Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  The sensus communis was thus the home of reason, imagination, intellect – even the soul. Leonardo again:

  It seems that the soul resides in this organ… called the Common Sense. It is not spread throughout the body as many have thought, but is entirely in one part,

  ‘The seat of the soul’. Sectional study of a human skull, with measurements to locate the sensus communis.

  because if it were all-pervading and the same in every part, there would have been no need to make the organs of the senses converge… The Common Sense is the seat of the soul.105

  Taking this at face value, one arrives at the extraordinary notion that in the proportional skull study at Windsor, illustrated above, Leonardo furnishes an actual grid-reference for the site of a man’s soul. This would of course be over-literal. Leonardo is inquiring rather than assuming; he refers the theory to ‘ancient speculators’, mainly Aristotle, and he notes the implications it has for other ancient speculations – Platonic, Hermetic – which held the soul to be infused everywhere. None the less this is a typical Leonardian leap – a measure of thrilling investigative potential. It will surely be possible – by the kind of lucid, dispassionate study these drawings exemplify – to find the inner secrets of a man’s mind. If there is a ‘common sense’ we can surely locate it; if there is a soul it surely resides there. One hears him in these notes: at once the magician and the sceptic. He peers fastidiously into the nooks and chambers of the skull, his eye burning with that fierce but ambiguous curiosity in which are commingled ‘fear and desire – fear of that threatening dark cave; desire to see if there was some marvellous thing within’.

  On the verso of one of the skull studies he writes the date, 2 April 1489, and then the following list of subjects to be investigated. It begins with questions specific to the head and face, and thus connected to the skull series:

  Which tendon causes the motion of the eye, so that the motion of one eye moves the other.

  Of frowning.

  Of raising and lowering the eyebrows.

  Of closing and opening the eyes.

  Of flaring the nostrils.

  Of opening the lips with the teeth shut.

  Of pouting with the lips.

  Of laughing.

  Of astonishment…

  Then suddenly, and typically, the scope of the inquiry broadens, and from the muscular mechanics of laughter and astonishment he turns, with hardly a pause, to

  Describe the beginning of man, and what causes it within the womb, and why a child of eight months cannot survive.

  What sneezing is.

  What yawning is.

  Falling sickness

  spasm

  paralysis

  shivering with cold

  sweating

  hunger

  sleep

  thirst

  lust

  He then moves on to the body’s systems of tendons and muscles – ‘Of the tendon which causes movement from the shoulder to the elbow’, and ‘Of the tendon which causes movement of the thigh’, etc. This subject-matter may be related to another early anatomical study, showing the tendons of the arm and leg.106 Its technical deficiencies suggest a drawing done at a dissection, hence rougher and more hurried.

  Already in this programme of anatomical studies we sense that urge towards comprehensiveness which becomes a debilitating feature of Leonardo’s scientific investigations: everything must be explained anew, each topic opening up to reveal scores of other topics in need of examination.

  Also part of this course of study ‘of the human figure’ is a series of drawings which tabulate the proportions of the human body and establish mathematical ratios between its different parts.107 Here again we find the influence of Vitruvius, the great Roman architect and military engineer of the first century AD, whose writings constitute a unique record of classical theory and practice on the subject of harmonious proportions. There are a number of drawings on this subject at Windsor, dated around 1490, and there are others now lost which are known through copies in the Codex Huygens, a manuscript treatise compiled in the latter half of the sixteenth century, probably by the Milanese artist Girolamo Figino, who was a pupil of Leonardo’s former assistant Francesco Melzi and had access to Melzi’s enormous collection of Leonardo papers.

  The most famous of these proportional studies – indeed one of the most famous drawings in the world – is the so-called ‘Vitruvian Man’, or the ‘Homo ad circulum’, which has become a kind of logo for Leonardo and his aspiring mind. Like most very famous works, it is more often looked at in the isolating spotlight of fame than in the context in which it was created.

  The Vitruvian Man is a drawing in pen and ink on a large sheet of paper (13½ x 9½ inches) now in the Accademia in Venice.108 Its presence in Venice is probably connected to the printing of Fra Giocondo’s folio edition of the works of Vitruvius, published in Venice in 1511, which contains an engraving based on the drawing. Above and below the drawing are handwritten texts. The upper text begins:

  Vitruvius the architect says in his work on architecture that the measurements of man are distributed by Nature as follows: that 4 fingers make one palm, and 4 palms make one foot; 6 palms make a cubit [a forearm, from the Latin cubitus, elbow]; 4 cubits make a man’s height…

  These ratios – quoted from the opening of Book 3 of Vitruvius’s De architectura – continue down to the punctilious: ‘from the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man; from the elbow to the armpit will be the eighth part of a man’, etc. Beneath the drawing is a scale given in units of fingers and palms.

  The Vitruvian Man.

  The drawing shows a single man in two distinct positions: these correspond to two sentences in the text. The man who stands with his legs together and his arms out horizontally illustrates the sentence written directly below the drawing: ‘Tanto apre l’omo nelle braccia quanto é la sua altezza’ – in other words, the width of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height. The man is therefore shown enclosed in a square, each of whose sides measures 96 fingers (or 24 palms). The other figure, with his legs astride and his arms raised higher, expresses a more specialist Vitruvian rule:

  If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height by 1/14th, and raise your outspread arms till the tips of your middle fingers are level with the top of your head, you will find that the centre of your outspread limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.

  This man is shown enclosed in a circle of which his navel is the centre.

  Part of the drawing’s power is its interplay of abstract geometry and observed physical reality. The body of the man is synoptic but beautifully contoured and muscled. The feet actually seem to be standing on the lower line of the square, or pushing against the hoop of the circle. The double figure introduces a sense of movement which might be a gymnast’s or, indeed, that of a man moving his arms up and down like the wings of a bird. The body is delineated with clean, spare, diagrammatic lines, but the face has been treated rather differently. It is more intensely worked, more dramatically shadowed: it glowers.

  I have sometimes wondered if the Vitruvian Man is actually a self-portrait. In a literal sense perhaps not – the drawing is dated c. 1490, and the man looks older than thirty-eight. It is also the case that the face exemplifies proportions listed in the accompanying text – for instance that the distance from the roots of the hair to the eyebrows is equal to the distance from the tip of the chin to the mouth. The features are in this sense ideal or prototypical. And yet the whole idea of the drawing seems to be a physically realistic rendering of these abstract bio-geometrical symmetries, and so the stern-looking man in the circle seems to be someone, rather than a cipher – someone with penetrating, deeply shadowed eyes, and a thick mane of curly hair parted in the middle. At the least I would say that there are elements of self-portraiture in the Vitruvian Man: that this figure which represents natural harmonies also represents the man uniquely capa
ble of understanding them – the artist-anatomist-architect Leonardo da Vinci.

  THE SFORZA HORSE

  On 22 July 1489 the Florentine ambassador in Milan, Pietro Alamanni, dispatched one of his regular newsletters to Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence. It included the following:

  Prince Ludovico is planning to erect a worthy monument to his father, and in accordance with his orders Leonardo has been asked to make a model for a large horse in bronze, ridden by the Duke Francesco in full armour. As His Excellence has in mind something wonderful, the like of which has never been seen, he has directed me to write to you, to ask if you would kindly send him one or two Florentine artists who specialize in this kind of work. It seems to me that although he has given the commission to Leonardo, he is not confident that he will succeed.109

  Though there are some uncertainties about Leonardo’s fitness for his task, at least in the mind of Ambassador Alamanni, this letter is a crucial document. By mid-1489 Ludovico has commissioned Leonardo, at last, to create the great Sforza Horse so long spoken of. Despite the doubts, the commitment is a serious one: the ‘model’ which Ludovico has ordered from him is not a scaled-down miniature but a full-size version of the statue in clay, which would then be used to create the mould for the bronze itself. Ludovico has the later stages in mind when he requests two Florentine specialists ‘in this kind of work’ – i.e. large-scale metallurgy and furnace-work – though in the event Lorenzo wrote back saying no such maestro was available.110

  Over the last seven years we have seen Leonardo striving to establish himself at the court of the Sforza, and with this major public commission we can at last say he has arrived. It links with other signs of preferment – the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, undoubtedly commissioned by the Moor, and the remodelling of the Duchess’s ‘pavilion’ in the castle garden, which also probably bears Ludovico’s personal imprimatur. These too can be dated to around 1489.

  Leonardo had certainly done something on the Horse before 23 April 1490, for on that day he noted in a new notebook, now Paris MS C, ‘Chomincai questo libro e richomincai il cavallo’ – ‘I began this book and I began again on the horse.’ Elsewhere there is a note of payment: ‘On 28 April I received from the Marchesino [Ludovico’s treasurer Marchesino Stanga] 103 lire.’ The missing year is probably 1490, thus five days after the note in MS C, and plausibly referring to an official payment connected with the Sforza Horse, on which he was now setting to work in earnest.111

  *

  The antecedents of this great but ultimately fruitless venture go back to the late 1460s, when the idea of a giant equestrian statue to honour Francesco Sforza was first mooted. News of the project had buzzed around the Florentine studios: there is a design for the statue by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, now in Munich. Leonardo himself first voiced his interest in the Horse in his ‘prospectus’ addressed to Ludovico in 1482. By then he had a smattering of experience, as he had probably assisted in the planning stages of Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni: a sheet at Windsor has a proportional analysis of a horse which is certainly connected with the Colleoni project.112 Verrocchio’s last years were devoted to this great work, erected in Venice. The question of its influence on Leonardo is complicated: he had probably not seen the sculpture itself (there is no evidence that he had visited Venice by this stage) but it must have been there in his mind, the yardstick by which his own efforts must be measured – all the more so, perhaps, after the death of his old master in 1488, with the statue unfinished, leaving the field open to the pupil who had always sought to ‘go beyond’ him.

  How does Leonardo envisage the Horse as he begins drawing up plans and designs in the last months of 1489? The short answer is that, typically, he envisages it as different from anything that has gone before. There were four famous equestrian statues in Italy – the Marcus Aurelius in Rome, dating from the second century AD; the slightly later classical sculpture called Il Regisole in Pavia; Donatello’s statue of the condottiere Gattamelata in Padua, done in the mid-1450s; and Verrocchio’s Colleoni monument in Venice, still unfinished. Without exception they showed the horse walking or trotting. In each case the horse had its left foreleg raised, to suggest its forward motion, and the other hoofs rested on the plinth. In contrast to this norm, the earliest drawings for the Sforza Horse show that Leonardo envisaged it dramatically rearing up. The finest of these is the study in metalpoint on blue prepared paper at Windsor, elegant and full of energy, though Clark – a particular expert on Leonardo’s horse studies – finds the modelling less ‘full and learned’ than later studies.113

  The chief problem with this design is technical – how to support the enormous weight of a large bronze horse with only its rear legs grounded on the base. The drawing attempts a solution: a fallen enemy beneath the horse’s front hoofs. On another page is a more perfunctory sketch, with a tree-stump beneath the rearing horse.114 But the problem of stability remains: the concept is dramatic but impractical, and perhaps this is the reason for Ludovico’s misgivings about Leonardo, as reported by Ambassador Alamanni: ‘He is not confident that he will succeed.’

  Leonardo soon abandoned this idea, and the next phase of drawings shows the horse in the more conventional trotting pose. This rethink seems to have been inspired by his viewing of the Regisole in Pavia in June 1490. The train of thoughts set off by this sculpture is preserved on a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus. At the top of this page he writes five sentences, each beginning with a new line, so they have the look of maxims or sententiae. They sound like them too, but one feels they are maxims he has just made up, as he stands in awe before the Regisole and ideas fizz in his head in connection with his own horse, which he had ‘begun again’ a couple of months earlier. The page is cropped at the top, so the first line has been lost (one can see the remnant of it). It perhaps mentioned another equestrian monument, which would explain the abrupt beginning of the next line, which is now the first:

  The one in Pavia is to be praised most of all for its movement.

  It is more praiseworthy to imitate antiquities than modern things.

  Beauty and utility cannot go together, as is shown in castles and in men.

  The trot has almost the quality of a free horse.

  Where natural vivacity is missing we must supply it artificially.

  On the same folio he did a small sketch of a trotting horse, doubtless inspired by the Regisole: this is perhaps the first drawing in this new phase in the design of the Sforza Horse.115

  It was not, of course, only sculptural models that Leonardo consulted. From this period comes a series of vibrant studies of horses quite obviously done from life – sleek, ponderous animals, rippling with vitality (Plate 16). We are reminded of a personal source for the Sforza Horse: Leonardo’s lifelong love of horses, Leonardo the rider. The horses he drew were from the stables of the young Milanese courtier and soldier Galeazzo Sanseverino, who was soon to improve his fortunes by marrying one of Ludovico’s illegitimate daughters. Leonardo refers particularly to ‘Messer Galeazzo’s big jennet’, called Siciliano.116

  The trotting horse as exemplified by the Regisole in Pavia was almost certainly the pose adopted for the clay model of the Sforza Horse which was eventually made in about 1493. We don’t know for sure because the model was destroyed, and the sculpture itself was never cast: it is another of Leonardo’s unfinished projects. Even his failures have a kind of magic about them, however, and half a century later the writer Pietro Aretino will say of a sculptor’s plans to make an equestrian statue, ‘He would have made a cast of the horse in such a way that Leonardo’s at Milan would no longer be talked of’ – implying that Leonardo’s model was still being ‘talked of’ long after its destruction.117 But these later phases – the creation and destruction of the Horse – belong to a later chapter.

  AT THE CORTE VECCHIA

  With the official commission to create the Sforza Horse comes the tangible benefit of official accommodation, and it was probably at this time that
Leonardo took up residence at the Corte Vecchia. This spacious new housing is a sign of his status, though in truth it was the colossal Horse itself which needed the space.

  The Corte Vecchia had once been the palazzo and power-centre of the Visconti, the first great Milanese dynasty; during the Sforza era it was superseded by the Castello Sforzesco, and became known as the Old Court. It stood close to the Duomo, on the south side of the piazza, a grand but dilapidated symbol of former times. It was heavily fortified with towers and moats; inside the walls the buildings ranged around two large courtyards surrounded by porticos.118 One part of the palace was used for the melancholy young Duke Gian Galeazzo’s apartments, though increasingly Ludovico preferred him safely sequestered at the forbidding Certosa fortress in Pavia. No trace of the Corte Vecchia remains today: it was demolished in the eighteenth century to make way for the grandiose Palazzo Reale.

  On one of those sheets of picture-puzzles or rebuses at Windsor there is a ground-plan of a palace which is probably the Corte Vecchia. The plan clearly predates the rebuses, for they are cunningly worked into its empty spaces, as if inserted into the rooms of the palace as notional miniature frescos. A later note gives some dimensions: ‘The hall of the Corte is 128 paces long and 27 braccia wide.’119 A pace (passo) is broadly reckoned as 30 inches, and a braccio as 24 inches, so we are talking about a vast space over 300 feet long and over 50 feet wide. This faded old Visconti ballroom was perhaps Leonardo’s workshop for the Sforza Horse.