Another tornado or gale is recorded in a note of 1508: ‘I have seen motions of the air so furious that they have caught up in their course whole roofs of great palaces and carried them away.’38
Now in Rome he returns intensively to this ‘fury’ of whirling movements, and pens a series of writings and drawings on the theme of ‘The Deluge’. Put together they add up to a kind of portfolio: they may be part of the ever-intended treatise on painting, or they may represent thoughts for an actual painting of the biblical flood. There are half a dozen texts on the subject, all dating to around 1515. The longest, which fills both sides of a sheet at Windsor, is divided into two sections entitled ‘Description of the deluge’ and ‘How to represent it in painting’; the style is big and rhetorical, as he tends to be with this sort of subject. A note headed ‘Divisions’ summarizes the ingredients of the Leonardian tempest. It begins with the physical – floods, fires, earthquakes, whirlpools, etc. – then focuses on the human dimensions of the catastrophe:
Broken trees loaded with people. Ships broken in pieces, smashed against rocks. Flocks of sheep; hailstones, thunderbolts, whirlwinds. People on trees which are unable to support them; trees, rocks, towers and hills covered with people; boats, tables, troughs and other means of floating. Hills covered with men, women and animals, and lightning from the clouds illuminating everything.39
These mental images of refugees, and makeshift boats, and flocks of sheep in a hailstorm, suggest the mapping-out of a large-scale painting or fresco. So too does another note, titled ‘Representing the deluge’, which says, ‘Neptune will be seen in the midst of the water with his trident, and Aeolus with his winds ruffling the trees.’40 But if there was a specific project – an apocalyptic Noah’s Flood to rival Michelangelo’s Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel – it came to nothing.
Or rather it resulted in the ‘Deluge drawings’ (Plate 27), which are collectively a late masterpiece. There is a series of ten, done in black chalk on uniformly sized sheets of white paper (6 x 8 inches).41 They are explosive, convulsive; the pen-strokes curl and jab to express churning vortices of energy, centrifugal tunnels of water, bursting scattershots of rock. What exactly is being shown? We could be looking back to some bleak cataclysm in distant astronomical time, or forward to the thunderbolt of nuclear fission, to the mushroom-cloud and the fallout. They are in one sense ‘scientific’: part of Leonardo’s inquiry into the ‘marvellous works’ of Nature. They are a test he has set himself: to represent accurately – which means also to understand accurately – the mechanics of upheaval, to discern in it some subtle, elastic pattern, like the fractals of modern chaos theory. They are attempts, one might say, to anatomize a storm. Yet they convey also that the attempt may fail. They speak of categories engulfed, of illusory mental constructs swept away in this ‘deluge’ of destructive power.
The force of the drawings is such that they seem to burst upon the paper. You sense the physical event of their composition – the sudden, intent, strenuous gestures; and you sense something too of the accidenti mentali, or mental events, which they express. Leonardo is confronting the raw energy of Nature; the confrontation is harrowing. These whirling banshee-forms seem like an onrush of mental disruption and chaos: a brain-storm. Some of the drawings have an almost hallucinogenic quality, as if he were passing through some kind of interior shamanistic ordeal. But then as you continue to look at them, and into them, you perceive that they contain also a kind of peace. They become mesmeric. Their curvilinear force-fields resolve into mandala-like forms. You regain a sense of the surface of the drawings: marks of black chalk on rough white paper, interweavings, fantasie fetched back from the abyss.
SICKNESS, DECEPTION, MIRRORS
The sickly catamite of the Angelo incarnato, the catastrophic visions of the Deluge: these do not argue much for Leonardo’s health and happiness at this time, and indeed in the summer of 1515, in the queasy Roman heat, Leonardo was ill. We learn this from the draft of a letter to Giuliano de’ Medici, then in Florence; the date is July or August 1515. Giuliano had himself been ill with consumption, and Leonardo’s letter begins, ‘So greatly did I rejoice, most illustrious Lord, at the desired restoration of your health that my own malady almost left me.’42
What is this ‘malady’? The only external clue we have to the elderly Leonardo’s physical condition is that in 1517, according to Antonio de Beatis, his right hand was ‘paralysed’. As Beatis goes on to say that this paralysis stopped him from painting, it has been argued that he was mistaken and that it was actually Leonardo’s left hand that was affected. This is false logic. We can be fairly sure that some of Leonardo’s drawings belong to 1517–18, probably including the great Turin self-portrait; his left hand cannot, therefore, have been paralysed. This means that Beatis was accurate, and may suggest that the paralysis affected rather more than just the hand – was perhaps a general paralysis on the right-hand side: a condition that could well have prevented Leonardo from painting large pictures, though not from drawing. The typical cause of this would be a stroke (or, as they tended to call it then, an ‘apoplexy’). This, or some premonition of it, may be the malady he refers to in the summer of 1515.
A rhyme of medical precepts copied out by Leonardo can be dated fairly precisely to this time, and may be related to his illness. It is a doggerel sonnet of sixteen lines. The prescription is as follows:
If you want to be healthy observe this regime.
Do not eat when you have no appetite, and dine lightly,
Chew well, and whatever you take into you
Should be well cooked and of simple ingredients.
He who takes medicine is ill advised.
Beware anger and avoid stuffy air.
Stay standing a while when you get up from a meal.
Make sure you do not sleep at midday.
Let your wine be tempered [i.e. mixed with water], taken a little and often,
Not between meals, nor on an empty stomach.
Neither delay nor prolong your visits to the privy.
If you take exercise, let it not be too strenuous.
Do not lie with your belly upward and your head
Downward. Be well covered at night,
And rest your head and keep your mind cheerful.
Avoid wantonness and keep to this diet.43
This seems a digest of sound common sense: today the poem would be an article about having a ‘healthy lifestyle’. He copies it out because he has not been well; the downplaying of exercise (‘let it not be too strenuous’) suggests a regime for recuperation. It brings us also an authentic sense of these last years – frugal, simple, pared down. He was certainly by this point vegetarian, and noted for it. In January 1516 a Florentine traveller, Andrea Corsali, writes to Giuliano de’ Medici from Cochin, and mentions ‘a gentle people called Guzzarati [i.e. Gujarati] who do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci; they live on rice, milk and other inanimate foods’.44 Such frugality is another aspect of Leonardo’s eccentricity in flesh-minded Rome.
A fragment of the sonnet on health is repeated on another folio in the Codex Atlanticus, also c. 1515, with architectural sketches probably related to the Vatican.45 It is this folio which contains the little riddle or pun or aphorism ‘li medici mi crearono e distrussono’, in which the subject of the sentence may be either the Medici or the medical profession. The double-meaning would certainly be present in Leonardo’s mind, and in this context of illness of 1515 the point may precisely be an oscillation between the two, thus something like ‘The Medici created me but my doctors are killing me.’ The first part would refer to Giuliano’s patronage, rather than to more distant and tenuous relations with Lorenzo back in the early 1480s. ‘Created’ would carry a specific meaning of ‘made me their creature’: creato is used in precisely this way to mean a dependant or servant. He might ironically describe himself as the ‘creature’ or creato of Giuliano.
As the draft letter to Giuliano also makes clear, Leonardo’s nerves were considerably frayed at this time by the behaviour of a German assistant, Giorgio or Georg, whom he describes at one point as an ‘ironworker’. (Leonardo spells the name ‘Giorzio’, a Lombard form.) He tells the story at length – a marvellous little window on to life in the Belvedere, though poignant in its contrast with that other narrative of apprentice misdemeanours, the boy Salai’s twenty-five years previously. Here there is no twinkle of fondness, no playful exasperation: Leonardo is angry and a bit shaky about the whole thing, though there are also some touches of wry humour. He writes:
I greatly regret that I have been unable completely to satisfy your Excellency’s wishes because of the wickedness of that German deceiver, for whom I have left nothing undone which I thought might give him pleasure. At first I invited him to lodge and board with me, so I could oversee his work and more conveniently correct his errors, and also so he could learn Italian and be able to talk more easily without an interpreter. From the start his allowance was always paid to him in advance, which no doubt he would willingly deny if I did not have the agreement, signed by myself and the interpreter.
(This allowance was itself in dispute – an undated account in the Vatican archives shows that Giorgio received an allowance of 7 ducats a month, but according to Leonardo he ‘claimed he had been promised 8’.) 46
But soon there were suspicions of disloyalty and double-dealing:
First he asked to have some models done in wood, just as they were being finished in iron, saying he wished to take them away to his own country. This I refused, and told him I would give him a design, showing the width, length, height and form of what he had to do. And so we remained at ill will.
The next thing was that in the room where he slept he made himself another workshop, with pincers and tools, and there he worked for others. After work he would go and eat with the soldiers of the Swiss Guard, where there are plenty of good-for-nothings though none to match him. And afterwards he and two or three others would go off together with guns to shoot birds among the ruins, and so they continued until evening. And when I sent Lorenzo to urge him to work, he said he did not want to have so many masters ordering him about, and that he was working for Your Excellency’s Wardrobe. And so two months passed, and so it went on, and then one day, meeting Gian Niccolò of the Wardrobe, and asking him if the German had finished his work for the Magnifico, he told me it was not true, and that he had only given him a couple of guns to clean.
As he was only rarely in the workshop, and as he consumed a good deal of food, I sent him word that if he liked we could make a separate bargain on each thing he made, and that I would give him what we agreed to be a good price. But he consulted with his colleague, and gave up his room here, and sold everything.
The skiving, surly apprentice Giorgio is not, however, the villain of the story. Leonardo reserves this distinction for another German, whom he calls Giovanni degli Specchi – John (or Johann) of the Mirrors.47 He has exerted a malign influence over Giorgio:
That German, Giovanni the mirror-maker, was in the workshop every day, wanting to see and know everything that was being done, and then broadcasting it around, and criticizing whatever he could not understand… At last I found that this Maestro Giovanni the mirror-maker was the cause of all this [i.e. of Giorgio’s behaviour], for two reasons: the first is that he said my coming here had deprived him of the conversation and favour of Your Lordship, and the other is that he said the rooms of this ironworker [Giorgio] suited him for working on his mirrors, and of this he has given proof, for as well as making him [Giorgio] my enemy, he made him sell all he had and leave his workshop to him [Giovanni], where he now works with a number of assistants making many mirrors to send out to the fairs.
The mirrors that feature in this saga of professional jealousies lead us to an ambitious project now under way in Leonardo’s studio. He was pursuing a new theme or dream: solar power – in particular the channelling of solar heat by means of parabolic mirrors:
The rays reflected from a concave mirror have a brilliance equal to the sun in its own place… And if you say that the mirror itself is cold and cannot throw out warm rays, I answer that the ray comes from the sun, and must resemble its cause, and that it can pass through any medium one wants it to pass through. When the ray from the concave mirror passes through the windows of the metal-furnaces it does not itself become hotter.48
The mention of furnaces shows the industrial application of his experiments. Those ‘blue spectacles’ he acquired on his way through Florence may be related to this work, for as he notes here, the human eye cannot ‘dwell on the radiance of the solar body’; the sun’s rays ‘strike the eye with such splendour that it cannot bear them’. As in the ‘Deluge’ drawings, we have a sense of Leonardo confronting the primal forces of Nature, plugging himself into pure but dangerously powerful energy-sources. As he had written many years before, ‘He who can drink from the fountain does not go to the well.’49
His interest in the harnessing of solar heat goes back at least seven years – there are designs for burning-mirrors in the Codex Arundel: beneath one he writes, ‘This is the mirror of fire.’50 The principle of burning-mirrors was of course ancient: Archimedes famously employed them against the Roman army besieging Syracuse, and on a more mundane level they were used to generate heat for soldering. Perhaps they had been used by Verrocchio, for in his Roman notebook Leonardo writes, ‘Remember the solders used for soldering the ball on Santa Maria del Fiore,’ recalling that vertiginous day on the lantern of Florence cathedral more than forty years earlier.51 But in Rome he is working on something larger and more complex, and it may be that Giovanni the mirror-maker’s snooping presence is connected with this. In a series of notes scribbled on blue paper Leonardo describes a ‘pyramidical’ structure which brings ‘so much power to a single point’ that it makes water boil in ‘a heating-tank like they use in a dyer’s factory’. (He adds that the device could be used for heating a swimming-pool, which seems an anticlimax but reminds us that he has clients to please.) There is also an astronomical use of these multifaceted mirror-structures: ‘To see the real nature of the planets, open the covering and display a single planet on the base, and the movement reflected from the base will describe the properties of that planet.’ This seems to anticipate the principle of Newton’s reflecting-telescope; the note is accompanied by a diagram which does indeed look like a telescope.52
In a laboratory at the Belvedere secret chemical treatments are prepared. There are recipes for a varnish that will prevent the mirror surface from misting or tarnishing, and for a cryptic substance called ‘fire of gypsum’ (ignea di gesso) which is ‘composed of Venus and Mercury’ (i.e. copper and quicksilver, though ‘Mercury’ may be an esoteric reference to the ‘secret fire’ or ignis innaturalis of the alchemists).53 A glimpse of Zoroastro’s Roman laboratory a few years later – a fireplace converted into a brick furnace ‘where we distil and separate the elements of everything’; a table ‘cluttered with pots and flasks of all sorts, and paste and clay and Greek pitch and cinnabar’ – helps us to picture the scene at the Belvedere, and to place in it Leonardo the magus or adept (or, as many in Rome must have seen him, the mad inventor), with his long grey beard and his blue goggles and his secret contraption for capturing sunlight.
Amid all this Leonardo continued his anatomical studies and performed the last of his dissections, probably at the famous Roman hospital in Santo Spirito. Here too, it seems, was scope for the malice of Giovanni: he has ‘hindered me in anatomy,’ complains Leonardo, ‘denouncing it before the Pope and also at the Hospital’.
The particular focus of this controversy was probably Leonardo’s research on embryology. The famous Windsor study of the foetus in the womb, generally dated to the last Milanese years, has some additional notes and drawings made later in Rome, and these touch on the vexed theological question of the soul of an unborn child. Leonardo writes that the foetu
s is a ‘creature’ wholly dependent on its mother’s soul, as on her body: ‘The same soul governs these two bodies, and shares its desires and fears and sorrows with this creature, as it does with all the other animal parts [of the mother].’54 When a pregnant woman died, therefore, her unborn child had no soul to save. In the Rome of 1515 this smacked of the heretical Aristotelian position that the soul was materially composed, and died with the body. At just this time the Pope’s theologians were entrenching their position
Embryological studies, a possible source of controversy in Rome.
against this and other heresies – the Aristotelian works of Pietro Pomponazzi were burned in 151655 – and this may have been the titbit of suspicion brought ‘before the Pope’ by the mirror-man, thus ‘hindering’ Leonardo’s studies.
An idea of Leonardo as theologically unorthodox came down to Vasari: ‘He had a very heretical state of mind. He could not be content with any kind of religion at all, considering himself in all things much more a philosopher than a Christian’ – so Vasari wrote in the first edition of 1550, though he removed the passage from the second, perhaps thinking it sounded too critical.
LAST VISIT TO FLORENCE
That little joke of the Pope’s about Leonardo’s working habits has a sombre aftertaste. ‘Comincia a pensare alla fine…’ He begins to think of the end.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 58