On the same sheet as these names appear, Leonardo drew a sketch of a clock using compressed air, and this in turn evoked some morose-seeming thoughts about the passage of time and the fear of ‘this miserable life’ passing ‘without leaving some memory of ourselves in the minds of mortals’. This gives his list of scholars and scientists an air of resolution, a determination to seek out and cultivate these important men, to try to do something memorable so that his ‘course should not be sped in vain’.
Lifting huge weights, ripping out the iron bars from windows, raising and channelling water – these are the first aspirations of Leonardo the young technologist: a pitting of human and mechanical ingenuity against the brute forces of gravity; a harnessing of natural energies. In the hydraulic devices and Archimedean screws we find the genesis of one of the great energy principles of Leonardian physics – the spiral, or, as Leonardo calls it, the coclea (snail-shell), in which resides the force of screws, drills, propellers and turbines, and, in nature, tornadoes and whirlpools. The vortical power of water is eloquently described in Alberti’s treatise on civil engineering, De re aedificatoria (which Leonardo certainly knew): ‘The rotation of waters
Study of currents and whirlpools, c. 1508–10.
or whirlpools is like a liquid drill, which nothing is hard enough to resist.’33 The force of the vortex fascinated Leonardo – a fascination expressed most powerfully in the late drawings known as the ‘Deluge’ series, but already present, in miniature, in the cascading ringlets of the Ginevra.
And there is something else in these rudimentary technical folios: the ultimate defiance of gravity. There is a scruffy-looking page among the Leonardo drawings in the Uffizi, dated c. 1478–80.34 On the verso of it is the earliest extant drawing of a Leonardo flying-machine. It is no more than a doodle, but quite unmistakable. It is seen from directly above or directly below; it has reticulated wings like a bat’s, a fanned-out tail like a bird’s, and a cockpit or framework shaped rather like a kayak. To the side of it is a more detailed drawing of a mechanism which would manoeuvre the wing by means of a handle operated by the pilot. The restricted movement of the handle suggests that this is essentially a hang-glider (as opposed to later designs that have mechanisms to make the wings actually flap up and down). This is confirmed on the other side of the sheet, in the upper left-hand corner, by a single zigzag line with the note ‘Questo è il modo del chalare degli uccelli’ – ‘This is the method by which birds descend.’ The line shows a bird’s descent as an angled fall punctuated with short upthrusts to break the momentum.
The first flying-machine, c. 1478–80.
This brief sentence and the scarcely perceptible line which illustrates it constitute Leonardo’s first known pronouncement on the mechanics of avian flight, already linked – as the machine on the verso clearly shows – to the dream of human flight: his ‘destiny’, as he would later put it, remembering or inventing that kite which flew down to him in his cradle.
‘POETS IN A HURRY’
On another list written around this time we find the name Antonio da Pistoia. This refers to the rough-diamond poet Antonio Cammelli, known as ‘I1 Pistoia’ or ‘I1 Pistoiese’, who opens up another aspect of Leonardo’s Florentine circle in the late 1470s.35 They may have met when Leonardo was in Pistoia in 1477: Cammelli is plausibly one of those ‘companions in Pistoia’ to whom Leonardo refers. Some poems found among Leonardo’s papers are probably in Cammelli’s hand; one of them can be dated quite precisely to around November 1479.
Now in his mid-forties, Cammelli was one of the finest vernacular poets of his generation. He typifies the slangy, ribald, satirical style often called burchiellesco, after an early exponent of the genre, the Florentine barber Domenico di Giovanni, called Il Burchiello. The name derives from the phrase alla burchia, which literally means ‘in haste’ or ‘higgledy-piggledy’. These ‘poets in a hurry’, dashing off poems with a feel of improvisation, and with a deliberate roughness and slanginess, were the jazz poets or rap artists of the Quattrocento – a very different breed from humanist poets like Poliziano and Landino with their classical allusions and Petrarchan conceits. Others who belong within this vein of anti-classicismo are the Florentines Luigi Pulci and Bernardo Bellincioni, and somewhat later Francesco Berni, born down the road from Vinci, in Lamporecchio, in 1498. Berni paid tribute to Cammelli – ‘O spirito bizarro del Pistoia!’ – and the great satirist Pietro Aretino praised the ‘sharpness and speed’ of his pen.36
Cammelli wrote ‘sonnets’, but not in the fourteen-line form later adopted in Elizabethan England. The term was more generic: sonetto simply means ‘a little song’, and is scarcely distinguishable from other lyric forms – frottole, rispetti, strambotti, etc. – which these poets used. Their verses were often performed to music, and some poets, like Serafino Aquilino, were noted musicians as well. Cammelli is occasionally romantic but more often cynical, as in the spirited poem ‘Orsu che fia?’ (‘What are you up to?’), much of it spoken by the poet’s frustrated wife:
Io starei meglio moglie d’un sartore,
che mi mettria tre punti in uno occhiello.
Ognor tu scrivi e canzone e rispetti,
vivo a marito a guisa di donzella:
che’l diavol te ne porti e tua sonnetti…
[I’d be better off married to a tailor: he’d put a few stitches in my buttonhole. You spend every hour writing songs and catches, I’m living with a husband who’s like a girl: the devil take you and your sonnets…]
The poet’s reluctance, it turns out, is not just because he’s composing his ‘songs and catches’, but because he fears she will get pregnant again:
Quel che a te piace a me non par bel gioco,
ch’io non vo’ piu cagnoli intorno al foco…
[That game you like I’m not so fond of, because I don’t want any more pups round the fireside… ]37
Poverty, hunger, disappointment and imprisonment are common themes, delivered in a defiantly humorous tone. A typical sonnet plays variations on Cammelli’s ugliness – he is ‘thin and scrawny’, he looks like a ‘screech-owl without a beak’, and so on – and then delivers the punchline:
Dunque chi vol veder guardi mi tutto:
Un uom senza dinar quanto par brutto.
[So take a good look at me all who wish: how ugly a man looks when he has no money.]
Some of the satirical poems are just a catalogue of ingenious insults – the railing which Cammelli calls ‘talking pepper’ (dire pepe) – but his typical tone is charming and nonchalant:
Cantava il concubin della gallina;
La rugiada sul giorno era nei prati…
[The hen’s lover-boy was singing; the dew of the day was on the meadows… ]38
The elegant Cardinal Bibbiena summed up Cammelli’s style well: ‘le facezie, il sale e il miele’ – ‘jokes, salt and honey’.
It is very likely that Cammelli wrote the short, humorous poem in Latin distichs found on a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus.39 The occasion of the poem was the siege of Colle Val d’Elsa by the troops of the Papal League in November 1479 – this was part of the war that followed the Pazzi Conspiracy. The town capitulated on 14 November, its walls having been reduced to rubble by an enormous piece of siege-artillery nicknamed La Ghibellina. This gun is the subject – indeed the imagined speaker – of the poem found in Leonardo’s papers, which begins:
Pandite iam portas, miseri, et subducite pontes
Nam Federigus adest quem Gebellina sequor…
[Now throw open your gates, you miserable creatures, and let down your drawbridges, for Federico is here whom I, Ghibellina, follow… ]
‘Federico’ is Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, one of the generals of the anti-Florentine league. On the same sheet are various drawings of artillery by Leonardo: the poem and the drawings belong together – companion pieces.
Cammelli is the likely author per se, and there are other circumstantial pointers. His patron at this time, the Ferrarese courtier
Niccolò da Correggio, was a senior military figure in the Florentine alliance, and Cammelli may have done some soldiering under his banner. We know Cammelli was in Florence in the summer of 1479 – on 20 August he answered a court summons for debt – so it is not improbable he was there in late November or December, the presumed date of the poem.
If this eccentric little braggadoccio is from the pen of Il Pistoiese, so too are some other passages in the Codex Atlanticus written in the same hand. One is a quite personal poem addressed to Leonardo, or perhaps rather a draft of a poem. Unfortunately it is obscured by a large ink-blot, but infra-red imaging has made at least part of it legible. The title of the poem can be partially read as ‘S […] 4’ – probably ‘Sonetto 4’. It begins:
Lionardo mio non avete d[…]
Lionardo perche tanto penato[?]
[My Leonardo you don’t have any […] Leonardo, why so troubled?]
The rest is hard to interpret, but seems to harp on a note of reconciliation or apology: the last word of the poem is perdonato, pardoned. Also written on this page are fragments of poetry in Leonardo’s mirror-script. There are two quotes from Ovid – ‘Things done without any witnesses, things known only to the dark night’ and ‘O Time, the consumer of all things’ – and one from Petrarch. And there is a lovely little couplet – very Cammellesco, but actually a quotation from Luca Pulci (brother of Luigi):
Deh non m’ avete a vil ch’io son povero
Povero e quel che assai cose desidera
[Don’t despise me because I’m poor: a man is poor when he desires many things.]40
This page gives us a sense of Leonardo opening up to the possibilities of poetry, perhaps under the capricious influence of Cammelli.
Another poem in the same handwriting appears to be a satirical sally against Bernardo Bellincioni, a Florentine poet in much the same burchiellesco vein as Cammelli, but younger. Bellincioni was a favourite of Lorenzo de’ Medici, with whom he exchanged scurrilous sonnets, and of Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, and hence a suitable target for the irascible Cammelli.41 Leonardo probably knew him too – they certainly knew one another later, in Milan, and collaborated together. They were the same age, and Bernardo was a poor boy raised up by his wit – a type Leonardo liked. He was a sparky, difficult young man: an enfant terrible. The Medici poet and priest Matteo Franco was an enemy – Bellincioni wrote a sonnet against him, beginning, ‘Taci, non ciarlar piu che tu schimazzi’ (‘Be quiet, stop chattering, or you’ll turn into a monkey’). The acerbic Luigi Pulci liked him, and praised his wit in his own great work, the burlesque epic Morgante maggiore, published in 1481 – a book which Leonardo later owned, and from which he quoted. Thus the Florentine literary currents flow in and around Leonardo’s studio.
If one were looking for a literary influence on Leonardo, the rough and laconic Cammelli would seem more congenial to him than the more mannered style of Poliziano, whose influence we felt hovering over the Ginevra portrait. Leonardo was never an exponent of belles-lettres; there are some forays into literary modes, but his writing style is terse, vernacular and tending to roughness of finish, and if it achieves poetry at times it does so through lucidity and density of expression, not through verbal tricks and pretty assonances.
There is something heartening about the friendship with the hard-bitten poet from Pistoia – that ‘Lionardo mio’ certainly suggests friendship – though we also learn from that poem that Leonardo is penato: literally ‘pained’, therefore troubled, stressed, downcast (though it can also mean ‘hard-working’, as in one who ‘takes pains’ over something). And he is ‘poor’, but philosophical about being so. Business at the bottega was not booming, we might infer, but the evenings were convivial.
THE MUSICIAN
Leonardo’s connection with rimesters like Cammelli and Bellincioni leads us to another of his accomplishments – one that is often forgotten. The early biographers are unanimously agreed that he was a brilliant musician, and that he was particularly good at playing the ‘lyre’. He must already have excelled during these years in Florence, since both the Anonimo and Vasari insist that when he went to Milan, probably in early 1482, he was presented to the Milanese court not as a painter or technologist, but as a musician. This is such a singular idea that one can only believe it is true.
The lira which Leonardo played was not the harp-shaped lyre of classical antiquity, such as is plucked in comic scenarios of Elysium. It was a more recently evolved instrument known as the lira da braccio, literally the ‘arm lyre’. It was essentially a variation on the viola da braccio, which in turn was the forerunner of the violin. Typically the lira da braccio had seven strings. Five were melody strings, tuned by pegs set in a heart-shaped peg-box. They were played with a bow, and were stopped with the fingers against a fingerboard to produce different notes. In addition it had two open strings (corde di bordone) running outside the fingerboard: these were ‘drones’ producing only one tone, and were plucked with the thumb of the left hand (or perhaps in Leonardo’s case the right) to produce a beat. These open strings, being comparable in sound and technique to those of a lyre, gave the instrument its name. A sixteenth-century Venetian lira da braccio is in the National Music Museum in South Dakota. It has a sentence in Latin painted round its carved ribs: ‘While the horse goes over the sheep, back and forth, the wood returns a mellifluous sound.’ This punning pastoral motto – referring to the horsehair of the bow, the sheep-gut of the strings, and the wood of the lira – sounds like one of Leonardo’s riddling prophecies.42
Angel playing a lira da braccio in the panel attributed to Ambrogio de Predis.
In paintings of the period, the lira or viola da braccio (it is often hard to tell which) is frequently shown being played by an angel. It features in pictures by Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Raphael and Mantegna, and in a page-border illumination in the Sforza Book of Hours. It is definitely a lira da braccio being played by the angel in the panel by Ambrogio de Predis in the National Gallery in London – you can clearly see the drone-strings passing outside the angel’s left thumb. This painting was originally a side-panel for Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks; it was painted by one of his chief colleagues in Milan, and may reflect something of the experience of watching – and listening to – Leonardo play.
Thus Leonardo’s instrument is essentially a prototypical fiddle, a violin avant la lettre. When and from whom he learned to play it is not known. Vasari makes music one of the accomplishments of the boy Leonardo, but this may be biographer’s hindsight. We know that Verrocchio had a lute
Musical games. A sketch for a fantastical stringed instrument, and a riddle using musical notation, both from the late 1480s.
among his possessions: this suggests that music was played in the bottega, and perhaps it was taught there, informally at least. Benvenuto Cellini, writing of his father Giovanni’s apprenticeship in Florence in the 1480s, says, ‘According to Vitruvius, if you want to do well in architecture, you must have some knowledge of both music and drawing. So Giovanni, having achieved skill at drawing, began to study music, and at the same time he learned to play excellently on the viola and the flute.’ Cellini also says that the Florentine pifferi (pipers) and other musicians who played on civic occasions – his father among them – were all very respectable artisans, and ‘some of them were of the arti maggiori, such as silkworkers and woolworkers, and for this reason my father did not think it unworthy to pursue this profession’.43 Both these comments seem relevant to Leonardo – that a proficiency in music went with the study of art and architecture; and that there was a strong tradition of music-making among the Florentine guilds.
What kind of music did Leonardo da Vinci play? No compositions by him survive, and the soundtrack of late Quattrocento Florence is loud and various – the fifes and drums of the pifferi, the sing-along ‘catches’ of carnival, the instrumental preludes and interludes that accompanied the sacre rappresentazioni, the fashionable dance tunes of Guglielmo Ebreo, the virtuoso organ mus
ic of Francesco Squarcialupi. Vasari gives us a clue (or at least an assumption) when he adds apropos Leonardo’s musical talents, ‘He was also the most skilled improviser in verse of his time.’ This pictures Leonardo accompanying himself on the lira while reciting or singing poems extempore. Viola-type instruments were particularly associated with this. The Flemish musician Johannes Tinctoris, at this time resident composer at the Neapolitan court, recommended the viola for ‘the accompaniment and ornamentation of vocal music and the recitation of epics’. The tradition of the improvvisatore lasted into modern times. The Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett described a performance by one in 1765: ‘When the subject is given, his brother tunes his violin to accompany him, and he begins to rehearse in recitative, with wonderful fluency and precision. Thus he will, at a minute’s warning, recite two or three hundred verses, well-turned and well-adapted.’44 Such skills shade into those of the frottolista – the singer of love-songs. Frottole (‘Trifles’) were essentially sung poems: the term is used generically to cover a variety of lyric forms – sonnets, odes, strambotti, etc. – set to music. These compositions have been described as ‘half-popular, half-aristocratic’ – they used popular tunes, but in a manner designed to please the cultivated listener. The heyday of the frottola was a little later than Leonardo’s arrival in Milan – around the turn of the century – and is particularly associated with the Mantuan court of Isabella d’Este, where accomplished poet-musicians like Serafino Aquilino held sway.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 19