Da Vinci's Ghost (14 page)

At the same time, not immune to the Renaissance fever sweeping other parts of Italy, he launched a genuine program of cultural improvement in his city. From Florence and other important Italian cities he imported architects, artists, and writers, even going so far as to bring one Florentine writer to his court to help smooth out what he considered
“the coarse speech
of the Milanese.” He had an eye for genuine artistic talent, too—and when Lorenzo de’ Medici sent a certain Master Leonardo to play music at his court as a goodwill gesture on the part of the city of Florence, he recognized that the man had it in spades.

Leonardo traveled to Milan
sometime between late 1481 and early 1483—quite possibly in mid-February 1482, to perform or compete in the city’s Ambrosian festival. By Vasari’s account, he arrived bearing an eccentric lute of his own design, made of silver and wrought in the shape of a horse’s head: “a form,” Vasari noted, “
calculated in order to render the tone louder and more sonorous
.”

That sounds a lot like Leonardo. In the days that followed he proceeded to enchant Ludovico with not only his instrument and his musicianship but also his talents as an improviser of light verse.
“He surpassed all the musicians
who had assembled to perform,” Vasari wrote, “and so charmed the duke by his varied gifts that the nobleman delighted beyond measure in his society.”

Charming the Moor temporarily was one thing. But winning permanent gainful employment at his court was another—and
there’s no evidence that Leonardo did so. Instead, the first surviving trace of him in Milan emerges in the spring of 1483, when a contract identifies him as part of an art studio run by the de Predis brothers. The contract makes him the lead artist in the job of painting an altarpiece, a work that would become his famous
Virgin of the Rocks
.

The de Predis brothers had good connections to Ludovico’s court, which may be why Leonardo attached himself to their operation. But what they had to offer him was not the studio of his dreams. Instead, more than a year after his arrival in Milan, he was back in the kind of environment he knew all too well: the workshop collective. In the early 1480s Milan was home to
about a hundred workshops
, which produced not only paintings and sculptures but also a variety of the other objects required by a court: armorials, draperies, furniture, illuminated books, medallions, miniatures, paper feathers, pennants, tapestries, and more.

In the eyes of many at Ludovico’s court, Leonardo’s association with a workshop made him a second-class citizen. How dare he, a poorly educated artisan, breeze into town with his paintbrushes, his fancy lute, and his rose-colored tunic, spouting light verse, and aspire to join Ludovico’s coterie of refined scholars and writers? Painting involved a certain amount of training and skill, of course, and Leonardo was an acknowledged master—but still, it was a menial craft, not a liberal art. Its practitioners certainly couldn’t ever qualify as natural philosophers, despite what this impudent Florentine charmer seemed to believe. Did Master Leonardo, by any chance, know any … Latin? Was he well versed in the rules of grammar and oratory, as laid out by Quintilian and Cicero? How much
time, exactly, had he devoted to the study of Aristotle? Had he immersed himself in the thought of St. Augustine, the Venerable Bede, Hugh of St. Victor, and Thomas Aquinas—or, for that matter, the really
quite
informative encyclopedias of Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Vincent of Beauvais, and Albertus Magnus? Did he have any idea of the years of applied study it took to master the intricacies of astrological medicine? Perhaps he would care to share his thoughts on scientific works of Ptolemy and the Arabs? Had he ever even
heard
of a Roman architect named Vitruvius?

Leonardo bristled at being condescended to in this way. Ludovico had surrounded himself with court dandies, he felt, who didn’t understand the nature of true learning, and he dismissed them as nothing but
“trumpeters and reciters
”—men who “strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors but by those of others.” Much of the “knowledge” they so arrogantly and mindlessly referred him to was simply wrong, he believed—and he resolved to prove it.

So began a new phase in Leonardo’s career: his inspired, frantic, sprawling, obsessive, free-associative, and ultimately lifelong effort to discover not only how things worked the way they did but also
why
. Its beginnings can be traced back to his time in Florence, but in Milan a new tone of seriousness creeps into his work, rooted in the sense, which must have dawned on him with an almost frightening cosmic grandeur, that everything in the world was governed and bound together by a set of universal laws, principles, relationships, and forces. If he pursued his empirical investigations of the world diligently enough, he began to feel, he might drill right down to the inner causes of
things—and then explain them for others in his art, far more efficiently and accurately than any writer could ever do.

Painting wasn’t just painting, in other words. It was the act of holding up a mirror to nature. It was the visual transmission of not only surface appearances but also deeper, much more powerful essences, which he defined as
“quality, the beauty
of nature’s creations, and the harmony of the world.” In the sprawling
Speculum naturale
, or
Mirror of Nature
, the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais had devoted 3,718 chapters to summing up all that was known about science and the natural world. Leonardo, for his part, dreamed of capturing it all in his art—perhaps even in a single picture.

In this context, anything could become for Leonardo a useful analogy for thinking about something else. A human body wasn’t just a human body. It was a machine: a system of gears, pulleys, cables, and levers, animated by a variety of mechanical, hydraulic, and pneumatic forces. A machine, by the same token, wasn’t just a machine. It was a body that, if designed harmoniously and kept in tune, like a musical instrument, could spring to life when acted upon by those same forces. Architecture could be thought of as a kind of anatomy; anatomy as a kind of geography; geography as a kind of mathematics; mathematics as a kind of geometry; geometry as a kind of music; music as a kind of physics; and so on. Proportion, Leonardo decided, was the key to it all and could be discerned
“in numbers and measurements
but also in sounds, weights, times, spaces, and in whatsoever power there may be.”

Hungry for knowledge in its own right but also motivated by a desire to prove the superiority of his art and gain employment at the Milanese court, Leonardo plunged himself into his
investigations. The whole business was intoxicating—and dizzying. The challenge was how to keep track of everything. He needed a way of collecting his observations, comparing his data, pinning down his thoughts, capturing his visions, roughing out his pictures, remembering what he’d been told, recording what he’d read, and reminding himself of his plans.

The work our hands do
at the command of our eyes is infinite.

—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490)

T
HE SOLUTION HE
came up with, probably sometime in the early 1480s, was to keep a set of notebooks. It wasn’t a new idea. Master artists in workshops had long given their apprentices copybooks to learn from and encouraged them to build collections of their own studies and drawings. Leonardo began keeping sketchbooks early in his career, probably while working under Verrocchio—and he certainly was doing so by the time he arrived in Milan. Not long after he arrived there, for example, he set down a detailed inventory of his work that reads distinctly as though he’s flipping through the pages of his portfolio.

Many flowers copied
from nature; a head, full-face, with
curly hair; certain St. Jeromes; measurements of a figure; designs of furnaces; a head of the duke; many designs of knots; 4 drawings for the picture of the Holy Angel … a head of Christ done in pen; 8 St. Sebastians; many compositions of angels … a head in profile with beautiful hair style; certain forms in perspective; certain gadgets for ships; certain gadgets for water … many necks of old women; many heads of old men; many complete nudes; many arms, legs, feet, and postures; a Madonna finished; another, almost finished, which is in profile; the head of Our Lady who ascends to heaven; a head of an old man with an enormous chin; a head of a gipsy; a head wearing a hat.

Many of these items are exactly what one would expect from a workshop artist trained in fifteenth-century Florence: the heads of Christ, all those saints and angels and Madonnas. But some of the others—the designs for machines and gadgets—reveal that by the early 1480s Leonardo had already begun to think of himself not just as a painter or a sculptor but as something altogether more ambitious: an artist-engineer.

Leonardo’s role model in this regard was the remarkable Filippo Brunelleschi. Originally trained as a goldsmith and watchmaker, Brunelleschi early in his career had proven himself to be an artist of great technical skill. Memorably, in 1418, he had perfected and introduced Florentines to the technique of linear perspective, the most important artistic development of the fifteenth century. But the work for which he became most famous was the magnificent dome he built atop the cathedral of Florence.

When Leonardo first arrived in Florence, in the late 1460s, Brunelleschi was already the stuff of legend. Alberti had set the
tone in 1436, just after the dome had been consecrated, when he dedicated the Italian edition of
On Painting
to him. “
What man
,” he wrote, “however hard of heart or jealous, would not praise Filippo the architect when he sees here such an enormous construction towering above the skies, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow, and done without the aid of beams or elaborate wooden supports? Surely a feat of engineering, if I am not mistaken, that people did not believe possible these days and was probably equally unknown and unimaginable among the ancients.”

Everybody in Florence knew the story of Brunelleschi and his dome: How the renowned Roman architect Arnolfo di Cambio had been hired in 1292 to transform a dilapidated church in the center of the city into a monumental symbol of Florentine wealth and ingenuity, intended to rival the massive cathedrals that were sprouting up all over northern Europe. How di Cambio, or somebody else in the decades that followed, had decided that the signature feature of the cathedral would be the largest dome in the world. How the overseers of the project, in 1367, had decided that the dome should actually consist of
two
interlocking domes: one on the exterior, which would rise to an unprecedented height; and one on the interior, which, protected and supported by the external dome, would appear to hover weightlessly over the body of the church, almost like the dome of the sky itself. How, by 1400, work on the church had stalled completely, because nobody could figure out how to actually build such a dome. How, in 1418, desperate to move ahead with the project, the overseers of the cathedral had announced a public contest to find a solution. And how Brunelleschi, despite
not having any experience as a practicing architect, had entered the contest and saved the day.

Brunelleschi’s solution came in the form of a brick model. The ingenuity of its design appealed to the overseers, and in 1420, not without some apprehension about his qualifications for the job, they awarded him the commission for the dome. The risk paid off spectacularly. For some sixteen years he personally supervised all aspects of the dome’s construction: overseeing the efforts of swarms of lumberjacks, quarriers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, and other laborers; grappling daily with emerging design challenges; and working with enormous winches, hoists, and cranes of his own secretive design, which allowed him to quickly and safely raise huge amounts of heavy building materials hundreds of feet above the ground and then move them laterally into place. Year by year, in what amounted to a de facto public works project, the dome gradually came together, until at last, at nine in the morning on August 30, 1436, the bishop of the nearby town of Fiesole climbed up to the top of the dome and symbolically set its final stone in place. Trumpets blared, bells rang out, and all across the city Florentines, ballooning with civic pride, clambered to their rooftops to gaze at the spectacle.

It was a stunning achievement. Brunelleschi’s dome clearly rivaled the greatest of all domes, that of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople—a dome that the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, an important mentor to many of Florence’s early humanists, had praised not long before using terms that Florentines now began to apply to their own new dome. “
This work
,” Chrysoloras had written, “makes the spectator wonder
at the ready intelligence and capacity to achieve great things not only of this architect and of the other builders but of the whole human race. … The dome reveals inventiveness, elevated thought, dignity, and power such as no one before ever would have imagined.”

Ready intelligence, inventiveness, the capacity to achieve great things: these were the traits that Florentines came to associate with the man who had built their great dome. Soon Italians everywhere were celebrating Brunelleschi as a symbol of the almost limitless potential of the human mind. The shadow of the great man, like the shadow of his dome, loomed large over Florence in the fifteenth century—and, inevitably, over the young Leonardo as he came of age in the city. Brunelleschi became a role model for Leonardo: a lowly craftsman who, thanks to his ingenuity, had ennobled his profession and earned himself lasting glory as an artist-engineer.

Like so many other Florentines, Leonardo fell prey to the
malattia del duomo
. As the affliction took hold, Brunelleschi’s dome began to dominate the landscape of his thoughts. Some of his earliest surviving sketches show the giant machines that Brunelleschi had devised to construct it, and scattered across the early pages of his notebooks one finds both hasty sketches of and careful plans for domes based on Brunelleschi’s original. The collective effect is mesmerizing: a ghostly procession of images, reflected in drawings like his famous
Study for the Head of St. James
, that for years seem to have mirrored the dissolving patterns of his dreams (
Figure 22
).