Da Vinci's Ghost (16 page)

Figure 24.
Siege engine in the form of a dragon, by Roberto Valturio (1472).

Leonardo launched himself into the study of military engineering with unbridled enthusiasm and creativity. This often troubles those who prefer to think of him as the contemplative master who would spend hours serenely pondering the addition of single brushstrokes to such masterpieces as the
Mona Lisa
and
The Last Supper
, or as the gentle vegetarian who, according to Vasari, bought caged birds solely for the delight of setting them free. But his notebooks reveal a different side of him. Strewn across page after page are designs for machines of defense and destruction. By turns ingeniously practical, weirdly archaic, and creatively implausible, they show a mesmerizing variety of inventions: scaling ladders, siege engines, trench diggers, tunnel borers, small weapons, machine guns, cannons, armored tanks, gun boats, a giant catapult, a gargantuan crossbow, chariot-powered scythes (
Figure 25
).

The more time and energy that Leonardo invested in investigating the study of military engineering, the more confident he became in his own abilities and inventions. If Roberto Valturio or Francesco di Giorgio Martini could succeed in the field, winning themselves both fame and fortune, then surely so could he. And so,
in about 1484
, he drafted a remarkable letter to Ludovico Sforza, detailing how he could serve the duke by designing portable bridges, siege machinery, silent tunnel diggers, armored tanks, aquatic attack vehicles, fire throwers, catapults, and mortars—in short, as he put it, “
an infinite variety
of machines for both attack and defense.”

Whether Leonardo actually ever sent this letter is unclear. The odds are that he didn’t, but even if he did, little came of it. As was his wont, he had dawdled a bit too long. On August 7, 1484, the Venetians signed a peace treaty that brought their military expansionism in northern Italy to an end. For the Milanese, the prospect of war faded, and gradually, after a horrifying outbreak of the plague, a new era of peace and prosperity began, allowing Ludovico once again to focus on the beautification of his capital. What interested him now were projects of not
military but civil engineering: the improvement of sewers, the paving of streets, the shoring up of walls, the demolition and renovation of aging structures, the construction of new ones.

Figure 25.
Studies of gun barrels, mortars, and, at bottom, a manned nautical machine gun, by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1485–90).

Sensing a shift in the winds, Leonardo drifted away from military engineering. Instead, he began focusing on architectural projects—and, in 1487, turned his attention to the unfinished cathedral of Milan. Perhaps, like Brunelleschi before him, he could place a dome atop one of the world’s greatest cathedrals and earn lasting glory for himself as an ingenious master builder.

I shall show
… the causes that bring ruin to buildings, and what is the condition of their stability and permanence.

—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1488)

B
Y THE TIME
Leonardo decided to try his hand at their game, the cathedral builders of Europe had long established themselves as a kind of medieval fraternity. What’s known of their story begins in the early twelfth century, with the work of a Benedictine monk named Suger.

Suger served as the abbot of Saint-Denis, a church near Paris that since the time of Charlemagne had been the burial site of the kings of France. It was a plum job. But when he first arrived there, in 1122, he found the church in a sad state of disrepair—and its monks in a corresponding state of moral collapse. He wasn’t alone to notice this. When the philosopher Peter Abélard sought refuge at Saint-Denis in the 1120s, feeling more than a bit glum after the public revelation of his famous affair with
Héloïse, which had led to his castration, he was appalled at what he encountered. Life at Saint-Denis, he wrote, was
“completely worldly and depraved
.”

Suger resolved to restore order. He would rebuild his church, he decided, in a style designed to inspire a new kind of religious contemplation—a style, it turned out, that would give rise to the great cathedral spaces of Europe. Ruminating on the kind of church he hoped to create and inhabit, he wrote,
“I see myself dwelling
, as it were, in some strange region of the universe that exists entirely neither in the slime of the earth nor in the purity of heaven.” He then went on to explain what would happen to him, or anybody else, who entered that strange region. “By the grace of God,” he wrote, “I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.”

Anagogy. Now,
there’s
a word not thrown around much today. Derived from the Greek verb
anagein
(“to lift up”) and the related noun
anagoge
, the word had long been used by Latin and Greek theologians to signify the spiritual uplift that comes from discovering signs of Heaven in earthly things. Christian scholars and theologians regularly employed the technique in parsing Scripture and had long used it, in both the Latin and Greek traditions, to unpack what the Bible taught about the Church. In the seventh century, for example, discussing the building of churches, the Venerable Bede had written,
“The foundation of the temple
is to be understood mystically.” At about the same time, a Greek abbot named Maximus had expanded on the theme. After describing a church as
“a figure and image
of the entire world,” he had gone on to note, “For those who are capable of seeing this, the whole spiritual world seems mystically imprinted on the whole sensible world in symbolic forms.”

Nobody saw all of this more clearly than Hildegard of Bingen—who, as it happened, corresponded with Abbot Suger during the first half of the twelfth century. When Hildegard became an abbess at St. Rupert, the monastery she founded near the town of Bingen, like Suger she undertook the building of a church. During the years she oversaw its construction, architectural imagery flooded into her mind, laden, she felt, with symbolic and anagogic import.

In Hildegard’s view, God was the master builder responsible for the architecture of everything. She wasn’t alone in thinking this way. Her contemporary Alan of Lille referred to God as
“the elegant architect
of the world”—an increasingly popular idea that manuscript illuminators began to translate into visual form at about this same time (
Plate 6
).

Hildegard and Suger didn’t play a role in the technical design and construction of their churches. Instead, each gave general instructions to a master builder—a sort of general contractor who, in turn, relying on a team of masons, carpenters, and other manual laborers, would have done his best to make her architectural visions a reality. In keeping with the practices of their age, however, Hildegard and Suger didn’t feel it necessary to record the names of their master builders. Next to nothing is known about them. They were craftsmen, experts at what they did, but part of a lowly professional class considered worthy of little mention. That’s a shame, because it was medieval master builders who, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, set in stone some of the most enduring, elaborate, and monumental visions of the microcosm ever produced: the great cathedrals of Europe.

* * *

P
ITY THE POOR
master builder tasked with creating Suger’s “strange region of the universe.” Whoever he was, he turned out to be a man of rare genius. Given the job of creating an otherworldly sense of uplift and light, he devised a new architectural style that would define church building in Europe for centuries to come. Initially known simply as the French style, it combined such already existing elements as the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, the flying buttress, and the elevated stained-glass window, and made possible churches of previously unimaginable size and grandeur. It all seemed the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.
“It shall come to pass
in the latter days,” the Book of Isaiah read, “that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it.”

And so up they rose, the mountainous cathedrals of medieval Europe—stone by stone, column by column, arch by arch, spire by spire, vaulting skyward, enclosing vast expanses of space and light. Rising to unprecedented heights, intricately geometrical in design, they were marvels of structural engineering that awed and delighted visitors, but they came together according to no single master plan or coherent set of proportions. Instead, inspired by the ideas of Suger and other religious leaders, they evolved in fits and starts over the course of decades and even centuries, constantly changing in response to the whims of their sponsors and the technical challenges encountered by their builders.

Not everybody appreciated the style. By the early fifteenth century, it had become anathema to the architects of the Italian Renaissance, who were developing a very different idiom: clean, spare, and based (they claimed) on the architecture of ancient
Greece and Rome. The Florentines, in particular, rejected it when considering the design of their own cathedral. As the self-anointed heirs of the Roman tradition, they felt they could do better than those barbarian Goths and Franks, whose gangly, monstrous cathedrals they saw spreading all over Europe like a plague. The cathedrals of northern Europe were all so hideously
Gothic:
good enough for the boorish warmongers of Milan, maybe, but not for the dignified republicans of Florence. Giorgio Vasari summed up the view in the sixteenth century when writing a history of architectural style.

We come at last to another
sort of work called German, which both in ornament and in proportion is very different from the ancient and the modern. Nor is it adopted now by the best architects but is avoided by them as monstrous and barbarous, and lacking everything that can be called order. Nay, it should rather be called confusion and disorder. In their buildings, which are so numerous that they sickened the world … they made endless projections and breaks and corbelings and flourishes that throw their works all out of proportion. … This manner was the invention of the Goths. … May God protect every country from such ideas and style of buildings!

All of this raises an interesting question. Did the convoluted, elaborately geometrical plans of the cathedrals encode the symbolic ideals of their patrons, or did they simply represent ad hoc engineering solutions worked out by their builders? It’s a complex question with no easy answers—but there’s no doubt, at least, that many medieval Christian thinkers understood
cathedrals as an important way of prompting believers to contemplate the awe-inspiring design of the cosmos. Cathedrals were universes in stone, three-dimensional renditions of the diagrams and maps of the microcosm that had long appeared in religious texts.

The cathedrals made this idea manifest in all sorts of ways. Laid out on an east-west axis in the form of a cross, not unlike the town plans of the Roman surveyors, the cathedrals reached out to the four corners of the earth, bringing cosmography and geography together in the manner of the great medieval world maps. Their mountainous exteriors summoned up images of the natural world, re-creating the terrible splendors that Europe’s pilgrims and crusaders were beginning to experience in the Alps as they made their way to and from the Holy Land: the forbidding summits, the jumble of steeply rising slopes, the sheer cliffs, the precarious overhangs, the precipitous drops, the shadowy crevasses. Inside the cathedrals, too, the natural world came to life: the tops of columns sprouted leaves and faces; strange races of monsters lurked in the building’s dark recesses; and haunting all things great and small, as it did in cosmic diagrams and world maps, was the ghost of the human figure itself.

Cruciform churches had long evoked the idea of the human body, in the form of Christ on the cross. The tradition was still alive and well in the thirteenth century. European cathedrals took this to the next level, offering visitors an almost anatomical view of the church as a microcosmic body. A prominently visible spine extended along its full length, framed by a skeleton of ribs and joints that themselves were covered over with a skin of stone and glass. The bishop of Mende, William Durandus, formerly the dean of the canons at Chartres, summed up the
basic idea near the end of the century.
“In the articulation
of its parts,” he explained, “the arrangement of the material church resembles that of the human body: the chancel, where the altar is placed, represents the head; the transepts, to the left and right, the hands and arms; and the other part, which lies westward, the rest of the body.”