21. There was no other book in the ninth-century Abbasid Empire: See Charles Pellat, “Hayawan,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3:305.
22. the custodians of this knowledge in the Abbasid Empire: See ibid., 304–15; S. H. Nasr, “Zoology,” in his Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study (Westerham Press, Kent: World of Islam Festival Publishing, 1976); and Egerton, “History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 6,” 142–46.
23. “to contemplate an entangled bank”: Last paragraph of Origin of Species (1859); see also Aarab, Provençal, and Idaomar, “Eco-Ethological Data According to Jahiz,” 278–86.
24. “All you need do is light a fire”: Jahiz, Hayawan, 2:110–11; translated by Charles Pellat, ed. Life and Works of Jahiz, 142.
25. “Each species … constitutes a food for another species”: Ibid. Translated by Pellat.
26. “we can see the germs of Darwin’s … natural selection”: Bayrakdar, “Al-Jahiz and the Rise of Biological Evolution,” 307–15.
27. “every man endowed with reason may know”: Jahiz, Hayawan, 2:110, translated by Charles Pellat, ed., Life and Works of Jahiz, 142.
28. “We rarely hear of a statement by a philosopher”: Jahiz, Hayawan, 3:268.
29. In the Wild Beast Park of Baghdad: On the zoos in the caliphal palace gardens of Baghdad and Samarra, see Al-Samarrai, “Abbasid Gardens in Baghdad and Samarra,” 1–10, www.muslimheritage.com/uploads/ACF9F4.pdf.
30. “They carry [the pigeons] on their backs”: Jahiz, Hayawan, 3:213–14; translated by Charles Pellat, ed., Life and Works of Jahiz, 172–73. This knowledge of the ill effects of inbreeding is remarkable; it is of course something that a pigeon breeder would observe over time among his pigeons. It is fundamental for modern genetics. Pigeon fancying and pigeon racing were popular pastimes in medieval Iraq. The Abassids also used a pigeon post.
31. “We have not devoted a separate chapter to fish”: Jahiz, Hayawan, 6:16–17; translation provided by James Montgomery.
32. caliphal power was beginning to move into a stage of slow decline: Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 124.
33. Every day, postal envoys brought news of insurrections: Joel L. Kraemer, “Translator’s Foreword,” in The History of al-Tabari, vol. 34: Incipient Decline: The Caliphates of Al-Wathiq, Al-Mutawakkil and Al-Muntasir, AD 841–863 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), xv.
34. Jahiz’s principal patron at Baghdad: A glimpse of their friendship can be seen in Jahiz’s teasing letters to his patron in which he chides him for making him tidy his study and bind the pages of his books: Pellat, ed., Life and Works of Jahiz, 209–11, 214–15.
35. But in 847 the caliph al-Wathiq died: See History of al-Tabari, 34: 65–68.
36. As part of a campaign of retribution: Ibid., 68.
37. Jahiz, fearing for his life: See ibid., 117.
38. The new caliph Mutawakkil: Kraemer, “Translator’s Foreword,” in ibid., xxi.
39. The rewards for writers and poets in the new court: See al-Tabari’s description of al-Mutawakkil’s patronage in “Some Things About al’Mutawakkil and His Way of Life,” in ibid., 185.
40. Fath was a Turkish aristocrat: Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 128.
41. “The Commander of the Faithful has taken a tremendous liking to you”: Pellat, ed., Life and Works of Jahiz, 7–8.
42. “You will be receiving your monthly allowance”: For translated extracts from Jahiz’s work on the Christians, see ibid., 86–89, and on the letter from al-Fath, see 7–8.
43. To ensure the favor of his new patron: Kraemer, “Translator’s Foreword,” in History of al-Tabari, 34:xiii.
44. he died in 869 at the age of ninety-four: Lawrence I. Conrad, The Western Medical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137. At thirty-five or more, the Abbasid Empire had the highest life expectancy of any country in the world at that point.
45. he was crushed to death: Pellat, ed., Life and Works of Jahiz, 9. Although Jahiz died a century or more before the chronicler Al-Nadim began to write his list of the books, writers, and translators in Baghdad, he was still able to talk to people who had known Jahiz personally. One of them claimed: “I said to Jahiz, ‘Do you have an estate at al-Basrah?’ He smiled and said ‘Verily there is myself, a concubine, the handmaid who serves her, a manservant and a donkey.’ ” Jahiz then listed his patrons, his books, and how much he was paid for each one, and he concludes his account of himself with the words: “Then I went to Al-Basrah and had an estate which did not require renovation or fertilising.” Jahiz’s friend remembered his smile when he described his estate. Al-Nadim also recorded that smile; it gives us a glimpse of the pleasure Jahiz felt in returning to Basra. Dodge, Fihrist of Al-Nadim, 2:440.
46. It took the caliphate army two decades: Amira Bennison, The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire (New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 89.
47. But the Catholic Church … continued to be deeply suspicious of pagan ideas: See, in particular, James Hannam, “Heresy and Reason,” in his God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (London: Icon, 2009), 77–89.
48. “Neither the works of Aristotle on natural philosophy”: Ibid., 77–81.
49. In 1423 a Florentine bookseller: Michael White, Leonardo: The First Scientist (London: Abacus, 2000), 42.
4. LEONARDO AND THE POTTER
1. Sometime in 1493, a family of Italian peasants: Leonardo tells this story about the peasants arriving from the mountains of Verona in his notebook, the Leicester Codex: Leonardo da Vinci, “Physical Geography,” in The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, translated by E. MacCurdy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), 1:355–56, 359. Michel Jeannert analyzes Leonardo’s preoccupation with water and mutability in “Earth Changes: Leonardo Da Vinci,” in his Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, translated by Nidra Poller (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 50–81. The connection between Leonardo’s artistic and intellectual development is also discussed, though to a lesser extent, in Pierre Duhem, “Léonard de Vinci, Cardan et Bernard Palissy,” Bulletin Italien 6, no. 4 (1906): 289–320.
2. rooms for his assistants: On Leonardo’s assistants in Milan, see Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (London: Penguin, 2005), 233–35.
3. no building could have been better: Ibid., 248–53.
4. By 1493 his library contained thirty-seven books: Ibid., 215; see also Janis Bell, “Color Perspective, ca. 1492,” Achademia Leonardo Vinci (1992): 64–77; a copy of Aristotle’s book appears in a book list from ca. 1490 in the Codex Arundel notebook listed as “meteora d’Aristotle vulgare,” and again in a further list in the Codex Arundel from ca. 1490–91 and in the long list in a manuscript in Madrid from 1503–4. On Leonardo’s library, see Carlo Maccagni, “Leonardo’s List of Books,” Burlington Magazine 110, no. 784 (1968): 406–10, and Ladislao Reti, “The Two Unpublished Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid—II,” Burlington Magazine 110, no. 779 (1968): 81–89.
5. the collection of natural objects he had gathered: On the cabinets of curiosities kept by Renaissance princes from the fifteenth century, see Robert Kirkbride, Architecture and Memory: The Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
6. “astounded … fear and desire”: Leonardo, Codex Arundel, 155r, translated by Jean Paul Richter, in Richter, ed., The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon Press, 1970), 1:1339.
7. He painted striations of rocky landscapes: For a dazzling study of the Renaissance fascination with genesis and metamorphosis, see Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion, particularly the chapter “Earth Changes: Leonardo da Vinci.”
8. engaged in numerous investigations about the way water: Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci, 278.
9. “In the Chiavenna valley … are very high barren mountains”: Ibid., 279.
10. the fresco of
The Last Supper … crumbled, cracked, and faded: Ibid., 302.
11. If rocks were no more than forms caught temporarily in time: On Renaissance ideas of mutability, see Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion, particularly the chapter “Earth Changes: Leonardo da Vinci.”
12. “First you must show the smoke of the artillery”: Cited in Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci, 373.
13. He called battle a “Pazzia Bestialissima”: See Maria Lessing, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Pazzia Bestialissima,” Burlington Magazine 64, no. 374 (1934): 219–31.
14. a great tangle of human and animal body parts: For a detailed account of Leonardo’s possible borrowings from Greco-Roman sarcophagi, see Kenneth Clark, “Leonardo and the Antique,” in C. D. O’Malley, ed., Leonardo’s Legacy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 1–34.
15. his shoulder a giant xenophora shell: Richard Preece of the Cambridge Zoology Museum identified this shell. If it is the Xenophora solaris, which is not found on Mediterranean shores, Leonardo is most likely to have seen it in one of the many shell collections in the studioli of private houses, or he may have picked one up himself from a natural history dealer. On collections, see Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). On Renaissance armor, and particularly the use of rams’ horns in body armor, see Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Concha Herrero Carretero, and José A. Godoy, Resplendence of the Spanish Monarchy: Renaissance Tapestries and Armor from the Patrimonio Nacional (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991); for a further example of a ram’s horm used in Renaissance armor around 1520, see 118–19. Leonardo may have seen ancient helmets like these in Rome around 1500 (see arguments by Kenneth Clark in “Leonardo and the Antique”) or in Lorenzo’s collection of ancient armor—see Mario Scalini, “The Weapons of Lorenzo de Medici,” in Robert Held, ed., Art, Arms and Armour: An International Anthology (Chiasso, Switzerland: Acquafresca Éditrice, 1979).
16. “of the winds at Pombino”: Madrid Codices, II, 125r, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; cited in Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci, 388.
17. “On 6 June 1505, on Friday”: Madrid Codices II, 2r; cited in Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci, 390.
18. he began the Leicester Codex: The Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s most important notebooks, was discovered in a chest of manuscripts in Rome in the 1690s and was bought by Thomas Coke, Lord Leicester, remaining in the family until the 1980s, when it was sold to Armand Hammer, who renamed it Codex Hammer. In 1994 it was auctioned at Christie’s and bought by Bill Gates for $30 million; he restored the notebook’s original name. On Leonardo’s fascination with water, see Martin Kemp, Leonardo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 75–83, and Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion.
19. “With such a rate of motion … it would not have travelled”: Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, Ambriosiana Library, Milan, 18v., translated by Jean Paul Richter, in Richter, Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 1:987.
20. “The peaks of the Apennines once stood up in a sea”: Leonardo, “Physical Geography,” 1:359.
21. He reread Aristotle and Theophrastus: All of these writers are referred to in his notebooks.
22. “It is therefore clear that as time is infinite”: Aristotle, Meteorologica, translated by H.D.P. Lee (London: Heinemann, 1952), 119–21.
23. “He had a very heretical state of mind”: Giorgio Vasari included this passage in the first edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters Sculptors and Architects (1550) but excised it in the second edition, thinking it too critical; cited in Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci, 483.
24. He was also dismissive of the claims of alchemists: See William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 120–27.
25. “My concern now … is to find subjects and inventions”: Leonardo, Leicester Codex, 2r.
26. what many Renaissance philosophers and scholars believed to be true: See, for instance, the Renaissance scholar Marcilio Ficino’s Three Books on Life, Book III, ch. 1.
27. “Nothing originates in a spot where there is no sentient”: Richter, Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 1:791–92.
28. He had brilliantly expressed this vision of the earth: Kemp, Leonardo, 148–50.
29. But he did not contemplate species evolution: One of the reasons for Leonardo’s lack of curiosity about species mutation would seem to be his contempt for all alchemical theories. Transmutation was at this point an alchemical notion wrapped up in codes and secrecy and necromancy. Alchemists believed that they could transmute lead to gold and mortal forms to immortal. For Leonardo it was hocus-pocus. No human could transmute flesh into new forms. It was probably this antipathy to the idea of transmutation of any kind that made it impossible for Leonardo, the great philosopher of flux and fluid in the natural world, to countenance the idea that species might have been transmuted from one form to another through vast periods of time by unspecified natural processes.
30. “The body of the earth, like the bodies of animals”: See Stephen Jay Gould’s analysis of Leonardo’s fossil writings in “The Upwardly Mobile Fossils,” in his Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (London: Vintage, 1999).
31. the most elaborate royal building scheme: David Thomson, Renaissance Paris: Architecture and Growth, 1475–1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 165–75.
32. The potter, who proudly bore the title of worker of the earth: For a fascinating analysis of Palissy as an artisan and of how he used his body to embody his art, see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100–106.
33. Catherine de Médicis, Italian by birth: On Catherine de Médicis, see Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004).
34. watched her grotto take shape: An account book survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris detailing Catherine’s expenses on the grotto. It is dated February 22, 1570. The extracts concerning Palissy and the grotto are reprinted in Leonard N. Amico, Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise (New York: Flammarion Press, 1996), 231–32.
35. cast from molds of rocks and shells: Ibid., 25–26.
36. they issued from a mind that had become a cauldron: See William Newman’s analysis of the alchemical basis of Palissy’s art in Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 145–64. See also Jean Céard, “Bernard Palissy et l’alchimie,” in Frank Lestringant, ed., Actes de colloque Bernard Palissy 1510–1590: L’écrivain, le réformé, le céramiste (Paris: Amis d’Agrippa d’Aubigné, 1992), 157–59.
37. Palissy’s plates … had become collectors’ pieces: It is clear from archival records that significant numbers of French aristocrats were already collecting Palissyware during his lifetime; Montmorency in particular had large collections—see Amico, Bernard Palissy, appendix 1, documents I and III, 229.
38. Palissy was fiercely secretive about his art: Ibid., 41–42.
39. We know some of the secrets of Palissy’s process: See Hanna Rose Shell, “Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissy’s Occupation Between Maker and Nature,” Configurations 12 (2004): 1–40, and Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 158–59.
40. “There are a great many kinds of ponds”: Bernard Palissy, The Admirable Discourses of Bernard Palissy, translated by Aurèle la Rocque (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957), 34–35.
41. the German-Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in particular: For more detail about the influence of Paracelsus’s work on Palissy, see the remarkable study of Palissy’s work in Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
42. Speculation about spontaneous generation: See Henry Harris, Things Come to Life: Spontaneous Generation Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–8; and for the link between artificial life and alchemy, see Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 16
4–237.
43. Pierre Belon and Guillaume Rondelet: Both Rondelet and Belon had written about rot and spontaneous generation. In La Nature et diversité des poissons (1555), Pierre Belon claimed that frogs were generated by both eggs and rot. Belon’s vision of spontaneous generation was also continuous with his ideas about the Renaissance. The French naturalist Guillaume Rondelet dedicated a whole chapter of his colossal book on fish, L’Histoire entière des poissons (1558), to organisms that live in stagnant marshes, believing them to be “by nature halfway between plants and animals.” Palissy also read a French translation of an essay by the great Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano, the son of Leonardo’s close friend, entitled “Creatures Born of Putrefaction,” in which Cardano claimed: “Frogs spring forth formed out of impure water and sometimes the rain; they are among a certain number of imperfect animals that are born, without seed, from corruption and putrefaction.”
44. “I maintain that shellfish … are born on the very spot”: Palissy, Admirable Discourses, 244–45.
45. “I am neither Greek, nor Hebrew, nor Poet”: B. Palissy (1563), “Recepte véritable,” Oeuvres de Bernard Palissy, edited by A. France (1880), 13; see also a new edition by Frank Lestringant (Paris: Macula, 1996), which has a substantial and very useful introduction.
5. TREMBLEY’S POLYP
1. The Count of Bentinck’s summer residence: On Dutch gardens in this period, see Erik Jong, Nature and Art: Dutch Garden and Landscape Architecture, 1650–1740 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 2000), and J. W. Vanessa Bezemer-Seller, “The Bentinck Garden at Sorgvliet,” in J. D. Hunt, ed., The Dutch Garden in the Seventeenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1990). I am indebted to Marc Ratcliff of the University of Geneva, author of the masterly study of Enlightenment microscopy, The Quest for the Invisible: Microscopy in the Enlightenment (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), for giving careful attention to an early draft of this chapter.
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