Da Vinci's Ghost (21 page)

Figure 35.
A public dissection, from the 1495 edition of Johannes Ketham’s
Fasciculus medicinae.

Much of this was mind-numbingly dull. One can imagine the scene as Leonardo witnessed it. A lecturer decked out in full scholarly regalia stands on the podium. Below him, in front of a sizable audience, a barber-surgeon stands at center stage, knife at the ready above a partially opened corpse.
“Having observed the guts
,” the professor declares, reading directly from the
Anatomy
, “you should proceed to the next organ—I mean, the stomach. Note carefully the place or site thereof.” He looks up for a brief moment, nods at the barber-surgeon to resume slicing, and then picks up where he left off. “Now, the stomach is the cell of the food, as Galen says in his
De juvamentis stomachi
, Part 5,
Chapter 2
, where everything that is to be said of the stomach is contained, and where there is a discussion of the gut—and Haly Abbas also, in his
Dispositio regalis
, in the part
Theorice
, Section 3, Chapter 20.” On and on he drones, to Leonardo’s growing dismay. “The place of the stomach is in the middle of the body, between upper and lower, between right and left, and between anterior and posterior. Here you may wonder why the stomach is not nearer the mouth. The reason I declare to be twofold …”

What would have bothered Leonardo even more than the style of these lectures was their substance. That’s not to say he didn’t learn from them. He most certainly did. But the more he learned, the more he realized that much of what was being peddled as established fact by the medical scholars of his day was just plain wrong. High up on their podiums with their heads buried in their texts, at a literal remove from their subject, they were blind to the obvious. Just because Aristotle had
claimed that women had fewer teeth than men, or that the life span of animals was proportional to the number of their teeth, did that make those statements true? Was it really the case that men had one fewer rib than women (because God had used one of Adam’s to create Eve)? Of course not. Yet despite readily available evidence to the contrary, often laid out on a table right in front of their eyes, the authorities continued to recite untruths that had been repeated mindlessly for centuries. Not only that, they repeated a panoply of subtler errors rooted in one basic problem: that many ancient teachings about the human anatomy derived from the dissection not of people but of animals.

Mundinus was as guilty as anybody in that regard.
“You see,”
he continued in his description of the stomach, “to the right it has the liver, by the five lobes of which it is clasped, as by a hand with five fingers.” That sounds authoritative, but in fact nobody attending a public dissection would have been able to see anything of the sort, for one simple reason: dogs, not people, have a five-lobed liver. Anticipating puzzled looks from members of his audience when the barber-surgeon held the liver up for all to examine, Mundinus covered himself. “
In man
,” he explained, “these lobes are not always distinct.”

That scholars would so blindly cling to such verifiably mistaken ideas disturbed Leonardo greatly—never more so than when, in the late 1480s, he began to ponder the nature of the eye. Scholars of his day subscribed to an ancient theory, elaborated on at great length by medieval Arab writers, in which the eye sent out particle emanations—the “visual spirit,” as Mundinus and other medieval authorities called it. These emanations traveled outward until they collided with the various
objects in one’s field of vision, the result of which was sight. But simple common sense made Leonardo wary of this idea.
If you opened your eyes outside
, he noted, you would see an object at arm’s length at exactly the same time you would see the sun. Everything in one’s field of vision appeared instantaneously, in other words. This simply couldn’t be possible if the visual spirit existed: traveling outward from the eye, its emanations would naturally reach nearby objects before they reached a distant object like the sun. Ergo, the so-called experts had to be wrong.
“Down to my own time
,” Leonardo wrote in 1490, “the eye, whose function we so certainly know by experience, has been defined by an infinite number of authors as one thing. But I find, by experience, that it is another.”

This undermined everything. If one couldn’t always trust what the medical authorities and the natural philosophers had written about the little things, which were easy to observe and define, how much faith could one put in what they had written about the big things, which were not so easy to pin down—the meaning of life, say, or the nature of the soul?

L
EARN BY EXPERIENCE
:
this became Leonardo’s mantra in the late 1480s. He observed natural phenomena, conducted experiments in physics, mixed pigments and varnishes, dissected animals, analyzed construction techniques, built models—and, above all, never stopped asking questions.

It was at this exact point in his career that Leonardo recorded that memorably eclectic list of things he wanted to find out: how the men in Flanders propel themselves on ice, how mortars are positioned on bastions, how to square
a triangle, how to think about proportion like a physician, how to repair locks and canals in the Lombard manner, how to build a crossbow. But in that list he also noted his interest in finding two scientific treatises—dense works in scholarly Latin, written by great medieval authorities of centuries past. The preening manner and the rote approach to learning of the scholastics may have struck him as vacuous, but his interest in those texts makes clear that he realized that he nevertheless had much to learn from the world of letters. Which is why, in the late 1480s, adding to the already dizzying range of his activities, he dedicated himself to a voracious program of literary self-education.

Today, in the popular imagination, Leonardo represents the archetypal Renaissance man: a visionary figure with almost magical powers of invention who possessed unlimited abilities and knowledge. But his early notebooks reveal a different picture. Alongside the masterful drawings, the ingenious inventions, and the flights of visual and intellectual fancy, one finds evidence of something much more mundane: a man hard at work trying to teach himself the basics of medieval learning. Anatomy, architecture, astrology, botany, cosmography, geography, geology, geometry, mathematics, medicine, military arts, natural philosophy, optics, perspective, surgery, even veterinary medicine: Leonardo wanted to learn about them all, as a backdrop to his own empirical study of the world. And in order to do any of
that
, he had to begin with something even more basic. The great master—in the prime of his life, having already produced some of the world’s greatest paintings and drawings, and having launched himself into scientific investigations centuries ahead of their time—had to sit down at his
desk and struggle humbly, like a schoolboy, with the age-old ritual of
amo, amas, amat
. He had to teach himself Latin.

He had no choice. In fifteenth-century Europe, as had been the case for centuries, Latin was the official language of learning. In the late 1200s and 1300s Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had begun to make the Italian vernacular a respectable language for literature, and as the 1400s progressed Alberti and a few other Italian humanists had begun to write didactic treatises in Italian. But still, if you wanted to familiarize yourself with the learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the teachings of the Church Fathers, the science of the Arabs, or the scholarly and theological works of any number of medieval authorities, you simply had to know Latin.

Hobbled as he was by a lack of formal schooling, Leonardo would never master Latin or even develop much comfort with the language. But he did manage to teach himself enough to get by—and that made a world of difference. Gradually, instead of having to rely on what friends and experts could tell him about the various subjects he was interested in, he began to seek out and read books about them on his own.

He had plenty of places to turn. Never before had so many books been available to so many people. Printing had been invented in Germany not long before he was born, and during his lifetime had spread to cities across Europe. Starting in the 1470s, all sorts of classical, medieval, and modern texts suddenly appeared for sale in Italy in inexpensive printed editions: works previously only available in precious manuscript editions reserved for special use by monks and scholars, and often kept chained to the shelves of monastery collections and private libraries.

Leonardo therefore came of age as part of the first generation of Europeans to have access to cheap, portable, and widely available books—and when he began to pursue his program of self-education he made the most of what was now on offer to him. By 1490 or so,
he owned at least 45 books
, already an impressive number for the time. A decade later,
he owned at least 116
.

The range of both collections, as Leonardo itemized them in his notebooks, was extensive. He owned not only encyclopedic compendia and scientific treatises, as is to be expected, but also all sorts of less predictable texts: works of classical literature, treatises on religion, guides to grammar and rhetoric, collections of sonnets, saucy romances, joke books, and more. He read for both edification and pleasure.

But printing was still in its infancy when he began actively seeking out books. There were plenty of important works that he couldn’t find in printed form or couldn’t afford to buy. For access to those works, which existed only in manuscript form, he had to turn to other sources: friends, friends of friends, local monks, university scholars, visitors to the court, ducal librarians. One 1489 note about finding two scientific treatises provides a glimpse of how he worked. “Get the Brera friar to show you
De ponderibus
,” he wrote, referring to a medieval work on mechanics owned by a monastery in central Milan. A few lines later he mentioned the other text, a work on optics by a thirteenth-century writer known today as Witelo, and the place he hoped to find it.
“Try to get Vitolone
,” he wrote using an alternate spelling of the author’s name, “which is in the library at Pavia.”

* * *

P
AVIA
.

Home to one of the great universities in northern Italy, the town lay only a short ride south of Milan, across the Lombard Plain. The thought of everything Leonardo could learn there, from its resident scholars and its books, tugged powerfully at his imagination. In the summer of 1490 he would travel there as an architectural consultant in the company of Francesco di Giorgio Martini. But his notebooks suggest that this wasn’t his first visit. By 1489, at least, he had already befriended Fazio Cardano, a leading doctor and lawyer in the town, and had made more than one reference in his notes to the holdings of its famous library.

By all accounts that library, now dispersed, was a wonder to behold. Founded in the fourteenth century by the Visconti family, which had ruled Milan until the arrival of the Sforzas, it had become one of the largest and most famous manuscript libraries in all of Italy, a rival of the best collections in Rome and Florence. Scholars came from far and wide to peruse its holdings—and they weren’t disappointed. Upon seeing the library’s great hall for the first time, one young scholar is said to have fallen on his knees with amazement at the sight of hundreds of priceless manuscripts laid out on shelf after shelf before him, many of them originally part of the great collection amassed by Petrarch. Often copied on the finest parchment, illuminated with gold leaf, and covered with dyed velvet or damask, the manuscripts were secured to their shelves with chains of silver. Even veteran bibliophiles couldn’t help admitting to feelings of astonishment.
One high-ranking official
from the court of Rome declared himself happier
while visiting the library than while visiting the holy sites of Jerusalem.

Whenever it was that Leonardo first entered the library, he must have felt a similar thrill.
Here, under one roof
, was virtually the entire known range of Western thought. The works from antiquity alone were enough to keep a scholar busy for a lifetime: dialogues by Plato; texts on natural philosophy by Aristotle; political essays by Cicero; poetry by Virgil and Ovid; Pliny the Elder’s massive
Natural History
; Ptolemy’s treatises on astronomy and geography; Euclid’s
Elements of Geometry
; writings on anatomy and medicine by Galen; Roman land-surveying manuals; and, miscatalogued under the name “Virturbius de architretis,” the
Ten Books
of Vitruvius.

But that was just the start. As he wandered around the library’s great hall, Leonardo would have realized with mounting excitement that he also had at his disposal many of the seminal works of medieval learning and literature. The roster of names alone would have made his eyes pop open. Augustine and Aquinas. Dante and Petrarch. Mundinus and other medical authorities. The encyclopedists Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede, and Albert the Great. The mystical theologians Honorius, Hugh of St. Victor, William of Conches, and Alan of Lille. The astronomer Sacrobosco, the mathematician Witelo, and a number of Arab scholars, among them Averroes, Albumasar, and Alcabitius (as they were known in Latin). Contemporary authors were well represented, too, among them Alberti and Filarete.

In much of what he read in Pavia and elsewhere, Leonardo encountered a common organizing principle: the human analogy. This was a connection he can’t have missed, given his interests
in the 1480s. It was everywhere. The Greeks had likened the human body to the cosmos, and the Romans had elaborated on the idea. Vitruvius had made the human body synonymous with harmonious design, geometrical perfection, and the Augustan body of empire. In the Middle Ages, inspired in part by Vitruvius, Christian thinkers had joined the fray. Isidore and Bede had called the human body a microcosm. In the centuries that followed, writers in Europe and the Islamic world alike had run with the idea, specifying the human body’s relationship to both Heaven and Earth—and developing elaborate scientific, medical, and philosophical models based on those connections. Later still, as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, a variety of humanists, philosophers, artists, and architects adapted the idea for their own purposes.