wrote, “possesses in itself images of the divine things upon which it depends. It also possesses the reasons and models of the inferior things. … Therefore it can with justice be called the center of nature, the middle point of all that is, the chain of the world, the face of all, and the knot and bond of the universe.” Ficino wasn’t the only one thinking this way. In 1486 one of his disciples, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, laid down a famous variation on the theme in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, a work that quickly became something of a humanist manifesto. In the Oration, Pico had God address Adam not long after creating him. “I have placed you at the very center of the world,” God tells him, “so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains.” Visual variations on this theme would appear in countless Renaissance texts (Figure 19).
Ahead of his time, Alberti pursued the logical implications of this human analogy years before Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, bringing it down to earth in a way that would appeal powerfully to the young Leonardo. Lofty Ciceronian talk about the godly nature of the human spirit was fine for scholars, Alberti suggested. But scholars were pale, flaccid, ineffectual creatures—“chained,” he wrote, “to the reading of manuscripts and condemned to solitary confinement … in the wretched obscurity of libraries.” Artists could offer a much more practical and accessible sense of all that the world contains, he suggested, by thoroughly investigating the proportions of the human body.
Figure 19. Man and the cosmos, from Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (1503).
AS A GUIDE to that investigation, Alberti decided to make a map.
For inspiration, he looked to a model laid out by the ancient Greek polymath Claudius Ptolemy. In the second century A.D., Ptolemy had produced a text known as the Geography, in which he had described the mapping of the world according to the coordinate-based system we still use today: latitude and longitude. Not only that, he had gathered together the coordinates of some eight thousand places, which allowed him to plot a fuller and more mathematically consistent map of the world than had ever been made before. After Ptolemy’s death the work had disappeared for centuries, and with it the idea of coordinate-based mapping. But it resurfaced in Europe in about 1400, in Florence, and as the century progressed it exerted an increasingly powerful influence on Renaissance thought. In the minds of the city’s humanists, in particular, the Geography provided not just a cartographic picture of the ancient world but also a visual metaphor for a powerful new idea: that the individual human mind, with the help of ancient learning, could find its way to a scientific understanding of the world as a whole.
This idea appealed to Alberti, who studied Ptolemy carefully. When, in the mid-1400s, he decided to map the human body, he devised a coordinate-based system of his own, which he explained in detail in a treatise titled On Sculpture. The system didn’t rely on latitude and longitude. Instead, it used a coordinate system designed to allow the mapping of a body in three dimensions. The key was an instrument of his own design, which he called the finitorium, or “definer”: a circle marked off in degrees with one end of a ruler attached to its center. This, Alberti, proposed, could be placed centrally over a human subject or statue, allowing one to measure the location of any part of a body along three different axes: height, width, and depth (Figure 20).
Alberti designed his system so that, in theory, sculptors could map and therefore re-create any body they wanted. But what he cared about most was the reproduction not of any one specific body, with all its eccentricities and imperfections, but rather of the human ideal—which is precisely what he went on to do in On Sculpture. After introducing his readers to the finitorium, he explained his method:
So that the subject may be clarified by examples and my work most useful to many people, I took on the task of recording the dimensions of man. I proceeded accordingly to measure and record in writing, not simply the beauty found in this or that body, but, as far as possible, that perfect beauty distributed by Nature, in fixed proportions, as it were, among many bodies; and in doing this I imitated the artist at Croton, who, when making the likeness of a goddess, chose all remarkable and elegant beauties of form from several of the most handsome maidens and translated them into his work. So we, too, chose many bodies, considered to be the most beautiful by those who know, and took from each and all their dimensions, which we then compared one with another, and leaving out of account the extremes on both sides, we took the mean figures validated by the majority of models.
Figure 20. Alberti’s “definer,” a device for mapping the human body in three dimensions, from a seventeenth-century edition of Alberti’s On Sculpture.
Just as Ptolemy had done in the Geography, Alberti appended a matter-of-fact list of coordinates to the text of his treatise under the heading “Tables of Measurements of Man.” He listed sixty-eight different bodily dimensions, covering everything from the basics (overall height, arm span, head size) to such minor details as the height of “the recess below the fleshy part of the inside lower leg,” the “maximum width between nipples,” and the “thickness of the arm at the wrist.” And at last, using the data he had gathered so methodically, he—or the copyists of his manuscripts—cobbled together a visual geography of the human ideal (Figure 21).
Figure 21. The proportions of the ideal human form, from a late-fifteenth-century manuscript of Alberti’s On Sculpture.
Ten manuscript copies of On Sculpture survive, the earliest of which dates to 1466, the year Leonardo arrived in Florence. During his time in Verrocchio’s studio or in his early working life as an independent young artist, Leonardo is sure to have come across the work and discussed it with colleagues and friends. In one of his notebook sketches he played directly with Alberti’s approach to body mapping, and on another page, in a passage datable to about 1490, he set out some preliminary thoughts for a text of his own, also to be titled On Sculpture, in which he explained how to transfer specific bodily measurements from a clay model to a marble statue. These examples suggest that Leonardo read Alberti’s On Sculpture literally, as a practical guide. But in the heady Neoplatonic spirit of his times, he would also have understood Alberti’s geography of the human ideal as something more ambitious—as a kind of map of the microcosm that could reveal all sorts of metaphysical truths.
Alberti himself seems to have felt the same way, as he made clear in Momus, a literary work he produced at about the same time as On Sculpture. “Let me tell you what I was told by a certain painter,” he wrote. “In studying the lineaments of human bodies, he saw more than all you star-gazing philosophers put together.”
4
MILAN
The painter’s mind must of necessity enter into nature’s mind.
—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1492)
LEONARDO HAD TROUBLE with deadlines.
His first recorded commission dates to 1478. On January 10 of that year, the Florentine authorities awarded him the job of painting the altarpiece in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall of Florence. It was a hugely desirable assignment, for which he received an ample advance. But he never delivered. In 1481 he received another important commission, this time to paint an altarpiece for a monastery just outside of the city. Records from the period show him to have been struggling financially at the time—but once again he failed to complete the job.
It was a pattern that would endure throughout his career. According to a story recounted by Vasari, when Leonardo, late in his life, was commissioned by the pope himself to paint a portrait, he didn’t set to work immediately, as most painters would have done. Instead, he began an intense round of experimentation with different herbs and oils, trying to concoct a special new varnish that he could apply to his finished portrait. “Alas!” the exasperated pontiff exclaimed. “This man will do nothing at all, since he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning.” Vasari himself more charitably attributed the problem to Leonardo’s genius. “In his imagination,” he explained, “he frequently formed enterprises so difficult and so subtle that they could not be entirely realized and worthily executed by human hands. His conceptions were varied to infinity.”
Indeed they were. But there’s a more prosaic way of explaining Leonardo’s trouble with deadlines. By the time he received his first independent assignment he had decided that he would not—and could not—simply churn out generic works as part of a factory collective. What he wanted to do was to become, as he put it, “the universal master of representing every kind of form produced by nature.” But to achieve that, he realized, he would have to investigate the makeup and function of everything: a gloriously fruitful but ultimately quixotic quest that would last for the rest of his life. Decades later, he was still grasping out in every direction to collect pieces of the ever-expanding puzzle. “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of the crocodile,” he wrote at one point. “Of the flight of the 4th kind of butterfly that consumes winged ants,” he wrote at another.
Most artisans and craftsmen of Leonardo’s time wouldn’t have dreamed of concerning themselves with such things. They inhabited the realm of surfaces and appearances. Natural philosophy was the province of the scholastics: learned university types who toiled away minutely parsing the Bible and the doctrinally acceptable works of the great ancient and medieval authorities, which, they assumed, contained all it was necessary to know about the natural world and the meaning of existence.
Leonardo—the unlettered craftsman, the artist-engineer, the playful tinkerer, the mixer of potions, the visual thinker—recoiled at this idea. He stayed down to earth. His approach to natural philosophy, he decided, would be resolutely empirical: he would get his hands dirty. The scholastics considered such an approach ignorant and ignoble, but he didn’t care. “They will say,” he wrote, “that because I have no book learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to treat of. But they do not know that for their exposition my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.”
It’s not clear exactly how or when Leonardo began thinking this way. But by the time he struck out on his own as an artist he’d already started. In notes that survive from the early 1480s, for example, when testing out a new pen he scribbled variations on the phrase “Dimmi” (“Tell me”). “Tell me … tell me whether … tell me how things are … tell me if there was ever.” These are the tics of an increasingly hungry mind.
He began asking such questions of others, too. In one note, which dates from about 1481 and is written alongside sketches of a sundial, a pneumatic or hydraulic water clock, and various geometrical figures, he lists eight Florentines whom he seems to want to consult. Of those eight, three have yet to be identified, one is a painter, and the remaining four are men whose areas of expertise hint at the rapidly diversifying range of Leonardo’s curiosities. The first, Carlo Marmocchi, was an astronomer and geographer whose quadrant (or treatise The Quadrant) Leonardo noted an interest in; the second, whom Leonardo called Benedetto of the Abacus, was a well-known local mathematician; the third, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, was one of the great sages of fifteenth-century Florence; and the fourth, Joannes Argyropoulos, was a hugely influential Byzantine scholar who had fled to Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
It’s no surprise that Leonardo was drawn to Toscanelli and Argyropoulos. Each was nearing the end of an illustrious life, and both had reputations as men who could teach Leonardo a great deal. During his exile, Argyropoulos had been pivotal in helping the humanists of Florence translate and reassess the works of Aristotle, whose broad range of writings on natural philosophy had been studied only very selectively in Europe during the Middle Ages, by Christian scholars interested only in those parts of his work that would help buttress their theology and metaphysics. Toscanelli, for his part, would have been a hugely appealing figure to Leonardo. A widely respected authority on subjects as varied as astronomy, geography, linear perspective, mathematics, and optics, and a friend of artists, humanists, and scholastics alike, he exerted a long and powerful influence on Florentine intellectual and cultural life. His circle included not only Alberti, Verrocchio, and Marsilio Ficino, the dean of the Florentine Neoplatonists, but also Brunelleschi—inside whose dome, in about 1468, he constructed a giant gnomon that for centuries afterward was used to make precise observations of the sun’s wanderings. Today, however, he’s best known for something else: the letter he wrote to a Portuguese friend in 1474, proposing that the best way to reach the Far East from Europe was not to sail east, under Africa, but west, across the uncharted Atlantic. Several years later, that letter would catch the attention of Christopher Columbus, who in turn would write to Toscanelli to ask for more information—and the brief correspondence the two men entered into supposedly helped convince Columbus to set sail in 1492. All of which leads to a remarkable thought: in the year or two before his death, in 1482, Toscanelli may have dispensed advice to both Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus.
