He was known around Florence as the young star artist from Verrocchio’s studio, a strikingly attractive man who seemed good at . . . everything. He was funny and intelligent, capable of discussing any topic. He had a fine singing voice and was considered the best impro viser in verse of his time—a sort of Renaissance rap artist. He was even good at sports, known for great strength, particularly as an excellent horseman.
But Leonardo did have flaws.
For someone with no other means of support, he was careless about business dealings. When he finally got commissions to do work, sometimes he followed through—and sometimes he didn’t. With his first solo commission, in 1478, for a painting in a chapel, he got only as far as a sketch before quitting.
Later, in 1481, he was hired to create The Adoration of the Magi, a painting for the friars of a Florentine monastery. This was never finished, either.
In fact, Leonardo left behind more sketches and plans—and less finished work—than probably any other artist in history. How to explain this apparent lack of follow-through? Art lovers throughout history have mourned Leonardo’s lack of productivity. The number of paintings (finished or unfinished) that we know to be his is only thirteen.
Is it possible for someone to be too smart? For him, a man with so many talents and so many passions, focusing on one idea or project may have been tricky. In a case, perhaps, of Renaissance attention deficit disorder, he always wanted to be on to the next thing.
Painting was not a means of self-expression for Leonardo—he thought of each painting as “a thing of the mind,” a set of problems a brain could gnaw on. He was always much more interested in the conception of a project—figuring out how it would look or be constructed—than the completion of it. Sometimes he was so ambitious in his designs that he imagined ways of doing projects that were technically impossible, that no human could pull off.
It sounds like he could be bristly to work with. He turned down commissions from people he didn’t like, or who had the nerve to treat him in a demeaning way. He hated being given orders or being rushed. Deadlines and contracts were obviously not sacred to him.
Perhaps Leonardo daydreamed instead of focusing. The artist did always have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. “Lying on a feather mattress or quilt will not bring you renown,” he once wrote, as if scolding himself. One of his early designs was for a personal alarm clock cleverly powered by water.
Or maybe he was growing ambivalent about fame, realizing it could bring attention of an unwanted kind.
Anyway, he was busy—busy reading, another pastime that earned him nothing. But it was important to him to fill in the craters in his education. Luckily, he was talented at teaching himself. He made notes of books he needed to read. By the time he was twenty-nine, in 1481, some 40,000 titles were in print.
Florence was home to a flourishing library, protecting thousands of rare items collected by the Medici. Like all libraries at that time, it wasn’t open to the public, but Leonardo could have made the right connections to gain entry, reading what had been translated into Italian.
He also made notes of scholars to meet—an astronomer and geographer, a doctor, several mathematicians, a scholar of Greek. He must have discovered the fact that most experts adore talking about their area of expertise.
He was currently most interested in animal and plant biology, human organs, and the principles of flight. A beloved subject of Florentine art was the Greek myth of Icarus, the boy who flew too near the sun with wings of wax and feathers. Leonardo was obsessed with the possibility of flying. A long-standing legend is that Leonardo, who cherished animals, would often buy caged birds at the market just to set them free. First, though, he would study them—even his earliest paintings of angels showed that he was using real bird wings as models. He studied birds’ wings and tails, how their feathers were arranged. Then he watched and made notes describing how birds flew up and down, changing direction, soaring, gliding, and coming in for a landing without breaking their legs.
His papers from this time show his deep interest in classical learning. He knew about Archimedes, the mathematician who was considered the greatest scientist of ancient Greece. Among other accomplishments, Archimedes had worked out the principles of the lever, using notions that were two thousand years ahead of his time.
Leonardo was also getting acquainted with the work of Plato, the Greek philosopher who linked knowledge with virtue.
Plato’s best-known student, Aristotle, was Leonardo’s favorite ancient Greek. Aristotle had studied biology, physics, medicine, and other fields, seeking grand truths that explained the natural world. He developed a system of reasoning to arrive at truths, known as Aristotelian logic. A classic example is: Every Greek is a person. Every person is mortal. Therefore every Greek is mortal.
Aristotle’s lectures, collected by his followers, made up a kind of one-man encyclopedia of some 150 volumes. Arab scholars had preserved the great man’s works, which were now available in translation in Florence. In his own thinking, Leonardo started out as a disciple of Aristotle, then later began questioning his ideas and branching out. Aristotle believed, for example, that the moon produced its own light, while Leonardo came to think (correctly) that the moon’s light was reflected sunlight. Leonardo never followed anyone blindly.
Leonardo also showed an acquaintance with the controversial work of Roger Bacon, the brilliant thirteenth-century English philosopher, scientist, and monk. Bacon’s work, too, formed a universal encyclopedia of knowledge. He was another Aristotle fan, and way ahead of his time in scientific thinking—he advocated controlled experiments, the testing of ideas. This was a whole new concept, one that must have had profound influence on Leonardo’s own thinking. Aristotle and Plato found experiments pointless compared to the beauty of logic and mathematics.
Besides studying, Leonardo also had practical problems on his mind. With the city-states of Italy at war so much of the time, he was constantly sketching machines of warfare—this seemed a better bet for making money than painting. People who could design weapons were highly employable, and even though he personally hated war, designing machines fascinated him. On paper, he created innumerable tanks, crossbows, cannons, bombs, and guns.
At the same time, he was sketching machines that were powered by water or that could be used to transport water. He drew submarines, a snorkel, a machine for pumping water from underground, machines that would pump water through buildings, and a device that measured moisture in the air.
Having “graduated” from Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo didn’t want to be thought of as a mere artist, an artisan. His role model was Giotto, a Florentine painter-architect who had died a century earlier, but who impressed Leonardo as a well-rounded innovator. “Giotto was not satisfied with imitating the works of his master,” Leonardo wrote. Leonardo wanted to be an original. He was much more interested in inventing and designing. An engineer-architect—now, that was a worthy goal. Plus, it would leave plenty of free time to study nature.
To further his studies, Leonardo needed time and support. He needed a protector who would cocoon him from the stress of earning money, a friend in a high place to ward off the prying eyes of the police. He needed a patron.
Unfortunately, it was becoming clear that Lorenzo de’ Medici was not going to be that patron. When the most important man in Florence wanted a job done, he sent it to artists who were Leonardo’s rivals. Extremely well educated, Lorenzo may have looked down on the “unlettered” artist, who didn’t know Latin, much less Greek.
Or perhaps Lorenzo just had a blind spot as far as recognizing Leonardo’s talent. In 1481, the pope asked him to send the best artists to work on the new Sistine Chapel. Leonardo didn’t make the cut. This seemed a bad omen for his future in Florence.
In fact, it was almost as big an embarrassment as his arrest. As he approached thirty, Leonardo’s only fame so far came from being named in a sordid court case.
It was time to get out of Flo
rence.
CHAPTER SIX
“The Universe Stands Open”
THE YEAR 1482, when he was thirty years old, was a turning point in Leonardo’s life.
He left Florence to make a fresh start in the wealthy city-state of Milan, two hundred miles to the north. It was there that he began keeping notebooks that explored all areas of the natural world.
He knew no one in Milan, a big city with twice as many people as Florence. The city was not as famous for art as it was for advances in science and learning. It was one of the centers for Italian book publishing. Milan also boasted a university with ninety distinguished professors, the University of Pavia, and one of the best libraries in all of Italy—a dream place to study.
Milan’s ruler, Duke Ludovico Sforza, while a corrupt dictator, was nurturing a hospitable atmosphere for thinkers and artists. With fewer artists than Florence, there should be less competition for his talents, Leonardo hoped.
Leonardo drafted a now-famous job application to Duke Sforza.
“I can invent an infinite variety of machines,” he stated, going way out on a limb to elaborate. He said he could build portable bridges; knew the techniques of constructing bombardments and making cannons; could build ships, armored vehicles, catapults, and other war machines; and could execute sculpture in marble, bronze, and clay. Most cleverly, he promised to build the immense bronze horse that Sforza wanted as a memorial to his father. “In painting,” he ended blandly, “I can do as well as anyone else.” His modesty about painting seems odd. But Leonardo was playing up the talents he knew would be valued most by a war-mongering duke.
He probably never sent the letter—a good thing, as it was mostly bluff. But the letter revealed something about his current mood. Producing art was not Leonardo’s main goal now; he wanted more. His painting was merely useful as a skill he could fall back on if other ventures didn’t pan out.
Once in Milan, he rented a room and studio space from the Preda family—six brothers, all artists. His best friend was Donato Bramante, a fellow artist and a future designer of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Both men were interested in mathematics, and were followers of artist-author Leon Battista Alberti.
Leonardo also met frequently with Fazio Cardan—a professor of medicine and mathematics—and his family. Cardan had edited a famous textbook on optics, written by a thirteenth-century English archbishop. During long talks with Cardan, Leonardo learned what was known at that time about how the eye worked. The eye was called the “window of the soul,” a concept that Leonardo took further, to identify it as the central way men could understand “the infinite works of nature.” While others of his day believed the lens was the most important part of the eye, Leonardo was more interested in the retina and how an image is formed there when light strikes it.
Eventually, by being in the right place at the right time, he did succeed in entering the service of Ludovico Sforza. The duke clearly valued Leonardo, who served him for years as principal military engineer and also as an architect. His job was to be versatile—produce a painting or sculpture here, design a courtyard there, create new and deadly weaponry, entertain the court with his music one day, invent an improved olive press another day.
During these early years in Milan, disaster struck—another epidemic of the Black Death. The disease hit fast and furiously. More than ten thousand Milanese died. Corpses, swarming with rats, were left for days in town squares, awaiting burial. Possibly it was at this time that Leonardo concocted the rose water perfume he liked to wear, to cover the ever-present “evil smell” of death.
Leonardo, who somehow avoided getting sick, tried to understand more about the disease. Most people assumed the plague was simply bad fortune destined by the stars, or God’s punishment for wickedness. Many Christians accused Jews of deliberately spreading the disease; an outbreak was often an excuse to step up persecution of the Jews.
Everyone knew the plague was contagious, but no one knew how to stop it. Although unaware of its cause—bites from infected rats and fleas—Leonardo rightly connected unsanitary living conditions with the disease. His response to the plague was typically ambitious. He drew up a plan to reorganize all of Milan. He wanted to make the city cleaner, healthier. Milan’s streets were narrow, filthy, and overcrowded, intersected by canals from which frogs chirped nightly, but that also carried human waste. The drinking water was contaminated. When people took baths at all, they shared water at public bath-houses.
For Leonardo, the plague must have caused two years of great anxiety, grief at losing friends, and daily trauma. He soothed himself by constructing, on paper, his version of an ideal city. Clean and efficient, it would stretch both horizontally and vertically—to two levels. The rich nobility would live above, in open spaces with parks. (Leonardo was a man of his time in believing that the rich were better people than the poor.) The streets would be very wide, to allow for fresh air and sunlight. The lower, darker level was for the less fortunate, with homes for the shopkeepers and—significantly, reflecting their status in society—artisans.
His detailed plans provided for plumbing, drainage, transportation of animals and people, and waste disposal. He had devices to wash the streets, and chimneys that blew smoke high above roofs. To stop people from using dark street corners as toilets, he planned bathrooms whose ceilings had many holes for ventilation, and even designed toilets with swiveling seats.
He wrote out rules for good health: “Visits to the toilet should not be postponed. Eat only when hungry and let light fare suffice. Chew your food well. . . .”
And speaking of food, in addition to the other things that set him apart—and unlike just about every other fifteenth-century Italian—Leonardo was a vegetarian. (He believed that any creatures that moved felt pain.) He despised people who shot birds for sport. He thought that men who ate meat were walking tombs and that someday people would no more murder animals than they would kill other people. In an era known for rich foods and serious feasting, he stuck to minestrone soup, peas cooked in almond milk, green salads, fruit, wine, and bread.
After the Black Death had passed, the city didn’t rebuild itself according to Leonardo’s designs. He had no authority to put his ideas into practice, and it’s not clear whether he even showed them to anyone. But Milan, freed from overwhelming death, was reenergized. Now Sforza and other officials poured money into constructing new buildings, remodeling old ones, and staging festivals and masques—much activity to keep Leonardo busy.
But not too busy. Leonardo also spent a great deal of time alone, either walking around the countryside or sitting all day in his studio. “If you are alone, you will be your own man,” he once wrote. He never stopped observing, questioning, or reading. When most people considered comets and eclipses and similar phenomena alarming messages from beyond, Leonardo considered them events in nature. He even devised devices for studying a solar eclipse without eye damage.
For years he had been in the habit of writing down his ideas—doodles, observations, to-do lists—on stray scraps of precious paper. But now, in Milan, he got serious, especially about his interest in the natural world, and began his famous series of notebooks.
Into these notebooks went all of his nature drawings, experiments, and theories about the world. He worked by candlelight, sometimes all through the night. With the intense curiosity of a small child, he asked questions about everything: What is milk? What causes tickling or vomiting or sneezing? Why is the sky blue? What kind of machine could fly? Where do tears come from? Why do we urinate and defecate? What exactly is drunkenness, madness, dreaming . . . ?
These are not diaries, though every once in a while a morsel of personal detail slips through. The notebooks are professional, businesslike (for him). Leonardo listed the subjects that were of most passionate interest to him—and came up with twenty. They included botany, optics, hydraulics, astronomy, geology, physics, and anatomy—he was doing the first of his amazing drawings of the human body. The notebooks show the b
irth and development of Leonardo the natural philosopher, Leonardo the scientist.
Leonardo did not compartmentalize his interests. To him, all knowledge was related. What he could learn in one field would help shed light on others. This attitude allowed him to cross-fertilize ideas in unusually creative ways. He thought of architecture, for example, as related to human anatomy. Buildings resembled bodies; the more he could learn about anatomy, the better an architect, or “building doctor,” he would be.
In his notebooks, Leonardo’s goal was the direct study of nature. “Nothing can be found in nature that is not part of science,” he wrote. “Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.”
He decided early on that firsthand experience—using the five senses—was the means of discovering scientific truths. Experience to confirm theories was absolutely crucial: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” And direct experience was certainly more important than reading about others’ experience: “The grandest of all books, I mean the Universe, stands open before our eyes.”
Leonardo valued knowing what great minds before him had thought, hence his ongoing self-education. But he didn’t necessarily accept their views. He called some scholars “stupid fools” for relying solely on the works of other men, for not thinking for themselves—investigating, questioning.
The people who impressed him most were those inventors who discovered ways to control nature.
In these new notebooks, Leonardo was thinking about science, and he was really thinking big. Inspired by Aristotle perhaps, he planned eventually to publish them as a grand encyclopedia of scientific knowledge, a system for understanding everything. His research and writing would occupy him for the next thirty-seven years. Like many of his projects, this one was never finished.
But what he did accomplish was beyond magnificent. The result was thirteen thousand pages that scholars have divided into ten assortments.
Leonardo Da Vinci* Page 3