The last page, folio 100 verso, was also the outer cover – when the book was out of its vellum carrying-case – and was thus the receptacle, over the years, of scribbles and lists and doodles: a miscellany of moments in the studiolo or study of Leonardo da Vinci. In the top left-hand corner is a numerical calculation, probably of money; to the right of it is a list of words, of which one (sorbire) is destined for a Latin word-list in another notebook, the Trivulzio Codex. Then comes a memorandum list of mostly cryptic import ending, ‘Ask Maestro Lodovicho for the water pipes, the small oven, the tinderbox, the perpetual motion [machine?], the small bellows, the forge-bellows.’44 Below this are three rows of hieroglyphs of vaguely Hebraic aspect and then, further down, four rapid sketches showing a moth, a bat, a dragonfly and a butterfly. Beneath the bat, before the long tear in the lower left-hand corner begins, are the words ‘animale che fuge dell’uno elemento nell’ altro’ – a beautiful and typically Leonardian synopsis of flight: ‘animal that flees from one element into another’. In the lower right-hand corner is a sketched figure which Marinoni describes as ‘a cloaked man in an act of reverence’, but the face is comically drawn, and he seems less to be kneeling in reverence than crouching. His hand reaches out to grasp the lower part of the bat’s wing, which has itself been doodled and cross-hatched, giving it a certain fleshiness, so the grasping or groping figure takes on a faintly lecherous aspect, and is certainly a potential impediment to the winged creature so keen to ‘flee’ to another element. He seems to belong with the Virtue–Envy, Pleasure–Pain conflict of the Oxford allegories: he is what drags you back down. Such are the unconscious patterns caught in the nap of this old notebook-cover.
There are two other notebooks which belong to this first period, conventionally dated c. 1487–90. One is a small pocket-book which is part of the Forster codices in the Victoria & Albert Museum.45 It deals with Archimedean screws or cocleae (literally snail-shells) to raise water, and other hydraulic machines. It has a number of chemical recipes, which perhaps reflect the presence of Zoroastro, or ‘Maestro Tommaso’ as Leonardo calls him in 1492. It investigates the enigma of perpetual motion, a subject he later dismissed as an illusion, the fruit of ‘superstizione’, on a par with the chimerical gold-making dreams of the alchemist.
The other early notebook is the Codex Trivulzianus or Trivulzio Codex. It is named after the Milanese family which owned it in the eighteenth century; there is no specific connection with Giangiacomo Trivulzio, the Renaissance condottiere whom Leonardo knew. It shares with its contemporary MS B an interest in architecture, and it contains some witty caricatures – among the earliest of the grotesques which become a fascinating sub-genre of Leonardo’s drawings – but what fills most of its pages is a painstaking series of Latin vocabulary lists. Hundreds of words are listed and when necessary translated into Italian: this is a crash-course in what was still the international language of learning and philosophy. We have a sense of labour, of homework, of punishing schedules.
On an early page of the Trivulzio Codex46 is a column of five words, as follows:
donato
lapidario
plinio
dabacho
morgante
At first glance this looks like another vocab list, but it is not. The words are abbreviated book-titles. There is no heading, so we don’t know for sure that these are books that Leonardo owns, but as all of them occur in later book-lists, which are certainly inventories of his library, it seems that this is indeed the earliest known account of the books on Leonardo’s shelf. Are these his only books at this time? It is not unlikely: printed books were expensive, still something of an innovation. They were not always welcomed by the bibliophiles of the day: the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci praised the Duke of Urbino’s library of manuscripts, ‘beautifully illuminated and bound in silver and scarlet’, then added, ‘Had there been one printed volume there, it would have been ashamed in such company!’47 Leonardo’s later lists suggest a rapid acquisition of books – a list in the Codex Atlanticus, which belongs to the early 1490s, enumerates forty books, while the famous Madrid inventory of 1504 contains 116 volumes.
The five books of the Trivulzian list are a snapshot of his interests in the late 1480s. Donato refers to a popular book of Latin grammar and syntax, De octo partibus orationis, by Aelius Donatus; there were numerous editions in the fifteenth century, and in fact the term donato became a standard shorthand for any Latin grammar-book (and donatello, a little Donato, for an elementary grammar-book). Its presence here ties in with the Latin vocabulary lists.
The term lapidario is too vague to identify with certainty: it is some kind of manual about precious stones and minerals. The nineteenth-century bibliophile Count Girolamo d’Adda – the first to study Leonardo’s reading systematically – thought it might be an Italian translation of the Liber lapidum (Book of Stones) written by a twelfth-century French bishop, Marbodeus. This book, also called De gemmis (Concerning Gems), particularly treats of the medicinal properties of precious stones.48
Plinio undoubtedly refers to the Historia naturalis of Pliny the Elder, the observant, scholarly, credulous author who was killed in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. His Natural History was an immensely popular repository of classical knowledge and lore, covering geography, natural science, inventions and the arts. He was a native of Como, and was considered a local hero in Lombardy. The edition Leonardo owned was probably the Italian translation by Cristoforo Landino, published in Venice in 1476. Leonardo had probably known Landino in Florence.
Dabacho (i.e. d’abaco) is again too broad a term: the word ‘abacus’ in this context could mean any book of arithmetic. There was a well-known Trattato d’abaco by Paolo Dagomari, but this was aged. A more up-to-date work was the Nobel opera de arithmetica by Piero Borgi da Venezia, published in 1484; Leonardo refers elsewhere to ‘Maestro Piero dal Borgo’.
Morgante takes us back again to Florence, to the popular romantic epic by Luigi Pulci, the scurrilously irreligious friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Benedetto Dei. This burlesque, slangy work – in a style not unlike that of Antonio Cammelli, though more sustained and subtle in form – appeared in two stages. The longer, 28-canto, version, known as the Morgante maggiore, was published in Florence in 1482. Leonardo quotes from it more than once; it is also likely he took from it the nickname Salai – meaning ‘Little Devil’ – which he gave to his wayward young Milanese apprentice Giacomo Caprotti.
Grammar, natural science, mathematics, poetry: a small row of books on the autodidact’s shelf, but as we have seen, this is only the beginning of Leonardo’s bibliophilia. The book-list written in red chalk on a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus seems to belong to about 1492: on the verso of it are some notes which are transcribed almost verbatim in Paris MS A, which is of this date.49 By this time, perhaps five years after the minimal Trivulzian list, Leonardo’s library has increased to thirty-seven books. (There are forty items listed, but the three volumes of the Decades of Livy are given as three separate works, and the Epistles of Filelfo is mentioned twice.)
Broadly speaking, of these thirty-seven books six are philosophical and religious in nature, fifteen are scientific and technical texts, and sixteen are literary works. The first category includes the Bible, the Psalms, a Lives of the Philosophers and a work identified as ‘de immortalita d’anima,’ which is almost certainly an Italian version of Ficino’s Theologia platonica, published in Latin in 1481 with the sub-title ‘De animarum immortalitate’. The scientific works are predictably various – works on mathematics, military science, agriculture, surgery, law, music, chiromancy and precious stones, and three separate books on health. (Does one discern a note of hypochondria?) It is the abundance of the literary category which is perhaps the surprise. Admittedly the category is broad: I have included among the literary texts three books on grammar and rhetoric, which are about how to write, and one travel book (an edition of ‘Giovan di Mandivilla’ or John de Mandeville) which is certai
nly more fiction than fact. The rest are an impressive collection of prose and poetry, including classical works by Aesop, Livy and Ovid, an edition of Petrarch, the sub-Dantesque Quadriregio by the Dominican friar Federigo Frezzi, the prose collection called the Fiore di virtù, the bawdy doggerel Il Manganello, the burlesque poems of ‘Il Burchiello’, the Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, the Epistles of Filelfo, the Driadeo by Luca Pulci, and the Morgante by his brother Luigi Pulci – the latter presumably the copy listed in the Trivulzio notebook. These are books read for pleasure, for much-needed relaxation.
TALL TALES, SMALL PUZZLES
It was probably on a day in 1487 that Leonardo availed himself of some spare paper from a discarded cathedral ledger and, on a pair of blank versos, drafted a picturesque story about a giant in Africa.50 He addressed it to the traveller and epistler Benedetto Dei, one of the Florentines about the Milanese court. Dei left Milan in 1487, which is the sort of date suggested by the handwriting of the draft: the piece may have been intended as a gift or presentation to him. Perhaps it was recited at some farewell do, with Zoroastro suitably accoutred in the role of the giant; or perhaps, like so many of Leonardo’s ghiribizzi, or caprices, it never got any further than this fragmentary draft. It begins:
Dear Benedetto Dei – To give you news of things here in the East, you should know that in the month of June there appeared a giant who comes from the deserts of Libya. This giant was born on Mount Atlas, and was black, and fought against Artaxerxes, and against Egyptians and Arabs, Medes and Persians. He lived in the sea and fed on whales, sea-serpents and ships.
It goes on to describe an earth-shaking battle between the giant and the human inhabitants of the region, involving much Gulliverish description of the tininess of the people, ‘scurrying furiously over his body like ants over the trunk of a fallen oak’. Awakened by the ‘smarting’ of their stabs, the giant utters a ‘growl like a terrifying clap of thunder’ and ‘lifting one of his hands to his face finds it to be full of men, clinging to its hairs’.
Richter glosses it as a ‘piece of railery’; we would perhaps call it a ‘spoof’ – an obviously fantastical account dressed up as a traveller’s newsletter. Most travel narratives at this time were written in the epistolary form. It is thus a joke about the dubious veracity of such accounts, and perhaps a particular jibe – a good-natured one – at Benedetto Dei as a purveyor of such tall tales. The setting ties in with Benedetto’s own African travels, accounts of which he doubtless seasoned with the traditional dash of pepper and salt.
Leonardo may have had in mind the legend of Antaeus, the giant killed by Hercules, who was also said to come from Libya. More particularly, the giant is a fearsome caricature of the African Negro – his ‘black face most horrible’, his ‘bloodshot eyes’, his ‘wide nostrils’, his ‘thick lips’. There is no doubt that Leonardo is cheerfully indulging racial stereotypes here. Whether he is parodying hyperbolic travel-writers or expressing some unresolved feelings of his own is hard to tell. Black Africans were exotic but by no means unknown in Italy; they were painted by many Renaissance artists – especially in Adoration scenes, where they accompany the stranger-kings or magi – though not by Leonardo. They were associated with sexual prowess, as in the bawdy Il Manganello, listed among Leonardo’s books in c. 1492, in which a rich merchant’s wife admires her ‘Ethiopian’ servant’s gran manganello (large tool).51 The name ‘Moor’ attached to Ludovico probably included an overtone of sexual power; the word then meant black African rather than (or as well as) Maghribi Arab-African – Shakespeare’s Othello, undoubtedly black, is the ‘Moor of Venice’.
This Negroid monster ends up eating everyone, and trampling down their houses, and so Leonardo’s little spoof links to that theme of cataclysmic destruction which is one of his recurrent obsessions, most famously expressed in the ‘Deluge’ drawings. The story ends with this rather haunting sentence: ‘I do not know what to say or what to do, for everywhere I seem to find myself swimming head downwards through that huge throat and remaining buried in that great belly, in the confusion of death.’ This evokes the old short-story trick of the narrator getting finally swept up in the events he describes – in this case being devoured by the giant – but it has also a dream-like quality expressed in the floating syntax (‘everywhere I seem to find myself swimming’), and one has a sense that this is more than just a narrative device, that Leonardo is accessing something interior to him: a nightmare of being swallowed and submerged whose meaning may well be found in the last word of the sentence. One remembers that ‘prophecy’ of Leonardo’s which turns out to be a kind of dream-notebook: flying and falling, speaking with animals, incestuous desires.
There is another picturesque black giant in a later notebook. This is less interesting, because the passage was transcribed from another book, Antonio Pucci’s Queen of the Orient, though Leonardo’s desire to copy this particular passage is itself noteworthy. His transcription is not exact. I particularly like the change in the first line: where Pucci describes the giant as ‘blacker than coal [carbone]’ Leonardo alters this to ‘blacker than a calabrone’.52 A calabrone is a big black flying beetle, still common in Tuscany: within the insect kingdom it is indeed a giant. He has added a single syllable and transformed a cliché into a precise, concrete and poetically apt simile worthy of his old friend Il Pistoiese.
We have an idea of Leonardo’s growing assurance with language, with literary effects, with the nuts and bolts of narrative. The story of the giant, though a bagatelle in itself, shows these skills. It belongs to the period in the later 1480s when he begins to acquire a basic library of prose and poetry, and when he becomes a habitual keeper of notebooks. The latter are certainly not literary. The language in them is work-related – descriptions, observations, problems, solutions, lists – but has none the less an ideal of lucidity and concision, a consciousness of writing as a vital supplement to the visual language of which he was already a master. Those books of grammar and rhetoric on his shelf perhaps relate more to his scientific studies, his role as explainer, than to his altogether vaguer literary aspirations.
For Leonardo, writing in the literary sense remains peripheral. (Somewhat paradoxically, one of his favourite literary exercises was the paragone, or comparison, between painting and poetry, in which painting was always argued to be superior; this debate forms part of the introduction to the Trattato della pittura.) He cultivates literature, it seems, principally as a social or courtly skill. In Florence he keeps the company of poets like Cammelli and Bellincioni, but his own achievements in that area are confined – as far as we know – to his skills as an improvvisatore, a song-and-dance man with his lira da braccio. The letter to Dei belongs within the same sort of sphere – an entertainment, a jeu d’esprit, probably written for a specific occasion. Its beautiful last sentence is an unexpected gem: a little coup de théâtre which ends the performance on a haunting, unsettling note. I see this as the typical mode of Leonardo as writer – lowbrow formats, plain-speaking style, moments of unexpected poetry.
Leonardo’s taste for puns and word-games is part of his interestingly limited view of the writer, and there is a fascinating page of the late 1480s which belongs precisely to this stratum of literary trickery, and which again affords certain oblique glimpses into his mental processes. It is a large sheet in the Windsor collection, crammed with what Kenneth Clark rather quaintly calls ‘puzzle writing’ – what are more generally called rebuses or cryptograms.53
A rebus is a word or name or sentence expressed pictorially: a visual code. Though the game is to avoid words, it is of course a thoroughly verbal game, since the solution of the puzzle depends entirely on linguistic connections and often on double meanings. The word ‘rebus’ may be derived from carnival newsletters headed ‘De rebus quae geruntur’ (‘concerning things that have been happening’, i.e. current events), which avoided libel by using pictorial and hieroglyphic symbols in place of names; or more soberly from the explanatory formula ‘non verbis sed re
bus’ (‘not with words but with things’). There had long existed in Italy a fondness for these punning cryptograms – the heraldic rebus representing the name of a family was particularly popular – though the more sophisticated rule-book for composing emblems and imprese had not yet been formulated.
Part of the large sheet of rebuses at Windsor.
Leonardo manages to squeeze a total of 154 rebuses on to the two sides of the Windsor sheet. (Some other fragments of picture-writing, of the same period, bring the total to something like 200.) 54 The pictographs themselves are hurriedly drawn: the finesse is in the mental ingenuity. Sometimes a picture alone is used, but often there is a combination of pictures and words or letters (not a ‘pure’ rebus, therefore). The sheet seems to be a working draft, in which ideas are tried out; some of the ropier ones were doubtless discarded. Beneath each rebus is written the key, the punning solution to the visual riddle. Thus the solution to the rebus showing a stook of corn and a rock is gran calamità, a great calamity, via puns on grano = grain and calamita = a magnetic stone. An o and a pear (pera) = opera, works. A face (faccia) and a donkey (asino) = fa casino, a slang phrase meaning someone is making a total hash of things. Some of the puns recur as he moves into whole sentences – thus ‘if the’ (se la) is always represented by a saddle (sella), and ‘happy’ (felice) by a fern (felce). These have become part of a reusable picture vocabulary.
There is a sense here of Leonardo as intellectual court-jester – these are party pieces, pen-and-ink entertainments. One imagines him hovering, the enigmatic quizmaster, as the courtiers struggle to guess the answer. There would also be a practical spin-off, since pictographs were popular as architectural decoration. According to the Milanese architect Cesare Cesariano, the Sforza castle was decorated with such allegorical hieroglyphs, though these are no longer to be seen. Leonardo’s friend Bramante later designed an inscription in honour of Pope Julius II for the Vatican Belvedere, in which ‘Julio II Pont Maximo’ is spelt out in carved pictographs. Thus the rebus-skill Leonardo is practising here has also a practical application for the aspiring architect of the mid-1480s.
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