The battle scene that took shape on the paper suspended by ropes in a frame on the refectory wall in early summer 1505 might have been a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; a great tangle of human and animal body parts, it was impossible to see where one body ended and another began. In Rubens’s extraordinary watercolor copy of Leonardo’s fresco, painted in 1603, horses and men merge as the soldiers fight for possession of the standard.* Everywhere in the sketches for the battle scene, Leonardo dissolved the edges between man and animal and pressed further into the mutability of species than he had yet dared, further into the scaled, furred, feathered, and watery mutability of his dreams. On the left he drew the enemy leader, monstrous in his wrath, turning into a centaur: his skin, clothed in ram’s fleece, is turning into fur and scales; the ram’s horn on his breastplate, a symbol of Mars, has become a second head; his helmet is the coils of a snake, his shoulder a giant xenophora shell. Leonardo drew spirals everywhere—in hair, the ram horns, shells, helmet snake coils, even in the curls of the ram’s fleece. Beneath his paintbrush, the repeated spirals of terrestrial and aquatic animal forms became the eddies of a deluge wiping out all distinctions and leveling everything.
Between finishing the huge wood-framed patchwork of a drawing for the scene in the refectory in midsummer and moving into the Council Hall to begin work on the fresco of it with his assistants, Leonardo left Florence and headed for the promontory of Piombino, where he stood on the waterfront to watch the wind whipping the sea into torrents. Years later he remembered the violence of the sea and wind: “of the winds at Piombino,” he wrote, “gusts of wind and rain, with branches and trees blown into the air. The emptying of rainwater from the boats.” He had conjured a storm into the battle; painting it even seemed to summon storms. “On 6 June 1505, on Friday,” he recorded with drama and precision, “at the stroke of the 13th hour [about 9:30 A.M.] I began to paint at the Palazzo. At the moment of putting down the paintbrush the weather changed for the worse, and the bell in the law-courts began to toll. The cartoon came loose. The water spilled as the jug which contained it broke. And suddenly the weather worsened, and the rain poured down until nightfall. And it was as dark as night.” It was a kind of omen. As he applied the paint to the thick primer he had pasted to the wall, pocked with holes from the imprints of the drawing, the paint began to drip. He and his men suspended large burning charcoal braziers from ropes close to the painting to save what they could, but only the lower part survived intact. The upper part ran and bled, the colors intermingling, the edges fluid, the wall awash.
Rubens’s watercolor copy of Leonardo’s fresco of The Battle of Anghiari, ca. 1604.
Louvre, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library
Leonardo lost patience with the project. He broke his contract with the city fathers and abandoned his already crumbling battle scene, turning instead back to birds and to flight—to his flying machine projects and to his unfinished sketches of Leda and the Swan.
Three years later, in the spring of 1508, in the quiet and privacy of the Palazzo Martelli on the Via Larga in Florence, where Leonardo was one of several guests of the intellectual and art patron Piero di Braccio Martelli, Leonardo, now in his sixties, returned to the shells in the red rocks. Distracted and vexed by lengthy legal cases that his half-brothers had begun against him in an inheritance dispute, he had determined to sort through his boxes and crates of manuscripts, overwhelmed by the great weight of unfinished investigations—he called them casi, or cases—he had collected. He came upon the notes he had made on the red shell-flecked rocks of Verona and remembered the arrival of the peasants at the Corte Vecchio and the urgency of their question.
Now, all these years later, he had begun to wonder whether the presence of shells in the mountain rock might be an answer to the set of questions about geophysics and hydraulics that plagued him and that now seemed increasingly entangled: questions about tides and currents and the atmospheric, geological, and erosive effect of water on the surface of the earth. It all needed careful, systematic investigation. It needed quiet thought. Aristotle, he remembered, perpetually moving from investigation to investigation, had gotten only so far with his pursuit of the same set of questions. So with his red, shell-tombed rocks laid out on his desk in front of the open window, his copy of Aristotle probably open beside him, the pages of his earlier notes scattered about, he began the Leicester Codex, a notebook entirely dedicated to geology and the physics of water. It was a book he had been thinking about all his life.
He began his investigation of the shells-in-the-mountains mystery by rebutting some of the existing explanations, his language inflected by weeks of writing legal defenses and letters to lawyers. Were the shells really made in the rocks by the action of stars or the moon, as some alchemists and astrologers claimed? That was superstitious nonsense. “And if you should say that these shells have been and still constantly are being created in such places as these by the nature of the locality or by potency of the heavens in these spots,” he scratched out in mirror writing (the back-to-front writing he used in his notebooks), “such an opinion cannot exist in brains possessed with any extensive powers of reasoning.”
Could the shells instead have been washed there by a universal deluge, as the priests claimed? Or even have made their own way to the higher ground? The cockles and oysters simply could not have reached the tops of mountains carried by the rain that fell in forty days, he reasoned. And even if the flood had been universal, they certainly could not have propelled themselves from the sea along the new seafloor so far in that time. He bought live cockles from the Florence fish market and tipped them out into a long container filled with seawater and sand in his rooms, noting down that no cockle moved more than eight feet a day: “With such a rate of motion,” he declared, “it would not have travelled from the Adriatic Sea as far as Monferrato in Lombardy, a distance of 250 miles, in forty days.”
Had they been drowned by the flood and then washed up here? Leonardo carefully chipped away pieces of rock with his sculpting tools. Young and old oyster shells clustered together there, attached to the rock and to one another, just as he had seen them grow on the shores of the Mediterranean. These oysters had not been washed there; they “had been born there,” he wrote; they had grown on the very mountain rock in front of him and later they had been entombed while still alive, calcified in sedimentary rock.
The answer was therefore much simpler than the one the priests told about the flood. It had an austere poetry to it: “The peaks of the Apennines once stood up in a sea in the form of islands surrounded by salt water,” he concluded, “and above the plains of Italy where flocks of birds are flying today, fishes were once swimming in large shoals.” The mountain rock had once been a seafloor. Where birds now fly, fish once swam.
Piece by piece, always assuming that nature acted as it had always acted because there was no good reason to believe otherwise, Leonardo puzzled out the problem of the oyster shells, consulting every book in his now much larger library and in the libraries of his patrons. He reread Aristotle and Theophrastus on geology; he consulted his copy of Pliny’s Natural History; he studied Avicenna and Averroes from medieval Latin sources. He knew that Aristotle understood about the upheavals that turned seabeds into mountains; the Greek philosopher had described that process nearly two thousand years earlier with a breathtakingly confident statement about the endlessness of time:
It is therefore clear that as time is infinite and the universe eternal neither Tanais nor Nile always flowed but the place whence they flow was once dry: for their action has an end whereas time has none. And the same may be said with truth about other rivers. But if rivers come into being and perish and if the same parts of the earth are not always moist, the sea also must necessarily change correspondingly. And if in places the sea recedes whilst in others it encroaches, then inevitably the same parts of the earth as a whole are not always sea, nor always mainland, but in process of time all change.
Like Aristotle, Leonardo sco
rned supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, dismissing as “ignoramuses” all those who claimed that celestial influences had placed the shells in the rocks. He trusted his own eyes over and above the pronouncements of priests or alchemists or astrologers. And in this he played a dangerous game. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, those who rejected the opinions of priests might find themselves under surveillance—or, worse, on the lists of the inquisitors, even imprisoned or tortured.* He learned to keep his own counsel and taught himself to mirror-write to protect his notebooks from prying eyes. “He had a very heretical state of mind,” the painter Giorgio Vasari wrote of him fifty years later. “He could not be content with any kind of religion at all, considering himself in all things much more a philosopher than a Christian.” He was also dismissive of the claims of alchemists to be able to transmute materials, although he did depend on the chemical expertise recorded in alchemical formulas. He made enemies. He had to be careful not only to veil his intimacies with the men he loved, but also to guard his ideas and practices, for assistants and rivals might report him to the authorities as a heretic at any moment.
Throughout his life, Leonardo was plagued by questions about water and its movements through and across the earth and the trails and hollowings that it left behind. But like most polymaths, he was easily distracted; he abandoned project after project, notebook after notebook, in order to follow a new thought or to return to an old one. His range of reference and the scale of his curiosity were both his strengths and his weaknesses. His notebooks are full of brilliant ideas, connections, and inspired questions and plans, but few lead to any complete theory. His leaping frustrated him, too. “My concern now,” he wrote in one notebook, “is to find subjects and inventions, gathering them as they occur to me; later I will put them in order, putting together those of the same kind. So, reader, you need not wonder, nor laugh at me, if here we jump from one subject to another.”
But though later scientists, like Charles Lyell, working more patiently and systematically three hundred years later, using a mass of fossil and mineralogical evidence and microscopes, might take the problem of shells in the mountains toward an answer that suggested an earth history that was millions of years older than had been previously believed and thus pave the way for an understanding of evolving species as well as evolving earth surfaces, Leonardo was doing something rather different in Florence in 1510. Certainly, he wanted to refute the authority of the priests and to disprove the theory of a universal deluge. He took the great age of the earth for granted. But he wanted more than anything else to prove that the earth worked like the human body, to prove what many Renaissance philosophers and scholars believed to be true: that the earth contained a soul, an anima mundi, that permeated the cosmos and connected all living beings within it.
“Nothing originates in a spot where there is no sentient, vegetable and rational life,” he wrote.
Feathers grow upon birds and are changed every year; hairs grow upon animals and are changed every year, excepting some parts, like the hairs of the beard in lions, cats and their like. The grass grows in the fields, and the leaves on the trees, and every year they are, in great part, renewed. So that we might say that the earth has a spirit of growth; that its flesh is the soil, its bones the arrangement and connection of the rocks of which the mountains are composed, its cartilage the tufa, and its blood the springs of water. The pool of blood which lies round the heart is the ocean, and its breathing, and the increase and decrease of the blood in the pulses, is represented in the earth by the flow and ebb of the sea; and the heat of the spirit of the world is the fire which pervades the earth, and the seat of the vegetative soul is in the fires, which in many parts of the earth find vent in baths and mines of sulphur, and in volcanoes, as at Mount Aetna in Sicily, and in many other places.
Underwater courses were always veins to Leonardo. When he traveled down into caves, he was traveling inside an enormous body that lived and breathed, seeped, and flowed. The earth was alive for him; it had veins and arteries; it was as sentient as the human body, and as vulnerable. He had brilliantly expressed this vision of the earth in the legendary Mona Lisa, painted in Florence in 1503 only months before he began the first sketches for the Battle of Anghiari: La Gioconda is depicted on a balcony overlooking a complex geological landscape of flowing waters, demonstrating an entire hydrological cycle. The veins and waterways of the landscape mirror the veins and waterways of the sitter’s body.
Leonardo’s mind sought connection between all the workings of nature, between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Landscape and bodily surfaces concealed, depths revealed. To come to know more than his predecessors, he saw that he had to make himself a tunneling man. He had to go underground. It is no coincidence that while he was writing his pages on geophysics in Florence, he was also undertaking a series of secret human dissections in the hospital of the Santa Maria Nuova, a few streets away, tunneling beneath skin, feverishly searching out the secrets of the vascular system, aware that his eyesight was beginning to fail, drawing page after page of diagrams and notes.
Leonardo passionately rebutted Christian explanations for the presence of shells in mountains. He understood the idea of strata; he knew that the gaps between layers of strata represented thousands of years of time and that this meant that the earth was incomprehensibly older than the Church proposed. But he did not contemplate species evolution as we now understand it. He did not ask why, for instance, there were no human remains entombed with the oysters in the deepest levels of time. He was interested in different ways of explaining nature’s laws. What the shells in the rocks of Verona told him was that the mountains had once been seabeds, and that provided proof of his deep conviction that the land and sea were in a continual process of rise and fall, like the lungs of a body. “The body of the earth, like the bodies of animals,” he wrote in the Leicester Codex, “is interwoven with a network of veins, which are all joined together, and formed for the nutrition and vivification of the earth and of its creatures.” Microcosm and macroscosm; connectedness across the cosmos; common patterns and structures not fixed in geometrically structured shapes but forever moving. It was a way of seeing shaped by the idiosyncratic collection of books in his library, by ideas quarried from Greek philosophy, from Renaissance humanists like Ficino, Aristotle, Averroes, and Avicenna; but however widely he roamed among the Greek philosophers or Renaissance humanists, there in his library or up in the mountains or inside his own head, moving between metaphysics, geology, physics, and hydrology, Leonardo was never able to answer to his own satisfaction the question buried in the shell-laced red rocks.
Leonardo was not the only Renaissance scholar-artisan to have spent his life returning to the great mystery of fossils and pondering the creation and origin of species. In France, only fifty years or so after Leonardo was buried in the Church of St. Florentin, in France, a Huguenot potter named Bernard Palissy was working on a similar set of questions about fossils, also using art as a means of detection. His patron was an extraordinary woman of Italian birth, the great Catherine de Médicis.
On the north bank of the Seine, in the district of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, the classical columns and pilasters of the Queen Mother’s magnificent new palace-retreat rose against the skyline in the midst of spectacular gardens along the river. The palace, named the Tuileries after the old tile kilns, or tuileries, that had once stood on the site, was the most elaborate royal building scheme in all of western Europe, but, like so many of Catherine’s projects, it was, in 1570, still unfinished. When Catherine’s architect died that year and an astrologer told her that she would die in Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, she found herself no longer in such a hurry to move her household there. Instead, she began designing another palace for herself, the Hôtel de la Reine, built within Paris’s medieval walls in the northwest of the city. Though the Tuileries remained unfinished, the Queen Mother still held banquets and festivities there and brought her visitors and ministers to walk in th
e gardens.
Hidden away in the back of the Tuileries Gardens, in a series of artisans’ ateliers, masons and carpenters chiseled away at the pilasters of columns or architraves; in one of the workshops Bernard Palissy was slowly piecing together a spectacular terra-cotta and ceramic grotto for the regent’s beloved garden. Inspired by classical models, grottoes had become the rage across Europe, but Palissy had promised the Queen Mother that her grotto would be the finest in Europe.
The potter, who proudly bore the title of Worker of the Earth and Inventor of Rustic Ware to the King and the Queen Mother, never stopped working or talking. His clothes sweat-stained and his hands rough and covered in scars, he was a ball of energy, always quick to tell his visitors about the sacrifices he had made for his art—the terrible weeks when he was forced to tear up his own floorboards and take an ax to his last chairs to keep his kiln burning; his periods of semistarvation; the denunciations he suffered from the mouths of his neighbors; his wife’s persecutions; the perpetual burdens of domestic and familial responsibilities; his endless clashes with the police, with debt collectors, and with the Inquisition; his time in prison accused of heresy and Protestant agitation. He owed his life to his first patron, he would recount, the constable of France, Montmorency, who had secured his release from prison and guaranteed his future safety. And now here he was in Paris, potter to the Queen Mother.
Catherine de Médicis, Italian by birth, an orphaned Medici heiress raised in a series of wealthy Medici courts in Florence under the protection of the pope, had been married at the age of fourteen to the French king, Francis I; after her husband’s death, her young son took the French throne as Francis II; when he died a year later, she became regent to her second son, Charles IX, who was only ten years old when he came to the throne. Catherine’s power, wealth, and interest in the arts made her the most important patron in Europe, with several hundred artists, sculptors, architects, masons, and landscape designers listed in her payment books in 1570. She had brought the principles of the Florentine and Medici classical revival to France, and for decades wealthy French aristocrats and intellectuals competed to follow her lead. On her travels around the country, she searched out provincial artists and brought them to her court or poached them from the courts of wealthy aristocrats. She found her Huguenot potter in Saintes working in his atelier, already designing grottoes and ceramics for the Duc de Montmorency, constable of France, her late father-in-law’s closest friend. The visionary grotto, she insisted, must be built for her in Paris.
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