The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance

by Fritjof Capra

  Leonardo’s originality revealed itself in his seemingly effortless integration of architecture and complex geometry. This is especially apparent in his many designs of centralized, radially symmetric churches and “temples” (see Fig. 2-5). Although churches with such central plans were a favorite design of Alberti, Brunelleschi, and other Renaissance architects, the playful clusters of geometric patterns—almost reminiscent of the fractals of today’s complexity theory—are unique to Leonardo. “The mathematical integration of the parts,” observes Martin Kemp, “somehow achieves a compelling sense of organic unity in the exterior perspective of the building in a way which is uniquely his own. Equally impressive and characteristic is the spatial vision which allows him to display his design as a fully three-dimensional concept, like a piece of sculpture, rather than as a compound of plan and flat elevations.”73

  Figure 2-5: Design for Centralized “Temple,” c. 1488, Ms. Ashburnham I, folio 5v

  In view of Leonardo’s central focus on understanding nature’s forms, both in the macro-and the microcosm, it is not surprising that he emphasized similarities between architectural structures and structures in nature, especially in human anatomy. In fact, this linking of architecture and anatomy goes back to antiquity and was common among Renaissance architects, who recognized the analogy between a good architect and a good doctor.74 As Leonardo explained,

  Doctors, teachers, and those who nurse the sick should understand what man is, what is life, what is health, and in what manner a parity and concordance of the elements maintains it, while a discordance of these elements ruins and destroys it…. Thesame is also needed for the ailing cathedral, that is, a doctor-architect who understands well what a building is and from what rules the correct way of building derives.75

  However, Leonardo went beyond the common analogies, for example, comparing the dome of a church to the human cranium, or the arches in its vaulting to the rib cage. Just as he was keenly interested in the body’s metabolic processes—the ebb and flow of respiration, and the transport of nutrients and waste products in the blood—he also paid special attention to the “metabolism” of a building, studying how stairs and doors facilitate movement through the building.76 A sheet from the Windsor Collection showing a diagram of human blood vessels next to a series of sketches of stairs makes it clear that Leonardo consciously applied the metaphor of metabolic processes in his architectural designs.77

  Leonardo’s special attention to how movements would flow through his buildings was not restricted to the interiors, but included the surrounding grounds as well, by means of doorways, loggias, and balconies. In fact, in most of his designs of villas and palaces, he considered the garden to be an integral part of the house. These designs reflect his continual efforts to integrate architecture and nature. The emergence and evolution of the Renaissance garden, and Leonardo’s original contributions to landscape and garden design, are discussed in great detail by botanist William Emboden in his beautiful volume Leonardo da Vinci on Plants and Gardens.78

  A further extension of Leonardo’s organic view of buildings and his special focus on their “metabolism” is apparent in his pioneering contributions to urban design. When he witnessed the plague in Milan shortly after his arrival in the city in 1482, he realized that its devastating effects were largely due to Milan’s appalling sanitary conditions. In typical fashion, he responded with a proposal for rebuilding the city in a way that would provide decent housing for people and shelters for animals, and would allow the streets to be cleaned regularly by flushing them with water. “One needs a fast flowing river to avoid the corrupt air produced by stagnation,” Leonardo reasoned, “and this will also be useful for regularly cleansing the city when opening the sluices.”79

  Leonardo’s design of the ideal city was radical for the time. He suggested dividing the population into ten townships along the river, each with approximately thirty thousand inhabitants. In this way, he wrote, “you will disperse such great agglomeration of people, packed like a herd of goats, on each other’s backs, who fill every corner with their stench and sow the seeds of pestilence and death.”80

  In each township there would be two levels—an upper level for pedestrians and a lower level for vehicles—with stairs connecting them. The upper level would have arcaded walkways and beautiful houses with terraced gardens. At the lower level would be shops and storage areas for goods, as well as roads and canals for delivering the goods with carts and boats. In addition, Leonardo’s design included underground canals to carry away sewage and “fetid substances.”81

  It is clear from Leonardo’s notes that he saw the city as a kind of living organism in which people, material goods, food, water, and waste needed to move and flow with ease for the city to remain healthy. Ludovico, unfortunately, did not implement any of Leonardo’s novel ideas. Had he done so, the history of European cities might have been quite different. As physician Sherwin Nuland points out, “Leonardo had envisioned a city based on principles of sanitation and public health that would not be appreciated for centuries.”82

  Two years before he died, Leonardo had another opportunity to reflect on urban design when he was asked by the king of France to draw up plans for a new capital and royal residence.83 Once more, Leonardo designed a city crisscrossed with canals, to be used not only for the water supply of splendid fountains but also for irrigation, transportation, and for cleaning the city and removing waste. Again, Leonardo insisted on the importance of water circulation for the health of the urban organism. This time, work on the huge project was actually begun, but it was abandoned a few years later when an epidemic decimated the workforce.

  Leonardo’s idea of urban health, based on the view of the city as a living system, was reconceived very recently, in the 1980s, when the World Health Organization initiated its Healthy Cities Project in Europe.84 Today, the Healthy Cities movement is active in over one thousand cities around the world, most likely without participants being aware that the principles on which it is based were set forth by Leonardo da Vinci more than five centuries ago.

  THE ARTIST AS MAGICIAN

  One of the essential duties of the courtly artist in the Renaissance was to design the settings and scenery for court festivities—pageants and theatrical performances—with all the accessory decorations, costumes, and ephemeral architecture. Through these spectacles, the artist created for the court the images of magnificence, wealth, and power that its ruler wanted to project. The Sforza court in Milan was famous for the ostentatious affluence of its pageants, which took place at annual religious festivals as well as at a series of spectacular royal weddings. Leonardo was well aware of the importance of his role in creating dazzling spectacles for such events. He dedicated considerable time and energy to these tasks and excelled in them no less than in his other artistic pursuits. Indeed, as Arasse points out, during his lifetime “Leonardo [owed] much of his fame to his unrivaled talents as artist of the ephemeral.”85

  Theatrical performances in particular were an ideal vehicle for Leonardo to show his diversity and brilliance as a designer. For many plays at court he acted as producer, stage and costume designer, and makeup artist as well as inventor of stage machinery.86 He carefully studied these theatrical arts and went on to create many innovations. For example, it was Leonardo who invented the first revolving stage in the history of the theater; he was also the first to raise the curtain, rather than have it fall at the start of the performance, as had been the custom.87

  For the most elaborate performances, Leonardo combined his skills of painting, costume design, musical composition, and engineering to create a complete spectacle, with moving scenery and “special effects” produced by his stage machines. To his contemporaries, these performances were awe-inspiring, bordering on magic. For example, in the production of Baldassare Taccone’s Danaë, Leonardo created dazzling illusions of Zeus’s transformation into golden rain, and of Danaë’s metamorphosis into a star. During the latter “the audience could see a star�
��rising up slowly towards heaven, with sounds so powerful that it seemed the palace would fall down.”88 When he staged the play Orfeo by Angelo Poliziano, Leonardo invented a system of gearwheels and counterweights to create a mountain that would suddenly split open, revealing Pluto on his throne, rising from the depths of the underworld, accompanied by terrifying sounds and illuminated by “infernal” lights.89 These spectacular performances firmly established Leonardo’s fame as a brilliant engineer and peerless magician of the stage.

  INTERWOVEN STRANDS

  The tapestries and other decorative elements designed for the courtly pageants and “masques” usually included elaborate emblems and allegories, rich in symbolism and wordplay, which served to glorify the ruling powers. Leonardo produced many of these allegorical drawings, with complex symbolic messages, many of which have been impossible for modern scholars to interpret. He also became fascinated with and used a more abstract kind of emblem featuring tangled curves in the form of knots and scrolls. These knot designs, which were very popular in the late fifteenth century, were known as fantasie dei vinci, after the reeds (vinci) used in basketry. Exploiting the fortuitous connection with his name, Leonardo used such interlaced vinci motifs as his signature designs in numerous sketches.90

  During his last two years at the Sforza court, Leonardo created the ultimate emblem for Prince Ludovico—a vast and complex fantasia dei vinci that covered the walls and vaulted ceiling of an entire room. Known as the Sala delle Asse (Room of the Wooden Boards), this is a large square room in the north tower of the Sforza Castle, in which four lunettes on each wall combine to generate an elaborate vaulting. Leonardo’s highly inventive decoration shows a grove of mulberry trees rooted in rocky subsoil, their trunks rising up to the ceiling like columns supporting the actual vaulting, their branches crisscrossing the vault in a Gothic rib structure of elegantly intertwined curves.91 The smaller twigs and leaves form a luxuriant tangled labyrinth of greenery spreading around the walls and across the ceiling. The entire composition is held together by a single endless golden ribbon winding in and out of the branches, in the complex arabesques of traditional knot designs.

  The painting in the Sala delle Asse is remarkable on several levels. With his extensive knowledge of plants, Leonardo gave the branches and leaves a surprisingly realistic appearance of exuberant growth, and he gracefully and beautifully integrated these natural growth patterns into the existing architectural structure and into the geometry of the formal decoration (see Fig. 2-6). In addition, Leonardo wove multiple meanings into his leafy labyrinth that went far beyond the obligatory glorification of the Prince.92 The dedication of the room to Ludovico’s magnificence is obvious. Inscriptions on four prominently placed tablets praise his politics, and a shield bearing the joint coats of arms of Ludovico and his wife, Beatrice d’Este, adorns the center of the vault. The intertwining branches were meant to commemorate their union.

  But there are more subtle layers of meaning to Leonardo’s design. The mulberry tree itself is rich in symbolism. The use of a stylized tree with leaves and roots was one of the Sforza emblems. The mulberry is an allusion to the prince’s well-known appellation il Moro (“the Moor”), which also means “mulberry.” The mulberry was also considered a wise and cautious tree, since it flowers slowly and ripens quickly, and hence was known as a symbol of wise government. In addition, the mulberry was connected with silk production, a major industry in Milan which Ludovico strongly encouraged. This link to industry is reinforced by the golden ribbon, which not only evokes the elegance of the Sforza court but is also a reminder of the manufacture of gold thread, another Milanese specialty.

  Figure 2-6: Detail from the Sala delle Asse, 1498–99, Castello Sforzesco, Milan

  At an even deeper level, Leonardo’s decoration conveys in symbolic form his conviction that human industry should integrate itself harmoniously into nature’s living forms. Indeed, it may not be too far-fetched to see the vinci decoration of the Sala delle Asse as a symbol of Leonardo’s science. The individual trunks, or columns, on which it rests, might be seen as the treatises he planned to write on various subjects, grounded in the soil of traditional knowledge, but intended to break through the rocks of the Aristotelian worldview and take human knowledge to new heights. As the contents of each treatise unfolded, they would interlink with each other to form a harmonious whole. The similarities of patterns and processes that interconnect different facets of nature provide the golden thread that integrates the multiple branches of Leonardo’s science into a unified vision of the world.

  One hundred years after Leonardo, the French philosopher René Descartes compared science (or “natural philosophy,” as it was then called) to a tree. “The roots are metaphysics,” he wrote, “the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences.”93 In Descartes’ metaphor, physics, itself grounded in metaphysics, was the single foundation of all the sciences, the discipline that provides the most fundamental description of reality. Leonardo’s science, by contrast, cannot be reduced to a single foundation, as we have seen. Its strength does not derive from a single trunk, but from the complex interconnectedness of the branches of many trees. For Leonardo, recognizing the numerous patterns of relationships in nature was the hallmark of a universal science. Today, we, too, sense a greater need for such universal, or systemic, knowledge, which is one of the reasons why Leonardo’s unified vision of the world is so relevant to our time.

  In the following chapters I shall follow Leonardo’s golden ribbon along various branches of his science of living forms. But before beginning that journey, it is important to know more about when and where those branches grew and foliated in his own life.

  THREE

  The Florentine

  In view of the enormous fame Leonardo enjoyed during his lifetime and the voluminous notes he left behind, it is astonishing that reliable biographical information about his life is very scant. In his Notebooks, he rarely commented on external events; he rarely dated his entries or drawings; and there are very few exact references to specific events in his life in official documents or the letters of his time.

  Thus it is not surprising that succeeding generations of biographers and commentators relied to a degree on legends and myths about this great genius of the Renaissance. It was not until the late nineteenth century, when the Notebooks were finally transcribed and published, that the full extent of Leonardo’s intellect began to emerge, and only in the twentieth century that biographers and art historians finally were able, with a great deal of detective work, to separate fact from fiction and produce accurate biographies.1

  These detailed accounts make it clear that Leonardo’s life was driven by his tremendous scientific curiosity. He always sought to find stable situations with regular incomes that allowed him to engage in his intellectual pursuits relatively undisturbed, rather than relying on infrequent commissions for works of art. Leonardo was very successful in this endeavor, living quite comfortably for most of his life. He was employed as court artist and engineer by various rulers in Milan, Rome, and in France, and he did not hesitate to change his allegiances when the political fortunes of his patrons shifted—as long as the new ruler again offered him a stable income and enough freedom to continue his scientific investigations.

  Leonardo’s desire for stable circumstances, in which he could calmly practice his art and science as well as carry out the many duties expected from him at court, stands in strong contrast to the turbulent times in which he lived. Italy in the fifteenth century was a kaleido-scope of over a dozen independent states, which formed ever-shifting alliances in a constant struggle for economic and political power that was always on the verge of degenerating into war. The principal powers of the time were the duchies of Milan and Savoy and the republic of Venice in the north, the republic of Florence and the territories of the papacy in the center of the peninsula, and the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily in the south. In addition, there were a number of smaller states—Genoa, Mantua, Ferrara,
and Siena.

  Leonardo had to move many times in the face of impending war, foreign occupations, and other changes of political power. Thus the trajectory of his life led him from Florence to Milan, from Milan to Venice, back to Florence, back again to Milan, then to Rome, and finally to Amboise in France. In addition, he made many short journeys within Italy, including several trips from Florence to Rome and to various places in Tuscany and Romagna, and from Milan to Pavia, Lake Como, and Genoa. About the many sudden changes and forced movements in his life, there is hardly a word in Leonardo’s Notebooks. Considering that travel by horse and mules took considerable time in those days, it is evident that he spent a significant portion of his life on the road, which makes his vast scientific and artistic output even more impressive.

  In spite of all these peregrinations, Leonardo’s art and culture remained rooted in Florence. He spoke a distinctive, eloquent Tuscan that was greatly admired at the Sforza court in Milan, and throughout his life he was known as “Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine.” Before he acquired his Florentine culture, however, Leonardo had several formative childhood experiences in the Tuscan countryside that exerted lasting influences on his character and intellect.

  CHILDHOOD IN VINCI

  Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, a charming Tuscan village on the slopes of Montalbano, some twenty miles west of Florence. His father, Ser Piero da Vinci, was a young and ambitious notary,2 his mother a peasant girl named Caterina. Leonardo was an illegitimate child, which severely limited his career options later on. Soon after his birth, his mother was married off to a local peasant, while his father married a young woman from the Florentine bourgeoisie, probably in order to further his career in Florence, where he gradually built up a clientele. The boy was raised by his elderly grandparents and his uncle Francesco, who managed their farm in Vinci.