Da Vinci's Ghost (27 page)

One little-discussed theory is worth pausing over, however: the idea that Leonardo drew his picture as part of a treatise on human movement. In
On Divine Perspective
(1498),
Luca Pacioli mentioned
just such a work and described it as already finished. Although the treatise has long been lost (if indeed it ever existed), many scholars believe that a manuscript known as the
Codex Huygens
contains copies of a number of its drawings—and what’s striking about some of them is the eerie resemblance they bear to Vitruvian Man. This suggests a tantalizing idea: that Vitruvian Man, whose body is indeed as much a study of animation as it is of proportion, is the last surviving member of what was originally a whole tribe of restless Vitruvian Men (
Figure 49
).

There’s a final possibility worth mentioning: that Leonardo drew Vitruvian Man as a self-portrait. Not a literal self-portrait, of course—the picture hews far too closely to an idealized set of proportions for that. But the man in the picture does seem to be about the right age (Leonardo would have been thirty-eight in 1490); he does correspond in appearance to descriptions of Leonardo by his contemporaries (“very attractive, well proportioned, graceful, and good-looking … beautiful curling hair, carefully styled”); he does bear some likeness to the possible
portraits of him that survive (the Verrocchio statue of David, the Bramante portrait of Heraclitus); and his face, drawn with far more care and apparent emotion than the rest of his body, looks for all the world like the face of a man studying himself intently in a mirror. Think of the picture as an act of speculation, a kind of metaphysical self-portrait in which Leonardo—as an artist, a natural philosopher, and a stand-in for all of humanity—peers at himself with furrowed brow and tries to grasp the secrets of his own nature. This would be consistent with advice he offered other artists: namely, that in striving to capture the human ideal, they start by studying how they themselves measure up.
“Measure on yourself
the proportion of the parts of your body,” he wrote, “and if you find any part in discord with the others make a note of it, and be careful not to use it in the figures composed by you. Remember this, because it is a common vice of painters to delight in making things similar to themselves.”

Figure 49.
Possible copy of a now-lost study of human motion by Leonardo, from the
Codex Huygens
(c. 1560).

That sounds a lot like somebody speaking from personal experience. Maybe, at some level, Leonardo just couldn’t
help
drawing himself. At least one person who knew him in Milan believed precisely that to be the case: the court poet Gaspare Visconti. In a few tart lines of verse written at the end of the 1490s, Visconti accused Leonardo of indulging in the very vice that he had urged his own disciples to avoid.
“There is one nowadays
,” he wrote, “who has so fixed in his conception the image of himself that when he wishes to paint someone else, he often paints not the subject but himself.”

It’s hard to read those lines without thinking of Vitruvian Man. Maybe, while lodging at Il Saracino in Pavia, Leonardo started out by imagining that he would draw the figure as Francesco di Giorgio had—as a dreamy embodiment of a classical idea. Maybe, back in Milan, he imagined that he would draw it as Giacomo Andrea had—as an allusion to Christ on the cross. Maybe he came to the idea even earlier, imagining it as an analogue to Alberti’s geography of the human ideal, to Taccola’s man in a circle and a square, or to any number of medieval visions of the microcosm. Maybe, true to form, he imagined it as all those things and more: as a study of human proportions; as an overview of the human anatomy; as an exploration of an
architectural idea; as an illustration of an ancient text, updated for modern times; as a vision of empire; as cosmography of the lesser world; as a celebration of the power of art; as a metaphysical proposition. His genius, in the end, was to bring all of these things together in a kind of universal self-portrait.

“He who understands himself understands much,” Taccola wrote under his man in a circle and a square. That’s surely the spirit, at once individual and all-encompassing, in which Leonardo summoned up the ghost of Vitruvian Man. Animated by the ancient philosophical injunction “Know thyself,” containing worlds both great and small, and ceaselessly reconfiguring himself in the act of self-study, the figure captures a hinge moment in the history of ideas: the intoxicating, ephemeral moment when art, science, and philosophy all seemed to be merging, and when it seemed possible that, with their help, the individual human mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of … everything.

A
RE YOU READY?”

Upstairs at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice, Dr. Annalisa Perissa Torrini looked over at me as I finished tugging on my tattered white cotton gloves. We were standing at the display table, about to open the folder containing Vitruvian Man. A few others working in the area had quietly gathered round, eager for a viewing themselves.

Nobody knows what Leonardo did with the picture after he drew it. He never had it printed; he made no sketches or mention of it in his notebooks; and not a single allusion to it has ever turned up in the writings of his contemporaries. Illustrated editions of Vitruvius did begin to appear in the early decades of the sixteenth century, including one published during Leonardo’s lifetime, but the relatively crude renderings of Vitruvian Man they contained clearly did not derive from his model. Only one direct reference to the picture survives from the whole of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
a cursory description
recorded in passing in 1590 by an obscure Milanese theorist of art.
The first copy
didn’t appear in print until 1784.

All of which brings a certain irony to the fore. Today Vitruvian Man has become one of the best known and most frequently reproduced images in the world. But in Leonardo’s time, and indeed for centuries afterward, the drawing remained almost entirely unseen and unknown.

What little is known about its early history is this. When Leonardo died, in 1519, he bequeathed all of his notebooks and drawings, Vitruvian Man presumably among them, to his favorite pupil and assistant, the Milanese painter Francesco Melzi. Throughout his life, Melzi guarded the works as treasures and showed them off to visitors with great pride, but after his death, in 1570, his heirs allowed the collection to disperse. What happened to the drawing in the two centuries that followed is anybody’s guess, but it seems to have stayed in Milan. That, at least, is where it finally reappeared in 1770, bound by a certain Venanzio de Pagave into a private folio of drawings by Leonardo, which Pagave recorded as having received as gifts from the archbishop of Milan. The folio then soon passed into the possession of the Milanese art historian Giuseppe Bossi, a lifelong champion of Leonardo who, in 1810, published one of the earliest known copies of Vitruvian Man, along with the first accurate transcription of the accompanying text. After Bossi died, in 1815, the folio was acquired, and eventually disassembled, by a Venetian museum eager to expand its holdings: the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

Yet even then the picture remained almost completely out of view for more than another century. Only in 1956 did it
at last begin to attract widespread public attention, when the famous British art historian Kenneth Clark reproduced it in a landmark work titled
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
. The work became a best seller, and for Vitruvian Man the results couldn’t have been more dramatic. Released into the ecosystem of popular culture, the picture began reproducing rampantly, in forms both serious and lighthearted, and has been doing so ever since (
Figures 50
,
51
, and
52
).

* * *

Figures 50, 51, and 52.
Vitruvian Man in the modern world.
Preceding page, top left:
The Skylab II logo;
top right:
The back of the Italian one-euro coin.
Above:
Parody images.

* * *

C
ELEBRITIES, THEY SAY
, always seem smaller when you meet them in person. That wasn’t my experience with Vitruvian Man. When Dr. Perissa Torrini finally laid the drawing out on the table, I found it larger than I’d expected, no doubt because reproductions so often shrink it down. Not only that, as I peered in close at the original I found myself arrested, as I never quite had been before, by the fixity of the figure’s gaze. He looks straight ahead with eerie intensity, as if studying his own reflection. He’s a vision of the human ideal, pinned forever in place like a butterfly to a museum wall, yet he’s also a study in perpetual motion. He pushes one leg out to the side and pulls it back, then does the same with the other; he raises one arm and lowers it, then does the same with the other. Playing with the possibilities, trying to understand himself, he shape-shifts though a series of sixteen poses in all.

We spent close to an hour with the picture that morning, studying it from all sides, reviewing its history, peering at tiny
details, discussing how and why it might have been drawn, holding it up to the light to see the pinpricks made by Leonardo’s compass dividers. What struck me immediately about it was the quiet confidence of its line. Leonardo had drawn the figure with remarkable delicacy, but at the same time, digging grooves into the paper with his pen, he’d practically etched it. Especially the hands and fingers, the feet and toes, and the outlines of the body: Leonardo had carved their contours right out of the page (
Figure 53
).