This has its obscurities, but gives us an attractive idea of Zoroastro as something between a jester, a magician and an engineer – and also a vegetarian, as Leonardo was reputed to be. The outfit of gall-nuts is curious, but has a parallel in some notes about masquerade costumes, where Leonardo describes an outfit made by sticking grains of black and white millet on to cloth varnished with turpentine and glue.19 However, Ammirato does not suggest a theatrical context: he seems to mean that Leonardo made this unusual appliqué outfit, perhaps a cloak, and that Tommaso, being an eccentric young man, wore it, and so earned the nickname.
Zoroastro is probably the ‘Maestro Tommaso’ referred to by Leonardo in some accounting notes of 1492–3:
Thursday 27 September: Maestro Tommaso returned [to Milan]. He worked on his own account until the penultimate day of February…
On the penultimate day of November we reckoned up accounts… Maestro Tommaso had nine months to pay. He then made 6 candlesticks.20
This would place him as an independent craftsman working under the aegis of Leonardo’s Milanese studio. He is a metalworker, which ties in with Ammirato’s mention of his interest in mining. In another near-contemporary source – a Venetian manuscript which has some copies of Leonardo machinery – he is described as a ‘blacksmith’.21 In 1492–3 Leonardo was involved in a very ambitious project – the casting of the gigantic equestrian statue known as the Sforza Horse – and doubtless the expert metallurgist Masini was involved in that too, and in many other projects: military, architectural and indeed aviational.
Zoroastro has a mercurial quality: his status is hard to define. He is ‘Maestro Tommaso’ to Leonardo, but to the accountant reckoning up the costs of the Anghiari fresco he is only a garzone or shop-assistant mixing the colours. He is also probably ‘Tommaso my servant’ – ‘mio famiglio’ – who makes household purchases for Leonardo in 1504. If so, we have some samples of his handwriting preserved among Leonardo’s papers in the Codex Arundel: a rounded, well-formed script.22
Another first-hand account of Zoroastro has recently surfaced. It is in a letter from Dom Miguel da Silva, Bishop of Viseo – a courtly and well-connected Portuguese who is one of the interlocutors in Castiglione’s book The Courtier. The letter, dated 21 February 1520, is addressed to Giovanni Rucellai, the son of Bernardo. (This tends to validate Ammirato’s account of Zoroastro, which mentions his connection with both da Silva and the Rucellai.) At some point before the letter, we learn, Zoroastro had been living at the Rucellai country villa, Quaracci, outside Florence. Da Silva writes of visiting the house, where he was pleased to find ‘everything arranged just as if Zoroastro was still there – a great many cooking-pots with dried-up paste, and other pieces of pots that had already been in the fire, were to be seen all over the place’. These ‘cooking-pots’ are to be understood as chemical vessels – retorts, alembics, etc. – as the continuation of da Silva’s letter makes clear:
Zoroastro is now in my house [in Rome] and governs me completely. We have some secret special rooms, and in the corner of a nice square room, in a place that once served as a little chapel, we have set up an excellent kitchen [i.e. laboratory], where I do nothing but puff with the bellows and pour out tremendous torrents of melted lead. We make spheres which shine brilliantly and in which appear strange human figures with horns on their heads and crabs’ legs and a nose like a prawn. In an old fireplace we have made a furnace, built up with bricks, and here we distil and separate the elements of everything; and with these we extract the fire from a marine monster [dactilo marino] which forever burns and shines. In the middle of the room there is a large table cluttered with pots and flasks of all sorts, and paste and clay and Greek pitch and cinnabar, and the teeth of hanged men, and roots. There is a plinth made of sulphur polished up on a lathe, and on this stands a vessel of yellow amber, empty except for a serpent with four legs, which we take for a miracle. Zoroastro believes that some gryphon carried it through the air from Libya and dropped it at the Mamolo bridge, where it was found and tamed by him. The walls of this room are all daubed with weird faces and drawings on paper, among which is one of a monkey who is telling stories to a crowd of rats who are attentively listening, and a thousand other things full of mystery.23
This vivid account gives us Zoroastro the alchemist, distilling and decocting strange brews; Zoroastro the keeper of strange reptiles; and indeed Zoroastro the artist, daubing the walls of his Roman laboratory with grotesque faces and talking animals. He is almost like a comic, folkloric version of Leonardo da Vinci. His interest in alchemy or chemistry (broadly the same activity at this time, but with different ends in view) is cognate with his work as a metallurgist. I cannot resist attributing to him the recipe written out by Leonardo, probably in the late 1480s. Headed ‘Deadly smoke’ (Fumo mortale), and appearing on a sheet related to naval warfare, its constituents are:
Arsenic mixed with sulphur and realgar
Medicinal rosewater
Venom of toad – that is, land-toad
Slaver of mad dog
Decoction of dogwood berries
Tarantula from Taranto24
This seems to me pure Zoroastro; it is almost a little poem.
A few months after Miguel da Silva wrote his letter Zoroastro was dead. His epitaph, inscribed on his tomb in Sant’Agata, commemorated him as ‘Zoroastro Masino, a man outstanding for his probity, his innocence and his liberality, and a true Philosopher who looked into the darkness of Nature to the admirable benefit of Nature herself’. Leonardo would not have minded this for his own epitaph: ‘ad naturae obscuritatem spectat…’
The memory of Zoroastro lingered on. The comic novelist Anton Francesco Grazzini (known by the fishy pen-name of Il Lasca – ‘the Roach’) includes a ‘crazy’ magician called Zoroastro in his collection Le Cene (Suppers). Grazzini was born in Florence in 1503, and was writing the Cene in mid-century. It is possible the character is loosely based on the real Zoroastro, though too loosely to be biographically useful. Grazzini’s Zoroastro is a comic-book magician, a stereotype, and there is no way of knowing if his physical appearance – a ‘tall, well-built, sallow-complexioned man, with a surly face and a proud manner, and a bushy black beard which he never combed’ – agrees with that of Tommaso Masini.25
Tommaso has been undervalued by Leonardo scholars: he always seems just a picturesque footnote – an eccentric hanger-on with a strong line in hocus-pocus. There is a folkloric element in all the early descriptions of him – in Ammirato’s sketch as much as in Grazzini’s fictionalized version, even in da Silva’s letter, which is an actual report of him, though doubtless pepped up for the amusement of Giovanni Rucellai. Leonardo’s version of him, as far as he gives us one, is rather different: Tommaso the maker of candlesticks, the grinder of colours, the purchaser of provisions – filling eminently practical roles. One notes also the enduring of his relationship with Leonardo. According to Ammirato he had already ‘joined up’ with Leonardo before the latter’s departure from Florence in c. 1482; he goes with Leonardo to Milan, and is glimpsed there, in Leonardo’s studio, in the early 1490s; back in Florence, in 1505, he is mixing colours for the Anghiari fresco. This already covers twenty-five years of acquaintance (though not necessarily continuous employment); it is also possible they were in Rome together in 1513–16. Tommaso may have been something of a joker, but he was clearly no fool. The range of his protectors and hosts in Rome is also impressive: Giovanni Rucellai, da Silva, Giovan Battista Ridolfi.
When Ammirato says that Tommaso ‘joined up’ with Leonardo, he means that he entered Leonardo’s studio as an apprentice or assistant. He perhaps replaced young Paolo di Leonardo in 1478, when the latter had been chased out of Florence for ‘wicked’ behaviour. Tommaso would then have been sixteen: a gardener’s son from Peretola, but already a young man of some promise. According to Ammirato, he claimed to be Bernardo Rucellai’s natural son: this is either a Zoroastrian joke or more likely a misunderstanding by Ammirato, who is the only source for it
. (Rucellai was thirteen when Tommaso was born, making the paternity improbable though I suppose not impossible.) More likely is that he was a protégé or prodigy of Bernardo Rucellai, as he later was of Rucellai’s son Giovanni. Bernardo was an assiduous member of Ficino’s academy, and in later years would found his own Platonic academy at the Orti Oricellari, or Rucellai Gardens, round the corner from Santa Maria Novella. The ‘Zoroastrian’ side of Tommaso Masini may have its beginnings precisely in the ambit of Ficinian magic, with which we find Leonardo associated through his connection with Bernardo Bembo and the Benci.
One does not want to lose the colourful Zoroastro of legend: magic and alchemy and their attendant showmanships were doubtless part of his act, and part of his attraction to those upmarket Roman hosts. (Alchemy, of course, had an added attraction – the remote but tempting possibility of infinite wealth.) But there is a real man behind the showmanship, and he was valued by Leonardo. A man of probity, says his epitaph: an innocent, a philosopher.
THE TECHNOLOGIST
If Tommaso Masini the future metalworker and alchemist was already an apprentice or assistant of Leonardo’s in the late 1470s, he would be associated with Leonardo’s early efforts as an engineer. It is from this period that we find the first concerted signs of Leonardo the technologist. They are found in the Codex Atlanticus and in the pages of Vasari, who describes various technological interests pursued by Leonardo while ‘still a young man [giovanetto]’, which is vague but certainly means while he was still in Florence. Whether any of these ideas were translated into actual projects is doubtful.
As we saw, Leonardo had gained first-hand knowledge of Brunelleschi’s ingenious hoists and cranes in 1471, when he was involved in the placing of the palla on top of the Duomo. He seems to have returned to this interest in around 1478–80, which is the probable date of those drawings of Brunelleschian lifting-devices in the Codex Atlanticus. Vasari mentions Leonardo’s interest in heavy lifting-gear: ‘He demonstrated how to lift and draw great weights by means of levers, hoists and winches.’ These would be particularly appropriate for an ambitious project described by Vasari:
Among his models and plans was one he proposed several times to the ingenious citizens then governing Florence, which showed how to raise the temple of San Giovanni [i.e. the Baptistery] in order to place steps under it, without any damage. His arguments were so powerful that many people were persuaded it could be done, until they left his company and thought it over, and realized it was impossible.
The idea is not as outrageous as Vasari implies. A similar feat – the moving of a church tower – had been achieved twenty-five years before, in Bologna, by the engineer Aristotele Fioravanti. Raising the Baptistery would have had advantages both aesthetic (to bring it up to the level of the Duomo opposite) and practical (to protect it from the periodic flooding of the Arno). The idea of placing it on steps was still current a century later, when Vasari’s friend Vincenzo Borghini published two engravings of an imagined reconstruction of the Baptistery ‘classicized’ and placed on a plinth with steps.26
That curious device I mentioned earlier ‘for opening up a prison from the inside’ is a further application of Brunelleschian engineering. The drawing in the Codex Atlanticus shows a stout three-legged winch with a screwed bolt at right angles; the bolt has a gripping mechanism on the end which Leonardo refers to as its ‘tongs’ (‘tanagli’). In one of the drawings it is shown ripping out the iron bars of a window. This machine might come under the heading of military hardware, but it might equally be referred back to Leonardo’s memories of imprisonment – ‘voi mi metteste in prigione’ – after the accusation concerning Jacopo Saltarelli. It is conceivable that this device is mentioned in an obscure corner of Vasari’s Lives concerning a Florentine blacksmith named Caparra: ‘Some young citizens brought him a drawing of a machine which could break and tear iron bars by means of a screw, and they asked him to make it for them.’ The blacksmith angrily refused, thinking it a ‘thief’s device’ for ‘robbing people or disgracing young girls’. He thought the young men were of good sort (‘uomini de bene’), but wanted nothing to do with this ‘villainy’.27 Could this drawing be the one now found in the Codex Atlanticus, and could Leonardo be one of those dubious but basically decent young citizens who approached Caparra to make it?
Vasari also says that Leonardo ‘designed mills, fulling machines, and engines that could be powered by water’, and this is echoed in an early sheet showing millstones, grinders and ovens. Other early drawings feature
Early technology. Leonardo’s devices for ‘opening up a prison’ and (below) for raising water.
hygrometers for measuring moisture in the air, and hydraulic devices for raising water. The latter show Leonardo’s early interest in the Archimedean screw, a device which raises water through a helix rotating inside a cylinder.28 These drawings, or ones very like them, occur in his list of works written in c. 1482: ‘some machines for waterworks’ and ‘some machines for ships’. The list also mentions ‘drawings of furnaces’, but these seem to have been lost.
These are some of Leonardo’s earliest technical drawings; they belong still to the somewhat two-dimensional style of the Quattrocento engineer, which one sees in the drawings of contemporaries like Buonaccorso Ghiberti, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Giuliano da Sangallo. Only later, following his studies of the ‘human machine’, does the true Leonardian technical drawing develop: multifaceted, sumptuously detailed, fully modelled and shaded without losing its analytical function – a visual language with which to explain mechanical processes and structures.
On another sheet of the Codex Atlanticus belonging to this time there is a list of eight names: a circle of acquaintances, or perhaps acquaintances to which Leonardo aspired.29 Of the five whose names can be identified, one, Domenico di Michelino, is a painter; the remaining four are scientists and scholars. This is again Leonardo the nascent scientist of the late 1470s. The first item on the list reads, ‘Quadrante di Carlo Marmocchi’. Marmocchi was an engineer and mathematician in the service of the Signoria: the ‘quadrante’ referred to may be either a treatise written by him or an actual quadrant – an instrument for measuring the altitude of stars – owned by him. ‘Benedetto de l’Abaco’ refers to another well-known Florentine mathematician, also known as Benedetto Arithmeticus.
The best-known person on the list is the one whom Leonardo simply calls ‘Maestro Paolo the physician’ – almost certainly a reference to the great Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, whose position as the grand old man of Florentine science I have already mentioned. One of his disciplines which would have interested Leonardo was optics. Toscanelli is thought to be the author of a treatise on perspective, a copy of which survives in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. It includes discussions of aerial perspective, optical illusion, and the observation of celestial phenomena. This work was well known in the Quattrocento, and was used as a kind of artist’s handbook on perspective; Leonardo seems to be citing it in some notes headed ‘Reasons for the increased size of the sun in the west’.30 An interesting drawing in the Codex Atlanticus belongs to this period. It shows a man looking through a ‘perspectograph’ (p. 175) – an optical device which helped the artist to reproduce an object in correctly scaled proportions. Under a caption reading ‘Put your eye to the tube’ (in other words the sight-hole) it shows a young man in a long loose gown, with curly hair topped off with a berretta.31 This may well be a self-portrait: the figure has some similarity to the probable self-portrait in the Adoration of the Magi, painted in 1481–2.
The last name on Leonardo’s list is ‘Messer Giovanni Argiropolo’. This is the Greek scholar Joannes Argyropoulos, probably the most famous Aristotelian in Italy.32 He was born in Constantinople in about 1415 and, like so many Byzantine scholars, sought asylum in Italy after the fall of the city in 1453. For fifteen years (1456–71) he was public lecturer at Florence’s university, the Studio, where he discoursed on the Aristotelian texts – the Ethics, Physics, Metap
hysics, Analytics, etc., all of which he translated into Latin. He was a vital figure in the Renaissance re-evaluation of Aristotle, which stressed the analytic, scientific side of his philosophy, as opposed to the metaphysics which had been grist to the mill of medieval scholarship. Argyropoulos influenced a whole generation of Florentine intellectuals – Ficino, Landino and Poliziano were all his students and admirers, as was Lorenzo de’ Medici. In 1477, after a spell in Rome, he resumed his post at the Studio, but his star was fading and he was ousted; he left Florence in 1481. Leonardo’s note belongs to this last declining phase of his influence. Like Toscanelli, another ageing guru, Argyropoulos was a pioneer of clear-sighted empiricism. All ‘researchers of immortal wisdom’ were grateful to him, wrote Poliziano, for chasing the ‘mists and glooms’ from their eyes.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 18