To ensure the favor of his new patron, Jahiz put aside his Living Beings again to finish a long treatise titled “On the Merits of the Turks,” praising the pride, courage, and military prowess of Fath’s people and incorporating an epistle he had composed much earlier on the subject. He chose his patron well. For seven good years he had access to one of the finest libraries in the world and to one of the finest salons. He began to publicize Living Beings. But in 861, Fath and the caliph were both violently assassinated. Jahiz, now suffering from a paralysis that was making it impossible to move without help, was allowed to return to his hometown of Basra, where he died in 869 at the age of ninety-four, sixty years more than the average life expectancy for a man or woman living in the Abbasid Empire at that time. According to popular lore, he was crushed to death when a wall of books fell on him.
Jahiz died in the first year of the great Zanj uprising, which took place in the marshes south of Basra. The Zanj people, African slaves in origin, lived in shantytowns out on the marshes, either removing topsoil from the alluvial plains to render the plains fertile for agriculture or working in the salt mines. Their rebel leader was an eloquent and charismatic poet who had taken refuge in Basra only a year before. On a September Friday in 871, the Zanj rebels, joined by Arab horsemen from the desert, marched into the city through the great marketplace of the Mirbad and set fire to the market stalls, the mosques, and the bridges; they rounded up the citizens and massacred hundreds of them by sword outside the palace. All the animals of the Mirbad died, engulfed in the flames, and every structure in the Mirbad was razed.
It took the caliphate army two decades to quell the Zanj uprising, which spread north. In 893, the historian al-Tabari reported that in an attempt to maintain public order after the Zanj had been defeated, “the authorities decreed in Baghdad that no popular preachers, astrologers, or fortune-tellers should sit and practise their trade in the Friday mosque. Moreover, the booksellers were sworn not to trade in books of theology, dialectical disputation or philosophy.” When the traveler Ibn Jubayr came to the city in 1184, he found Baghdad “a shadow of itself, a washed out ruin or the statue of a ghost.”
Any Arabic translations of Aristotle’s works that survived the later sacking of the great cities and libraries of Islam by the Mongol hordes in 1258 were scattered throughout Europe. But the Catholic Church, long obsessed with rooting out and destroying the works of infidels abroad during the Crusades and tracking down heretics within Europe through the work of inquisitors, continued to be deeply suspicious of pagan ideas. In 1210, as the great walls of Notre Dame’s western façade rose to transform the Paris skyline, the Bishop of Paris ordered that all the members of a small sect in Champeaux be burned at the stake for preaching pantheism and materialism inspired by reading Aristotle. “Neither the works of Aristotle on natural philosophy,” the bishop decreed, “nor their commentaries are to be read at Paris in public or private. This we forbid under penalty of excommunication.” But it was too late to stop the spread of Aristotle’s ideas. Within twenty years, the pope, under pressure from the professors of France, insisted that the bishop reverse his decree. The ancient Greek’s rhetorical arts and his knowledge, the professors claimed, were an essential part of the war against heresy.
When Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Crusaders, a stream of refugee scholars fanned down through Italy pushing handcarts of rescued manuscripts containing the combined knowledge of Arabic and Greek science and philosophy—Aristotle, Averroes and Avicenna, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Plato. Many settled in Florence, where they established new networks and took in students, accelerating a flow of knowledge that had been crisscrossing Europe for centuries.
In 1423 a Florentine bookseller and book agent named Giovanni Aurispa returned to Venice from Constantinople with 238 complete Greek manuscripts. Within decades these had been translated into Latin, printed up on one of the many new printing presses in the Italian cities, and were on sale in the booksellers’ stalls of Florence and Milan, where a young artist named Leonardo da Vinci bought three translations of works by Aristotle for his rapidly increasing library.
*His full name was Abu ‘Uthman ‘Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Fuqaimi al-Basri.
*The Abbasid dynasty had only recently—AD 750—come to power after overthrowing the Arab-Syrian Umayyad caliphs.
*Some reports suggest that a number of translators received as much as the modern equivalent of $40,000 a month.
4
Leonardo and the Potter
MILAN, 1493; PARIS, 1570
Sometime in 1493, a family of Italian peasants pushed a handcart into the courtyard of a grand but faded palace in the center of Milan and asked to speak to Il Maestro, Leonardo da Vinci. Inside the Corte Vecchio the sculptor chiseled away at a colossal clay mold of a horse, twenty-four feet high, that lay on its side in the dusty half-light of the old palace ballroom, a statue commissioned by Leonardo’s patron, the great Duke of Milan, Prince Ludovico il Moro, to commemorate his father. Assistants and pupils crossed quietly between rooms carrying paint, clay, and wax; nearby, pupils stretched canvases, sketched, or mixed paints.
The visitors from the mountains waited, fascinated by the hum of activity in the atelier and hoping to get a glimpse of the legendary horse or the flying machine. Once owned by a great Milanese dynasty, the palace—fortified, towered, and moated—had fallen into disrepair by the time Leonardo, in search of larger premises, moved in there. The colonnaded pillars in the courtyards were peeling, the corridors drafty, the floors bare, the carved library shelves dusty and empty of books, the frescoes faded. But for Leonardo, who needed high ceilings, good light, rooms for his assistants, stables for his horses, space for his flying machine, stage sets, and mechanical designs and models, a study for his books, a laboratory for his experiments, and shady courtyards in which to draw, no building could have been better. It even had a section of flat roof from which he could launch his smaller flying machines when they were complete.
When the tall, handsome man with the mane of dusty brown hair emerged from the dark interior, the peasants told him they had been traveling for days, pulling their heavy cart over mountain passes and across pitted roads. In the mountains, people talked of Il Maestro and his mighty horse, they told him; people whispered that he collected the rocks called petrifications. So they had brought him red rocks famous in their mountains, rocks with strange markings and shapes, flecked with oyster shells and corals, some as big as a hand. How did the shells get to the tops of the mountains? they asked the sculptor as he examined their gifts in the sunlight of the courtyard. The priests maintained that they were carried there by the great flood described in the Bible, they told him, but the astrologers insisted that they had been made by magic deep in the rocks on nights when the stars lined up in particular patterns. Leonardo shrugged. He had no idea, he told them.
For months after the peasants had returned to their mountain village, well paid for their trouble and their gifts, Leonardo puzzled over how the seashells had washed up in the mountains. He turned over the red rocks in the light of a candle, peering into the mystifyingly entombed and clustered shells and consulting his books, struggling with his Latin to find an answer to the question the peasants had framed. As the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a peasant woman, Leonardo lacked a formal education, but like many artists and engineers of his day, he had fashioned himself into an intellectual. And like others in the community of intellectuals in which he was accorded equal status, he was searching for answers to the great mysteries of creation. Like the humanists around him, Leonardo was returning to the ancient texts that had flooded into Italy after the sack of Constantinople searching for answers. He had made himself a library.
Impatient to understand the way everything worked, and scornful of the dominance of the Church and of alchemy and necromancy, Leonardo had taught himself to read and write Latin; he wandered the booksellers’ shops of Milan looking for translations of ancient Greek manuscripts, now being translated into Latin
and spun out by the thumping printing presses invented only fifty years earlier by Gutenberg and now pressing ink onto paper in all the major Italian cities. Leonardo arranged his growing collection of books in the Corte Vecchio near a desk by an open window, books and notebooks that helped to channel the noise in his head, the perpetual rush of ideas and questions. By 1493 his library contained thirty-seven books, expensive printed volumes that included the Bible, the Psalms, books by Ficino, Ovid, Livy, Aesop, Petrarch, and Pliny, and three newly printed Latin translations of Aristotle. A decade later it would contain three times as many volumes.
Leonardo added the red rocks to the others in the collection of natural objects he had gathered from trips into the mountains. Beyond the rooftops of Milan, the mountain range of Le Grigne tantalized him; he would stand at the top of the towers of the Corte Vecchio or up on the roof of Milan Cathedral gazing north, running his eyes along the perpetually changing colors of the snowcapped mountain peaks as the sun moved and shadows brushed across them, wondering about those shapes and how they had come to be. He remembered a moment in his childhood when, walking in the mountains, he had looked down into a cave mouth and had been “astounded,” petrified, he wrote, both by “fear and desire—fear of that dark, threatening cave; desire to see if there was some marvellous thing within.” He painted striations of rocky landscapes glimpsed distantly through the Corte Vecchio windows, from the veering crags of The Virgin of the Rocks (ca. 1483) to the framed, sunlit, always out of reach mountains of The Last Supper (ca. 1496).
On several occasions, sketchbook balanced on his knee, Leonardo traveled by mule from Milan to Lecco up into the mountains along the Carraia del Ferro, the old Iron Road used for centuries to transport ore from the mines of Valsassina. He told himself and the duke’s envoys that he was studying watercourses for canalization projects, but he was also, as always, engaged in numerous investigations about the way water—deluges, watercourses, rivers, streams, and storms—had carved and chiseled and polished the landscape above and below ground through unimaginable stretches of time. Leonardo scrambled down into caves and mine workings so that he could draw the shapes and layers of rock, in places as molten as petrified water. He sketched the whirled and flurried patterns in the exposed rock outcrops—the signs of ancient flows and upheavals; he noted the lakes and rivers he saw there and the “fantastical things” he saw in the copper and silver mines; he described fish in the high lakes, hot springs at Bormio, and the ebbs and flows of the Fonte Pliniana. He talked to the mountain people, recording their knowledge of their landscapes. “In the Chiavenna valley,” he wrote in his notebook, “are very high barren mountains with huge rocks. Among the mountains you see the water-birds called marangoni. Here grow firs, larches and pines. There are deer, wild goats, chamois and terrible bears. It is impossible to climb without going on hands and feet. The peasants go there at the time of the snows with huge devices to make the bears tumble down the slopes.” In all his descriptions, he repeated the phrase “I myself have seen it” again and again, invoking the Aristotelian imperative he lived by: never trust a fact unless you have seen it with your own eyes.
But when the peasants came to the Corte Vecchio with their questions about the oyster shells in the mountain rock, Leonardo could not answer them. It drove him back to his books and notebooks. He knew he was not the first to be vexed by the problem of inland shells: the Greek philosopher and poet Xenophanes and the geographer Herodotus had concluded in the fourth and fifth centuries BC that mountain shells had been left behind by marine or alluvial inundations in some ancient unimaginable past. Leonardo scanned the pages of his copy of Aristotle’s Metereology for further speculations, but Aristotle had nothing to say about petrifications.
But in Milan there was never enough time to attend to anything, never any quiet to pursue trains of thought. There was always the horse; there was always the duke’s envoy asking about the horse; there were the duke’s parties to design entertainments for, pupils coming and going, the flying machine to engineer, and new commissions for paintings and frescoes.
Two years later, as he worked both on The Last Supper in the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan and on the horse in the Corte Vecchio, Leonardo was still distracted by a host of connected scientific and artistic questions, still taking notes, still puzzling about water, shells, and rock. War with France interrupted his work and his studies. The duke, despairing that his brilliant engineer and sculptor would ever finish anything, reclaimed the bronze he had assigned for the horse to build cannons. When the French army invaded Milan in 1499, the soldiers used the unfinished clay horse for target practice, fracturing it into pieces. Leonardo fled the city, eventually returning to his hometown, Florence. Over the following years, the fresco of The Last Supper in the Milan monastery crumbled, cracked, and faded.* In 1517, the diarist and travel writer Antonio de Beatis lamented that the mural was “beginning to spoil,” and forty years later Vasari saw “nothing visible but a muddle of blots.”
Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of Neptune and his horses, ca. 1504–5.
The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II/The Bridgeman Art Library
Leonardo saw mutability everywhere. He drew swirls in rock, and later, when those swirls reminded him of the curls of hair on the head of an old woman or the eddies in a mountain torrent, he drew the head, the rock, and the river next to one another in his notebooks. He looked at the profile of an old man and saw the jutting features of an apparently still molten mountain ridge. Sometimes everything seemed to him to be in the process of transformation. When he saw horses fighting he saw male warriors, their mouths open, foaming, teeth clenched. When he traced the arteries of a dissected body he saw trees and root systems; when he drew trees he saw veins. He believed, as the Greeks did, that the patterns and structures of small things mirrored the same patterns and structures in the universe as a whole. But, for Leonardo, if the world was made up of repeated patterns, none of them was a static archetype or the blueprint of a divine designer. Leonardo’s patterns and shapes were all on the move, passing continually through ripeness to decay. Nothing, he knew, remained untouched by time. Even the apparently solid masses of mountain ranges were passing constantly through processes of putrefaction and regeneration, driven by water that was ever flooding, gushing, eroding, silting, slicing, leveling, blocking—destroying and remaking landscapes in an endless cycle. He pushed his vocabulary to its utmost limit, forever collecting words to describe the actions of water on rock.
If rocks were no more than forms caught temporarily in time, then the same was true of living beings. For Leonardo, all forms dripped, flowed, and metamorphosed like Ovid’s creatures. As he sketched a face or a body in motion, other forms seemed to be constantly pushing through. He drew grotesque and misshapen bodies in states of transformation, feeling for points where the edges broke down, where something else seemed to be surfacing. The body of the duke on his monumental clay horse: Where, Leonardo asked himself, did the man end and the horse begin? Life was continuity and flux.
In October 1503, after a summer spent completing the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo and making excursions into the Pisan hills, Leonardo moved into the large disused refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria Novella so that he could begin working on a new commission, the first major public work he had attempted since The Last Supper. His task was to decorate a wall of the Council Hall on the first floor of the Palazzo Vecchio with a huge battle scene to commemorate the Battle of Anghiari, in which Milan had triumphed over the Italian League led by the Republic of Florence in 1440. The battle had become a symbol of the city’s power and ambition.
It was winter, and the roof and windows leaked. Workmen mended them and, at Leonardo’s instruction, papered them up, perhaps to keep out the light or to ensure privacy. Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman and scholar, sent over a long description of the battle copied out by his assistant, but the scene was already taking shape in Leonar
do’s mind. Ten years earlier he had written instructions on “How to represent a battle,” noting down images as vividly as if he were describing a recurring dream. The battleground was for him a place of intense mutability: “First you must show the smoke of the artillery, mingling in the air with the dust thrown up by the movement of horses and soldiers,” he wrote. “The air must be filled with arrows in every direction, and the cannon-balls must have a train of smoke following their flight.… If you show one who has fallen you must show the place where his body has slithered in the blood-stained dust and mud.… Others must be represented in the agonies of death, grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies and their legs contorted.… There might be seen a number of men fallen in a heap over a dead horse.” Always horses merge with men. His preparatory sketches juxtapose human, lion, and horse heads, eyes and nostrils dilated, teeth grinding, fury making them one. He called battle a “Pazzia Bestialissima,” a most bestial madness.
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