One of the most fruitful collaborations of Leonardo’s career took place during his time in Milan with the mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli, who arrived in the city in 1496. Their meeting became a catalyst for a flourishing of Leonardo’s interest and development in mathematics. Pacioli’s empirical approach was combined with a Platonic reverence for the mystery of mathematical order. This approach matched perfectly with Leonardo’s own understanding of the underlying order of all things. Their collaboration encouraged Leonardo to investigate far more fundamental studies into the mathematical order that had been a silent basis for so much of his previous art and science. Pacioli praised Leonardo’s work on motion, weights, and forces and referred to a book that Leonardo had written ‘on painting and human motions’. Leonardo illustrated Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione, which was originally produced and presented to Galeazzo Sanseverino in 1498 (the illustrated treatise was printed in 1509). The treatise describes the geometry of the five regular or ‘Platonic’ solids and the divine proportion of their construction. These five solids are divine in their construction because they are the only ones that are made up from identical faces and that are symmetrical around their vertices. Leonardo’s ability to render these complex structures in solid and skeletal form is a testament to his grasp of complex spatial structures. Leonardo’s fascination with the abstract nature of mathematics continued to develop and is especially apparent in manuscripts I, M, and the Codex Atlanticus.
Although Leonardo listed sculpture before painting in his job application to Ludovico, we know very little about his work in this medium. In his notes on the Paragone, a comparison of the arts in which painting reigned supreme in the visual arts, he spoke disparagingly of sculpture as a messy and dusty enterprise. Debate of this kind was popular in the courts and we know that Leonardo took part in one such debate in February of 1498. Leonardo’s notes on the subject are some of the most comprehensive and sophisticated of any of the topics he wrote about. Sometimes repetitive, they can appear to be practice sessions for public debate and would no doubt have been both engrossing and entertaining. No less entertaining and equally creative were the tales and fables Leonardo wrote. They display a deep and fertile imagination—what he termed fantasia. We know from his book lists that he owned chivalric romances, imaginative poetry, and collections of tales, fables, and jests. Fantasia was also required for the painter. To succeed, the painter needed to establish a union between the intelletto, rational understanding, and fantasia, imaginative composition. Only through this combination could an artist remake nature.
We do not know how long Leonardo would have stayed in Milan had the French king Louis XII not invaded. The city was taken over in 1499 and Leonardo left with Pacioli. By March he was in Venice to act as a military adviser to the Venetian Republic which was under threat from a Turkish invasion. Leonardo’s analysis resulted in a proposal to use the River Isonzo as a defence barrier. Numerous sheets were devoted to the study of water and its movement. He was fascinated by its force and the way it behaved, its currents and its destructive potential. He drew parallels between the nature of water and air and he compared curls of hair with vortices of water which was all part of the underlying unity of nature. Leonardo’s work with water would continue at a later date.
When Leonardo returned to Florence by April of 1500 he was 48 years old. He appears to have been housed in the church complex of Santissima Annunziata as a guest of the Servite brothers. He consulted on architectural damage that had taken place on the church of San Salvatore dell’Osservanza (San Francesco al Monte) above Florence and on the construction of a campanile for the church of San Miniato. This ad hoc kind of work was an opportunity for Leonardo to earn some money, and he continued to be employed in this way.
Leonardo’s reputation by now was substantial. He oversaw his own busy studio with an array of assistants and pupils. His working method, as ad hoc as his work, is illuminated in a letter from Fra Pietro da Novellara, the head of the Carmelites in Florence, to Isabella d’Este, the great patron of the arts in Mantua with whom Leonardo had stayed some months before. Isabella had asked Fra Pietro to chase Leonardo to make a painting for her and Fra Pietro’s letters to Isabella give us a revealing look into Leonardo in his studio. He reported to Isabella on 3 April 1501 giving a detailed explanation of Leonardo’s activities including a description of a cartoon Leonardo was doing of the Virgin and Child with St Anne and a lamb, which he describes in great detail, noting the symbolic imagery of the lamb. He notes that Leonardo ‘is hard at work on geometry and has no time for the brush’. He also mentions that ‘the life that Leonardo leads is haphazard and extremely unpredictable, so that he only seems to live from day to day’. Although Leonardo had an established workshop with pupils, it was not apparently being run in a businesslike manner. In another letter written on 14 April Fra Pietro again mentions Leonardo’s distractions with ‘mathematical experiments’ and reports that Leonardo was working on a little picture for ‘one Florimond Robertet, a favourite of the King of France’. Fra Pietro goes on to describe the Robertet painting:
The little picture he is doing is of a Madonna seated as if she were about to spin yarn. The Child has placed his foot on the basket of yarns and has grasped the yarnwinder and gazes attentively at the four spokes that are in the form of a cross. As if desirous of the cross he smiles and holds it firm, and is unwilling to yield it to his Mother who seems to want to take it away from him.
This is a description of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder which exists today in two versions (in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch, Scotland and in another private collection). In his letter Fra Pietro notes the symbolism but also recognizes a new form of emotional dynamism being developed by Leonardo. In other words, Leonardo was taking the devotional subject and giving it an emotional narrative. This kind of narrative in devotional paintings was wholly new, and soon to be taken up by Raphael and Michelangelo. Emotion as a fundamental element of narrative painting was something Leonardo wrote about in his notes for the proposed treatise on painting: ‘That which is included in narrative paintings ought to move those who behold and admire them in the same way as the protagonist of the narrative is moved’ (Urb. 61v). The Madonna of the Yarnwinder stands in the middle of this revolution in narrative painting and is perhaps one reason why it was copied so often (there are at least thirty surviving versions).
As early as May the following year (1502) Leonardo was occupied in a wholly different way. He entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the head of the papal armies, as ‘architect and general engineer’. Cesare’s ambition was to extend the control of his father, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, throughout the Marches and Romagna. Leonardo was continually on the road travelling to Urbino, Cesena, Pesaro, and Rimini as a result. He studied and consulted on military architecture, field defence, and cartography, drawing maps of Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches, as well as a bird’s-eye-view map of Imola.
Leonardo was back in Florence by March 1503 and by July he was involved in an ambitious and tactical project of the Florentines to divert the River Arno around their enemy Pisa in order to choke them of their vital access. Looking at the quickly drawn yet fluid maps Leonardo produced, one is reminded of his description of rivers as veins which nourish the earth. The project was never fulfilled and one can imagine Leonardo was not surprised that the great force of the river was not to be diverted. He was fascinated with the potential of nature’s forces and would later (c.1515) devote a number of drawings and notes to the cataclysmic possibilities of nature unleashed in a series known as the deluge drawings.
As early as 1506 he was engaged in a deep investigation of the nature of water for the notebook known as the Leicester Codex. Leonardo had planned a treatise on water, which, as with his other proposed treatises, was never completed. In the notebook he outlines a series of titles to encompass water in all its aspects (see pp. 18-19). It is typically Leonardesque in the way he attempts to cover everything. Although it was never finished, it i
s possible to see that he intended to tackle the subject beginning with hydrodynamics then progressing to the geographical study of the earth’s water system and finally addressing questions of military and civil hydraulic engineering. It is an example of some of the most sustained discussions on a subject produced by Leonardo.
As with his other notes for treatises, the Leicester Codex was written for Leonardo’s own reference. It is more detailed than a notebook of free notations, but less complete than a publishable volume. It provides us with a good example of Leonardo’s writing style. Sometimes it is fragmented, sometimes fluent, and at other times rapid or abrupt. Abbreviations are common, as are spelling errors. Leonardo realizes that further work is needed on some areas and so he writes notes to himself on where to expand: ‘Here I shall continue and discuss a little the location of waters, although it seems somewhat out of order, and then put them in order in their places when drawing up the work’ (Leic. 25v).
Following the Renaissance Platonic format of a dialogue, Leonardo applies it to technical and scientific subjects. On one side is Leonardo, the scientist who bases his knowledge on experience and on the other side is what Leonardo calls the ‘adversary’, whose beliefs are based on book learning and authoritative texts of the day. Leonardo takes pleasure in gaining debating points through demonstrations of the facts of nature.
One of the challenges Leonardo set himself was the possibility of man achieving flight. This would be the greatest engineering achievement of all. Leonardo spent a great deal of time studying the flight of birds and the possibility of man flying, or as he eventually realized, gliding. In the early 1490s, when he was still in Milan, his notebooks show he was working on a flying machine, which he drew suspended from his studio ceiling and noted a plan to test the machine secretly. He returned to this ambition in Florence when he began the notes now known as the Codex on the Flight of Birds (Turin, Biblioteca Reale). This notebook is his most sustained analysis of the dynamics of bird flight. In understanding the mechanisms and dynamics of flight Leonardo turned to a study of the workings of the human body in an example of comparative anatomy. This study confirmed to him some essential analogies between man and bird in the mechanisms of the bones, tendons, and muscles. Amongst the sketches of soaring birds, there is a reference to the testing of a flying machine at Mount Ceceri (named after the soaring birds found in the area) above Fiesole. He predicted that the success of his experiment would fill the ‘universe with awe’ and bring ‘eternal glory’ to the man who created it. We do not know if the test was ever carried out, as no notes survive that refer to it, successful or not.
Leonardo’s interest in human anatomy was intense. His earlier approaches had been strongly influenced by Mondino de’ Luzzi (c.1270-c.1326), Galen, the ancient Greek medical writer, and Avicenna, the great Arab philosopher and physician. These were the standard influences during the Renaissance. Leonardo had continued his investigations and in the winter of 1508 he was in Florence where he dissected the corpse of a 100-year-old man (the ‘centenarian’) in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Leonardo wrote a touching description of the old man lying in his hospital bed and gently dying. He then could not help but find out the ‘cause of so sweet a death’ and carried out a dissection of the body. The reason, he discovered, was ‘from the lack of blood for the artery that nourishes the heart and the other parts below it, which I found very dry, thin and withered’ (W. 19027v). This appears to be the first description of arteriosclerosis.
Although Leonardo would come to realize that Galen was fundamentally wrong in many of his anatomical depictions, he did share Galen’s awe of nature’s design, ‘the wonderful skill of the creator’ (On the Function of Parts, 14. 2. 295) and belief that ‘Nature does nothing in vain . . . the artifice of nature is worked out in every part’ (Anatomical Procedures, 2. 2). This idea that everything in nature had a purpose was the underlying basis for Leonardo’s anatomical investigations. It was the structure of the anatomy that would reveal how it worked. Leonardo would take his work in anatomy to its highest level with his later studies of the heart in Rome (c.1513-14). These studies are a wonderful example of Leonardo’s ability to take his most developed knowledge of another subject, in this case hydrodynamics, and apply it to his study of blood flow in the heart. Leonardo had studied the cause and behaviour of vortices of water forming in rivers. Looking at the shape of the heart, he worked out that vortices of blood occurred when passing through the valve as the heart pumped, and these vortices in turn caused the valve to shut before the next flow of blood occurred.
The rapid development of Leonardo’s anatomical studies is most likely to have been caused by his meeting with the brilliant young anatomist Marcantonio della Torre at the University of Pavia around 1510. Little is known of their collaboration and Marcantonio died the following year, but it is evident that his influence on Leonardo provided a catalyst for a coherence of vision in Leonardo’s work. The drawings which survive, now at Windsor, reveal a carefully laid out technique of descriptive visual beauty. The clarity of the drawings is staggering when one takes into account the relatively primitive and messy conditions of dissecting a corpse. It was during this time that Leonardo devised the first exploded diagrams to show, for example, the complex layering and structure of the muscles of the arm and neck.
Leonardo’s departure from Milan at the end of 1511 was caused by the collapse of the French occupation of the city, and his next known residence was in Rome at the end of 1513. Giovanni de’ Medici had been elected Pope Leo X. His brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, head of the papal forces, established Leonardo and his household in the Belvedere wing of the Vatican and became his patron. Leonardo travelled around the region carrying out tasks for Giuliano and the Pope, including studies of a harbour and plans for draining the Pontine marshes. He was working on his anatomical studies and continued with his notes for his treatise on painting. It was also a time when he carried out studies of convex and concave mirrors. Leonardo was deeply absorbed by the study of light as it affected all things and how we see them. The studies of rays of light from concave mirrors were part of a series of experiments with optics, lenses, and the camera obscura. The use of burning mirrors would have had a great practical use, of course, in heating things and Leonardo specifically mentions their use for dye factories where water could be boiled by this method. Notes from this period show he was working on creating a process for manufacturing parabolic mirrors.
While living in Rome Leonardo appears to have had with him a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, or Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre), the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a prominent Florentine. Although the painting was begun in around 1503/4, Leonardo appears to have kept it with him, never giving it to his patron. It seems that he grew attached to it, and continued to work on it for some years, until about 1516. The painting is a stunning example of the culmination of Leonardo’s artistic, philosophical, and intellectual development. The visual sfumato effect of blurred edges and ambiguous forms is also apparent in a more abstract way. Here, Leonardo has created a sort of primeval world in his landscape that has the same force of life as his sitter. The microcosm and macrocosm are interwoven and the unity of man with nature is completed.
It is not known exactly when an agreement was made, but in 1516 the 64-year-old Leonardo travelled to France to become the paintre du Roy to Francis I. He was granted a home at the chateau of Cloux near to the royal court at Amboise and enjoyed a privileged life as a highly admired addition to it. He continued to create entertaining displays for the court and devised a complex scheme of canals for a project for the great palace at Romorantin on the banks of the Saudre. In October 1517 he was visited by the Cardinal of Aragon, whose secretary, Antonio de Beatis, wrote about the visit (pp. 356-7). There is a sense of great respect for the old man, whose health by this time was deteriorating. On 2 May 1519, Leonardo died peacefully.
It seems clear from his notebooks that Leonardo was attempting to outline an underlying science for all things.
He sought its rules by finding the shared principles behind the varied phenomena of nature he investigated. However, he could not stop at the principles. He had a need to go beyond this to find all the variations he observed based on a multitude of effects. All details and variations in nature needed to be fully described, and understood. Only when every possible cause and effect had been studied could one come to a true understanding of how nature worked.
A task like this, which required a comprehensive understanding of all things, was ultimately doomed. There was really no way Leonardo could have succeeded and it seems he understood this. Throughout his writings one sees variations on a recurring note: ‘Tell me if anything was ever done?’ as if in the middle of one of his investigations he was aware that he could question a thing indefinitely. That he was unable to cease in his quest, the thousands of sheets that make up his notebooks testify. They are witness to an unerring commitment to knowledge, and no other body of writing equals their range in exploring man and the world around him.
The heavens often rain down the richest gifts on human beings, naturally, but sometimes with lavish abundance bestow upon a single individual beauty, grace and ability, so that, whatever he does, every action is so divine that he distances all other men, and clearly displays how his genius is the gift of God and not an acquirement of human art. Men saw this in Leonardo da Vinci.
Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Notebooks Page 3