Giovanni Rustici’s St John, at the Baptistery in Florence.
being a talented sculptor he was an ‘amateur alchemist and occasional necromancer’, which makes him sound like Zoroastro. Among his associates was the young Andrea del Sarto, a fine painter with a strong tinge of Leonardismo; del Sarto was later Vasari’s master, which suggests that Vasari’s information on Rustici is likely to be good. He says of Rustici’s studio that it ‘looked like Noah’s ark… It contained an eagle, a crow who could speak like a man, snakes and a porcupine trained like a dog which had an annoying habit of pricking people’s legs under the table’.29 I cannot resist an image of Leonardo inclining confidentially towards this crow – a mynah bird? – that ‘could speak like a man’. How much he wishes to ask it.
According to Vasari, the tangible product of Leonardo’s friendship with Rustici was the sculptural group St John Preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee, which stands above the north door of the Baptistery opposite the Duomo. ‘All the time he [Rustici] was working on this group he would let no one come near him except Leonardo, right up to the casting stage.’ The left-hand figure has been compared to the pensive old man of the Adoration; the St John, though executed in the workmanlike style of Rustici, has the trademark hand pointing heavenwards.
Here in the Palazzo Martelli, in the long intermissions of the lawsuit, Leonardo set about organizing his manuscripts, as recorded on the first folio of the Arundel Codex:
Begun at Florence, in the house of Pietro di Braccio Martelli, on 22 March 1508. This will be a collection without order, made up of numerous sheets that I have copied up, hoping later to put them in order, in their proper places, according to the subjects which they treat.
The Codex Arundel is not itself the ‘collection’: in its present state – probably put together in the 1590s by Pompeo Leoni – it is highly miscellaneous. Only the first thirty folios belong with this initial statement: consistent in paper, ink, handwriting and subject-matter – mainly physics and mechanics – they were probably written up at precisely this time in spring 1508. But even as he begins, this task of organizing and classifying his manuscripts seems suddenly daunting:
I fear that before I have completed this I shall have repeated the same thing several times, for which do not blame me, reader, because the subjects are many, and the memory cannot retain them and say, This I will not write because I have already written it. And to avoid this it would be necessary, with every passage I wanted to copy, to read through everything I had already done so as not to replicate it.30
The sheer unwieldiness of his writings is borne in on him. He has retrieved them from the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, where he had stored them on his departure in 1506; they are piled up on his desk at the Palazzo Martelli; one glimpses what they looked like in Filippino Lippi’s beautiful depiction of stacked scholarly manuscripts in the Vision of St Bernard (Badia, Florence). A precious resource, but also a chaos. Another note reminds us of their vulnerability to loss and damage: ‘Look over all these subjects tomorrow and copy them, and then cross through the originals and leave them in Florence, so that if you lose those you carry with you, the invention will not be lost.’31
He feels an impending exhaustion from this great swirl of subjects (or, as he calls them, casi – ‘cases’), the fruit of more than twenty years’ study. But he will not have to tackle them alone: he has a helping hand in this Herculean task of classification and transcription – or at least he will have when he gets back to Milan. And so he tells young Melzi, in that bitter-sweet letter of reproach written at precisely this time, ‘by God I’ll make you write so much you’ll be sorry.’
Also at this time he was compiling the densely written pages of the Codex Leicester (named after its eighteenth-century owner Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, and now owned by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates).32 It is the most unified of Leonardo’s notebooks, and though the outer dates of composition are c. 1507–10, it has a look of consistency, even doggedness. The handwriting is small and regular, the drawings are cramped into the margin, but the myopic look of the pages belies the vastness of their scope. The Codex Leicester is concerned with what we today call geophysics: it investigates the fundamental physical structure of the world, anatomizes the macrocosmic body, dismantles the moving parts of the terrestrial machine. This leads into areas of pure physics – gravity, impetus, percussion – and into closely argued discussion of fossils (imperiously countering the orthodox view that they were relics of the biblical deluge). But the particular emphasis is on water: its forms and powers, its tides and currents, and their effects – atmospheric, erosive, geological – on the face of the earth, a preoccupation poetically distilled into that famous landscape in the Mona Lisa. This brief synopsis does not include the marvellous pages concerning the sun and moon. Leonardo wonders about the luminescence of the moon – does it mean that the moon is composed of some bright reflective material like crystal or porphyry, or is its surface covered with rippling water? And why, if the phases of the moon are caused by the shadow of the earth, is the rest of the moon sometimes dimly seen during the crescent phase? (In the latter case he correctly deduced that this secondary light is reflected from the earth, pre-dating by several decades the findings of Kepler’s teacher Michael Mastlin.) 33
The Codex Leicester is not a ground-breaking work of modern science: its cosmology is essentially medieval, as is its search for microcosmic correspondences and underlying geometrical symmetries. Its most famous passage is a sustained poetic analogy between the earth and the body of man:
We may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil, its bones are the successive strata of rock, its cartilage is the tufa, its blood the veins of its waters. The lake of the blood that lies around the heart is the ocean. Its breathing is by the increase and decrease of the blood in its pulses, and even so in the earth is the ebb and flow of the sea.34
In these respects the codex is more a philosophical than a scientific text, but the philosophy is under constant scrutiny. There is always that typically Leonardian modulation between the visionary and the practical: a dialogue between them. He tussles with the cosmological theories of the ancients, putting them to the test of ‘experience’. He studies the surface tensions of dewdrops on the leaves of a plant so that he can learn more about that ‘universal watery sphere’ in which, according to Aristotle, the universe is enclosed. He builds a tank with glass sides so he can observe miniature water-flows and earth-deposits. A discussion of atmospheric effects draws on his own observations from the Alpine peaks of Monte Rosa: ‘as I myself have seen’.
Some of his experiments can be tied closely to these months in Florence. Two drawings illustrating water-currents are captioned ‘at Ponte Rubaconte’, another name for the Ponte alle Grazie downriver from the Ponte Vecchio. And in a contemporary passage in the Atlanticus he notes, ‘Write of swimming underwater and you will have the flight of a bird through the air. There is a good place at the spot where the mills discharge into the Arno, by the falls of Ponte Rubaconte.’35 These ‘falls’ are the weir: it is shown on the 1472 ‘Chain Map’ of Florence, with boatmen and fishermen, and it is still there today. These vividly place Leonardo’s researches on and indeed in the Arno, ‘swimming under water’ to understand more about the movement of a bird through the invisible currents of the air.
But the codex has also that note of impending dizziness on the subject of organization. He breaks off from a description of ripple-effects, saying:
I will not consider the demonstrations here because I will reserve them for the ordered work. My concern now is to find subjects and inventions, gathering them as they occur to me; later I will put them in order, putting together those of the same kind. So, reader, you need not wonder, nor laugh at me, if here we jump from one subject to another.36
And on the following page comes the same disclaimer: ‘Here I shall discourse a little more about finding waters even though it seems somewhat out of place; when I co
me to compile the work I will put everything in order.’ The manuscripts are infused with clarity, with what Giorgio Nicodemi has called Leonardo’s ‘serene and accurate habits of thought’,37 yet they have this literal lack of definition, this unfinished, procrastinated quality. Everything he writes is provisional, a rough draft for that perfect ‘ordered work’ he would never write.
DISSECTIONS
Litigations, transcriptions, cases, letters: Leonardo’s life in the early months of 1508 – the last he would spend in Florence, as it turned out – seems oddly scribal, one might even say notarial. The stacks of paper in his studiolo on Via Larga threaten to dwarf him as he sits writing. His shoulders are getting rounder; his eyesight is troubling him; his beard is flecked with grey. There is some artistic activity of which we know next to nothing: the mysterious ‘two Madonnas of different sizes’ for King Louis; the eternally ongoing Mona Lisa; the advisory work on Rustici’s sculptural group for the Baptistery; and perhaps some last touches to the giant fragment of the Battle of Anghiari, though there is no documentation of this, nor of his relations – if any – with the Gonfalonier. Leonardo abandoned relationships as easily as he abandoned pictures – a skill, the psychiatrist might say, which he learned early on from his father.
But perhaps the most significant activity of these last months in Florence – the activity that opens a new chapter of intensely focused investigation – finds him with not a pen or a paintbrush in his hand but a scalpel. In a famous memorandum of late 1507 or early 1508 Leonardo records his dissection of the corpse of an old man:
This old man, a few hours before his death, told me he had lived for more than a hundred years, and that he was conscious of no deficiency in his person other than feebleness. And thus, sitting on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, without any movement or sign of distress, he passed from this life. And I made an anatomy to see the cause of a death so sweet.
He also, at around the same time, dissected the body of a two-year-old child, ‘in which I found everything to be the opposite to that of the old man’.38
His immediate interest centres on the vascular system. Next to a drawing showing the superficial veins of the arm, he notes the difference between the veins and arteries of the ‘old man’ and the ‘boy’. He suspects that the old man’s death was attributable to ‘weakness caused by a lack of blood in the artery which feeds the heart and lower members’. He finds the arteries to be ‘very dry, thin and withered’, and ‘in addition to the thickening of their walls, these vessels grow in length and twist themselves in the manner of a snake.’ He also notes that the liver, deprived of adequate blood supply, ‘becomes desiccated, like congealed bran in colour and substance’; and that the skin of the very old has ‘the colour of wood, or dried chestnuts, because the skin is almost completely deprived of nourishment’. Later, in a different ink, he writes a curt reminder: ‘Represent the arm of Francesco the miniaturist which exhibits many veins.’ On a related sheet he discusses whether the heart or the liver is the key organ of the vascular system, and concludes (with Aristotle, against Galen) that it is the heart, which he likens to the stone of a peach from which the ‘tree of the vessels’ grows.39
This highly practical, textural language – snake, bran, wood, chestnuts, peach-stone – is in marked contrast to the more metaphysical tone of his earlier anatomy of the late 1480s, with its interest in the ‘confluence of the senses’, and the traffic of ‘vital spirits’, and other traditional medieval postulates. A similar movement away from the metaphysical is found in his small tract on optics (now Paris MS D), written later in 1508, which stresses the purely receptive nature of the eye and the absence of any invisible or ‘spiritual’ rays emanating from it. (The traditional model held perception to be proactive in this way.) The eye may be the ‘window of the soul’, as he is fond of saying, but it is also a miniature machine whose working parts must be disassembled and understood.
Of the same period, c. 1508–9, are beautifully drawn diagrams showing
Anatomical dissection of the shoulder and neck, from a Windsor folio of c. 1508–9.
lungs and abdominal organs, perhaps of a pig, again with botanical analogies.40 These show Leonardo battling with problems of how to show anatomy – looking for that diagrammatic technique which combines surface detail with transparency. The anecdote in Vasari about him inflating a pig’s gut until it filled the room serves as a macabre footnote to this dissection of a pig. He likes to scare and unsettle people: the theatrical side of him.
Also from this time is the famous drawing showing the distended vulva of a woman, the genitalia unrealistically cavernous even if the drawing represents a multiparous or post-partum woman.41 I am tempted to connect this strange exaggeration with Leonardo’s earlier text about the ‘cavern’,
Female genitalia and studies of the anal sphincter, c. 1508–9.
and to suggest that the fear he expressed about looking into that ‘threatening dark cave’ was in part an unconscious confrontation with the disturbing mysteries of female sexuality. Within that Freudian sort of interpretation, the ‘marvellous thing’ that might be glimpsed within the cave would be the mystery of generation and birth. Here, however, in his notes below the drawing, Leonardo is content with a more laconic metaphor: ‘The wrinkles or ridges in the folds of the vulva have indicated to us the location of the gatekeeper of the castle.’ The image of a woman’s sex as a defended ‘castle’ or ‘fortress’, to be besieged and breached by the insistent male, is a commonplace of amorous poetry.42
On a related sheet are views of a standing female showing her uterus in early pregnancy; drawings of male and female genitals; a study of a cow’s uterus with a small foetus in it; and a detail of the cow’s placenta, whose tissues Leonardo describes as ‘interwoven like burrs’.43 These studies on reproduction seem to link with the generational theme of the Leda, on which he was plausibly at work in c. 1508–9 – there is a visual echo of Leda in the outline of the pregnant female. On the verso of the sheet is a wonderful page of studies of the mouth and its muscles, among them those ghostly lips which seem to have floated, Cheshire Cat-style, from the face of Mona Lisa.
The notes about the ‘old man’, written in late 1507 or early 1508, contain the first clear reference to Leonardo himself performing a human dissection, but he had probably done others before this, for on another anatomical page dated c. 1508 he claims to have personally dissected – disfatto: taken to pieces – ‘more than ten human bodies’.44 He boasts of his finesse with the scalpel. To arrive at ‘a true and perfect knowledge’ of the body’s veins he has removed ‘in the most minute particles all the flesh that lies around these veins, without causing any flow of blood save a scarcely perceptible bleeding of the capillary veins’. He also notes the procedural problems in the days before refrigeration: ‘As a single body would not last long enough, it was necessary to use several bodies in succession, so as to arrive at a complete knowledge [of the veins]; I repeated this process twice, in order to observe the variations.’ And he describes the challenges, indeed horrors, of the task. ‘You’ – the reader, the would-be anatomist – ‘will perhaps be deterred by the rising of your stomach.’
Some of these dissections were doubtless done, as were those of the ‘old man’ and the ‘boy’, at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. He knew the place well: it served as his bank and on occasions his depository. He must have had some kind of official licence for these – even the ‘doctors and scholars’ of the Florentine Studio had to seek permission from the magistrates before conducting a public dissection at Santa Croce in 1506.45 But it seems that not all the dissections Leonardo performed were done there. He speaks feelingly of ‘the fear of living at night-time in the company of these dead men, dismembered and flayed and terrible to behold’. He is perhaps playing this up a bit, but the implication is that he has done dissections in his own lodgings or studio, hence the specific fearfulness of spending the night with the corpses, which would not be required if he
were dissecting them at Santa Maria Nuova.
Dissection was still controversial. It was permitted, under licence, but it remained a dubious activity around which clustered rumours and superstitions an implication of the ‘black arts’, of the fetishes and concoctions of medieval magic. The frequent use of cadavers from the gallows added a further frisson. Leonardo was keen to dissociate himself from such goings-on, which is why the passage describing his dissections also contains a spirited attack on fraudulent magicians:
Nature revenges herself on those who wish to perform miracles… for they live always in the direst poverty, as is and forever will be the case with alchemists who seek to create gold and silver, and engineers who wish to create living force out of dead water in perpetual motion, and most idiotic of all, necromancers and sorcerers.
Later, in Rome, Leonardo’s researches brought him into conflict with the Church, and he was ‘hindered in anatomy’ by an ill-wisher who reported his activities to the Pope. Such attitudes hardened with the Counter-Reformation. Half a century later the great Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius, author of the De humanis corporis fabrica (1543), was condemned to death by the Inquisition for ‘body-snatching’ and dissection; the sentence was commuted to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but he died on the return journey, aged fifty.
When Leonardo talks of spending the night in the company of corpses we get a hint of dissections done behind closed doors, clandestine, tinged with heresy. For Leonardo the imperative of investigation is always stronger than that of personal comfort or doctrinal safety.
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