Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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jungle of his manuscripts there is no word of love or tenderness for
women. Yet he understood well many phases of woman's nature; no one
has surpassed him in representing virginal delicacy, motherly
solicitude, or feminine subtlety. It may be that his sensitiveness,
his secretive anagrams and codes, his double locking of his studio
at night, had a root in his consciousness of abnormality as well as in
his fear of being charged with heresy. He was not anxious to be read
by the many. "The truth of things," he wrote, "is a supreme food for
fine intelligences, but not for wandering wits." `050725
His sexual inversion may have influenced other elements of his
character. He was the soul of gentle kindness to his friends. He
protested against killing animals, "would not allow anyone to hurt any
living thing"; `050726 he bought caged birds to free them. `050727
In other aspects he seemed morally insensitive. He was apparently
fascinated by the problem of designing instruments of war. He
appears to have felt no strong resentment against the French for
condemning to a dungeon the Lodovico who for sixteen years had
maintained him handsomely in Milan. He went off without visible
qualm to serve a Borgia whom Florence feared as a threat to her
liberty. Like every artist, every author, and every homosexual, he was
unusually self-conscious, sensitive, and vain. Se tu sarai solo tu
sarai tutto tuo, he wrote; "if you are alone, you are all your own;
with a companion you are half yourself; so you squander yourself
according to the indiscretion of your company." `050728 He could shine
in company as a musician or a conversationalist, but he liked rather
to isolate himself in rapt concentration on his tasks. "The chief gift
of nature," he said (never having starved), "is liberty." `050729
His virtues were the better side of his faults. His aversion to
sexual behavior may have left him free to spend his blood upon his
work. His painful sensitivity opened up to him a thousand facets of
reality unseen by the common eye. He would follow through a dozen
streets, or all day long, some unusual face, and then, in his
studio, draw it as well as if he had brought the model with him. His
mind leaped at peculiarities- strange forms, actions, ideas. "The
Nile," he wrote, "has discharged more water into the sea than is at
present contained in all the waters of the earth"; consequently "all
the sea and the rivers have passed through the mouth of the Nile an
infinite number of times." `050730 By a kindred bent he indulged
himself in queer pranks; so one day he hid the cleaned gut of a ram in
a room, and when his friends had gathered there, he inflated the gut
by a bellows in an adjoining chamber, until the swelling skin
crowded his guests against the walls. He recorded in his notebooks a
variety of second-class fables and jokes.
His curiosity, his inversion, his sensitivity, his passion for
perfection, all entered into his most fatal defect- the inability or
unwillingess to complete what he had begun. Perhaps he entered upon
each work of art with a view to solve a technical problem of
composition, color, or design, and lost interest in the work when
the solution had been found. Art, he said, lies in conceiving and
designing, not in the actual execution; this was labor for lesser
minds. Or he pictured to himself some subtlety, significance, or
perfection that his patient, and at last impatient, hand could not
realize, and he abandoned the effort in despair, as in the case of the
face of Christ. `050731 He passed too quickly from one task or subject
to another; he was interested in too many things; he lacked a unifying
purpose, a dominating idea; this "universal man" was a medley of
brilliant fragments; he was possessed of and by too many abilities
to harness them to one goal. In the end he mourned, "I have wasted
my hours." `050732
He wrote five thousand pages, but never completed one book.
Quantitatively he was more an author than an artist. He speaks of
having composed 120 manuscripts; fifty remain. They are written from
right to left in a half-Oriental script that almost lends color to the
legend that at one time he traveled in the Near East, served the
Egyptian sultan, and embraced the Mohammedan faith. `050733 His
grammar is poor, his spelling is individualistic. His reading was
varied and desultory. He had a little library of thirty-seven volumes:
the Bible, Aesop, Diogenes Laertius, Ovid, Livy, Pliny the Elder,
Dante, Petrarch, Poggio, Filelfo, Ficino, Pulci, the Travels of
"Mandeville," and treatises on mathematics, cosmography, anatomy,
medicine, agriculture, palmistry, and the art of war. He remarked that
"the knowledge of past times and of geography adorns and nourishes the
intellect," `050734 but his many anachronisms show only a scattering
acquaintance with history. He aspired to be a good writer; made
several attempts at eloquence, as in his repeated descriptions of a
flood; `050735 and wrote vivid accounts of a tempest and a
battle. `050736 He clearly intended to publish some of his writings,
and often began to put his notes into order for this purpose. So far
as we know he published nothing during his lifetime; but he must
have allowed some friends to see selected manuscripts, for there are
references to his writings in Flavio Biondo, Jerome Cardan, and
Cellini.
He wrote equally well on science and art, and divided his time
almost evenly between them. The most substantial of his manuscripts is
the Trattato della pittura, or Treatise on Painting, first
published in 1651. Despite devoted modern editing, it is still a loose
aggregation of fragments, in poor array, and often repetitious.
Leonardo anticipates those who argue that painting can be learned only
by painting; he thinks a sound knowledge of theory helps; and he
laughs off his critics as being like "those of whom Demetrius declared
that he took no more account of the wind that came from their mouths
than of that which they expelled from their lower parts." `050737
His basic precept is that the student of art should study nature
rather than copy the works of other artists. "See to it, O painter,
that when you go into the fields you give your attention to the
various objects, looking carefully in turn first at one object then at
another, making a bundle of different things selected among those of
less value." `050738 Of course the painter must study anatomy,
perspective, modeling by light and shade; boundaries sharply defined
make a picture seem wooden. "Always make the figure so that the
bosom is not turned in the same direction as the head"; `050739 here
is one secret of the grace in Leonardo's own compositions. Finally
he urges: "Make figures with such action as may suffice to show what
the figure has in mind." `050740 Did he forget to do this with Mona
Lisa, or did he exaggerate our ability to read the soul in the eyes
and the lips?
Leonardo the man appears more clearly and variously in his
drawings than in his paintings or his notes. Their number is legion;
one manuscript alone- the Codice Atlantico in Milan- has seventeen
hundred. Many are hasty sketches; many are such masterpieces that we
must rank Leonardo as the ablest, subtlest, profoundest draughtsman of
the Renaissance; there is nothing in the drawings of Michelangelo or
Rembrandt that can match the amazing Virgin, Christ, and St. Anne in
Burlington House. Leonardo used silverpoint, charcoal, red chalk, or
pen and ink to draw almost every phase of physical, many of
spiritual life. A hundred putti or bambini spread their fat and
dimpled legs in his sketches; a hundred youths, half Greek in profile,
half woman in soul; a hundred pretty maidens, of demure and tender
mien, hair waving in the wind; athletes proud of their muscles, and
warriors breathing battle or gleaming with armor and arms; saints from
the soft beauty of Sebastian to the haggard skin of Jerome; gentle
madonnas seeing the world redeemed in their babes; complex drawings of
costumes for masquerades; and studies of shawls and scarves and
laces and robes caressing the head or the neck, curling on the arm, or
falling from shoulder or knee in folds that catch the light, invite
the touch, and seem more real than the garments on our flesh. All
these forms sing the zest and marvel of life; but scattered among them
are horrible grotesques and caricatures- deformed heads, leering
imbeciles, bestial faces, crippled bodies, shrews contorted with fury,
a Medusa with snakes for hair, men desiccated and corrugated with age,
women in the last stages of decay; this was another side of reality,
and Leonardo's impartial universal eye caught it, fixed it, put it
down resolutely on his sheets, as if to look ugly evil squarely in the
face. He kept these horrors out of his paintings, which owed some
loyalty to beauty, but he had to find room for them in his philosophy.
Perhaps nature pleased him more than man did, for nature was
neutral, and could not be accused of evil as malice; everything in her
was forgivable to an unbiased eye. So Leonardo drew many landscapes,
and scolded Botticelli for ignoring them; he followed the tendrils
of flowers faithfully with his pen; he hardly painted a picture
without giving it added magic and depth by a background of trees,
streams, rocks, mountains, clouds, and sea. He almost banished
architectural forms from his art so that he might leave more room
for nature to enter and absorb the painted individual or group into
the reconciling totality of things.
Sometimes Leonardo tried his hand at architectural design, but
with chastening unsuccess. There are architectural fantasies among his
drawings, quaint and half Syrian. He liked domes, and made a pretty
sketch for a kind of St. Sophia that Lodovico might build in Milan; it
never rose from the ground. Lodovico sent him to Pavia to help
redesign the cathedral there, but Leonardo found the mathematicians
and anatomists of Pavia more interesting than the cathedral. He
mourned the noise, filth, and narrow congestion of Italian towns,
studied town planning, and submitted to Lodovico a sketch for a city
of two levels. On the lower level would move all commercial traffic,
"and loads for the service and convenience of the common people";
the upper level would be a roadway twenty braccia (some forty
feet) wide, upheld by colonnaded arcades, and "not to be used by
vehicles, but solely for the convenience of the gentlefolk"; spiral
staircases would occasionally connect the two levels, and every here
and there a fountain would cool and cleanse the air. `050741
Lodovico had no funds for such an upheaval, and the Milanese
aristocracy remained on the earth.
VI. THE INVENTOR
-
It is hard for us to realize that to Lodovico, as to Caesar
Borgia, Leonardo was primarily an engineer. Even the pageants that
he planned for the Duke of Milan included ingenious automata. "Every
day," says Vasari, "he made models and designs for the removal of
mountains with ease, and to pierce them to pass from one place to
another; and by means of levers, cranes, and winches to raise and draw
heavy weights; he devised methods for cleaning harbors, and for
raising water from great depths." `050742 He developed a machine for
cutting threads in screws; he worked along correct lines towards a
water wheel; he devised frictionless roller-bearing band
brakes. `050743 He designed the first machine gun, and mortars with
cog gears to elevate their range; a multiple-belt drive; three-speed
transmission gears; an adjustable monkey wrench; a machine for rolling
metal; a movable bed for a printing press; a self-locking worm gear
for raising a ladder. `050744 He had a plan for underwater navigation,
but refused to explain it. `050745 He revived the idea of Hero of
Alexandria for a steam engine, and showed how steam pressure in a
gun could propel an iron bolt twelve hundred yards. He invented a
device for winding and evenly distributing yarn on a revolving
spindle, `050746 and scissors that would open and close with one
movement of the hand. Often he let his fancy bemuse him, as when he
suggested inflated skis for walking on water, or a water mill that
would simultaneously play several musical instruments. `050747 He
described a parachute: "If a man have a tent made of linen, of which
the apertures have all been stopped up, and it be twelve cubits across
and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any
great height without sustaining any injury." `050748
Through half his life he pondered the problem of human flight.
Like Tolstoi he envied the birds as a species in many ways superior to
man. He studied in detail the operation of their wings and tails,
the mechanics of their rising, gliding, turning, and descending. His
sharp eye noted these movements with passionate curiosity, and his
swift pencil drew and recorded them. He observed how birds avail
themselves of air currents and pressures. He planned the conquest of
the air:
-
You will make an anatomy of the wings of a bird, together with the
muscles of the breast, which move these wings. And you will do the
same for a man, in order to show the possibility of a man sustaining
himself in the air by the beating of wings.... `050749 The rising of
birds without beating their wings is not produced by anything other
than their circular movement amid the currents of the wind.... `050750
Your bird should have no other model than the bat, because its
membranes serve as.... a means of binding together the framework of
the wings..... `050751 A bird is an instrument working according to
mechanical law. This instrument it is within the power of man to
reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding
degree of strength. `050752
-
He made several drawings of a screw mechanism by which a man,
through the action of his feet, might cause wings to beat fast
enough to raise him into the air. `050753 In a brief essay Sul
volo, On Flight, he described a flying machine made by him with
strong starched linen, leather joints, and thongs of raw silk. He
called this "the bird," and wrote detailed instructions for flying
it. `050754
-
If this instrument made with a screw... be turned swiftly, the
said screw will make its spiral in the air, and it will rise
high.... `050755 Make trial of the machine over the water, so that
if you fall you do not do yourself any harm.... `050756 The great bird
will take its first flight... filling the whole world with amazement
and all records with its fame; and it will bring eternal glory to
the nest where it was born. `050757
-
Did he actually try to fly? A note in the Codice Atlantico `050758
says: "Tomorrow morning, on the second day of January, 1496, I will
make the thong and the attempt"; we do not know what this means. Fazio
Cardano, father of Jerome Cardan the physicist (1501-76), told his son
that Leonardo himself had essayed flight. `050759 Some have thought
that when Antonio, one of Leonardo's aides, broke his leg in 1510,
it was in trying to fly one of Leonardo's machines. We do not know.
Leonardo was on the wrong tack; human flight came not by imitating
the bird, except in gliding, but by applying the internal combustion
engine to a propellor that could beat the air not downward but
backward; forward speed made possible upward flight. But the noblest
distinction of man is his passion for knowledge. Shocked by the wars
and crimes of mankind, disheartened by the selfishness of ability
and the perpetuity of poverty, saddened by the superstitions and
credulities with which the nations and generations gild the brevity
and indignities of life, we feel our race in some part redeemed when
we see that it can hold a soaring dream in its mind and heart for
three thousand years, from the legend of Daedalus and Icarus,
through the baffled groping of Leonardo and a thousand others, to
the glorious and tragic victory of our time.
VII. THE SCIENTIST
-
Side by side with his drawings, sometimes on the same page,
sometimes scrawled across a sketch of a man or a woman, a landscape or
a machine, are the notes in which this insatiable mind puzzled over
the laws and operations of nature. Perhaps the scientist grew out of
the artist: Leonardo's painting compelled him to study anatomy, the
laws of proportion and perspective, the composition and reflection
of light, the chemistry of pigments and oils; from these researches he
was drawn to a more intimate investigation of structure and function
in plants and animals; and from these inquiries he rose to a
philosophical conception of universal and invariable natural law.
Often the artist peered out again in the scientist; the scientific
drawing might be itself a thing of beauty, or terminate in a
graceful arabesque.
Like most scientists of his time, Leonardo tended to identify
scientific method with experience rather than experiment. `050760
"Remember," he counsels himself, "when discoursing about water, to
adduce first experience and then reason." `050761 Since any man's
experience can be no more than a microscopic fragment of reality,
Leonardo supplemented his with reading, which can be experience by
proxy. He studied carefully but critically the writings of Albert of
Saxony, `050762 gained a partial acquaintance with the ideas of
Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Nicholas of Cusa, and learned much
from association with Luca Pacioli, Marcantonio della Torre, and other
professors in the University of Pavia. But he tested everything with
his own experience. "Whoever refers to authorities in disputing
ideas works with his memory rather than with his reason." `050763 He
was the least occult of the thinkers of his age. He rejected alchemy
and astrology, and hoped for a time when "all astrologers will be
castrated." `050764
He tried his hand at almost every science. He took
enthusiastically to mathematics as the purest form of reasoning; he
felt a certain beauty in geometrical figures, and drew some on the
same page with a study for The Last Supper. `050765 He expressed
vigorously one of the fundamental principles of science: "There is
no certainty where one can neither apply any of the mathematical
sciences nor any of those that are based upon them." `050766 And he
proudly echoed Plato: "Let no man who is not a mathematician read
the elements of my work." `050767
He was fascinated by astronomy. He proposed to "make glasses in
order to see the moon large," `050768 but apparently he did not make
them. He writes: "The sun does not move... the earth is not in the
center of the circle of the sun, nor in the center of the
universe." `050769 "The moon has every month a winter and a
summer." `050770 He discusses acutely the causes of spots on the moon,
and combats, on that matter, the views of Albert of Saxony. `050771
Taking a lead from the same Albert, he argues that since "every
heavy substance presses downward, and cannot be upheld perpetually,
the whole earth must become spherical," and will ultimately be covered
with water. `050772
He noticed on high elevations the fossil shells of marine animals,
and concluded that the waters had once reached those altitudes `050773
(Boccaccio had suggested this about 1338 in his Filocopo ). `050774
He rejected the notion of a universal flood, `050775 and ascribed to
the earth an antiquity that would have shocked the orthodoxy of his
time. He assigned to the accumulations brought down by the Po a
duration of 200,000 years. He made a map of Italy as he imagined it to
have been in an early geological era. The Sahara Desert, he thought,
had once been covered with salt water. `050776 Mountains have been
formed through erosion by rain. `050777 The bottom of the sea is
continually rising with the detritus of all the streams that flow into
it. "Very great rivers flow underground"; `050778 and the movement
of life-giving water in the body of the earth corresponds to the
movement of the blood in the body of man. `050779 Sodom and Gomorrah
were destroyed not by human wickedness but by slow geological
action, probably the subsidence of their soil into the Dead
Sea. `050780
Leonardo followed avidly the advances made in physics by Jean
Buridan and Albert of Saxony in the fourteenth century. He wrote a
hundred pages on motion and weight, and hundreds more on heat,
acoustics, optics, color, hydraulics, and magnetism. "Mechanics is the
paradise of the mathematical sciences, for by its means one comes to
the fruit of mathematics" in useful work. `050781 He delighted in
pulleys, cranes, and levers, and saw no end to what they could lift or
move; but he laughed at seekers for perpetual motion. "Force with
material movement, and weight with percussion, are the four accidental
powers in which all the works of mortals have their being and their
end." `050782 Despite these lines he was not a materialist. On the
contrary he defined force as "a spiritual capacity... spiritual
because the life in it is invisible and without body... impalpable
because the body in which it is produced is increased neither in
size nor in weight." `050783
He studied the transmission of sound, and reduced its medium to
waves of air. "When the string of a lute is struck it... conveys a
movement to a similar string of the same tone on another lute, as
one may convince oneself by placing a straw on the string similar to
the one struck." `050784 He had his own notion of a telephone. "If you
cause your ship to stop, and place the head of a long tube in the
water, and place the other extremity to your ear, you will hear
ships at a great distance from you. You can also do the same by
placing the head of the tube upon the ground, and you will then hear
anyone passing at a distance." `050785
But sight and light interested him more than sound. He marveled at
the eye: "Who would believe that so small a space could contain the
images of all the universe?"- `050786 and he wondered even more at the
power of the mind to recall an image long past. He gave an excellent
description of the means by which spectacles compensate for the
weakening of the muscles of the eyes. `050787 He explained the
operation of the eye by the principle of the camera obscura: in
the camera and in the eye the image is inverted because of the
pyramidal crossing of the light rays that come from the object into
the camera or the eye. `050788 He analyzed the refraction of
sunlight in the rainbow. Like Leon Battista Alberti he had a good
notion of complementary colors four centuries before the definitive
work of Michel Chevreul. `050789
He planned, began, and left countless notes for, a treatise on
water. The movements of water captivated his eye and mind; he
studied placid and turbulent streams, springs and falls, bubbles and
foam, torrents and cloudbursts, and the simultaneous fury of wind
and rain. "Without water," he wrote, repeating Thales after twenty-one
hundred years, "nothing can exist among us." `050790 He anticipated
Pascal's fundamental principle of hydrostatics- that the pressure
exerted upon a fluid is transmitted by it. `050791 He noted that the
liquids in communicating vessels keep the same level. `050792
Inheriting Milan's tradition of hydraulic engineering, he designed and
built canals, suggested ways of conducting navigable canals under or
over the rivers that crossed them, and proposed to free Florence