Extract - Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered

l e onardo d a vi n ci ,

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recuperating leonardo’s legacy He was so unique and universal, that it could be said he was a miracle of nature.

Fu tanto raro et uniuersale, che dalla natura per suo miracolo essere produtto dire si puote.

Anonymous Florentine author, Codice Magliabechiano, ca. 1540.

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ew artists have captivated the imagination of the general public as widely as has Leonardo. The photographs of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States, and First Lady Jacqueline B. Kennedy posing with the Monna Lisa in 1963, when, in an unprecedented act of diplomacy, Leonardo’s painting traveled across the Atlantic for a solo exhibition in Washington and New York,1 illustrate the power of Leonardo’s legend and of this painting in particular (pls. 1.1, 1.2). But the appreciation of Leonardo and the Monna Lisa was not continuous throughout history, and was not unanimous even within the half century following the great master’s death. His biographer Giorgio Vasari, never having seen the original picture,

f a c i n g p age Detail of pl. 1.12: Leonardo, presumed self-portrait.

Red chalk, on discolored off-white paper with severe foxing. Turin, Biblioteca Reale Dis. Ital. I/30, 15571 DC.

which was already in the French royal collection (since 1518, or thereabouts) at the Château de Fontainebleau, praised it in 1568: “and it can truly be said that this [portrait] was painted in such a manner as to make every good artist, whoever he may be, tremble and lose heart” (“e nel vero si può dire che questa fussi dipinta d’una maniera da far tremare e temere ogni gagliardo artefice, e sia qual si vuole”; pl. 1.4).2 After having seen it in person in 1573–74, during his trip to France,3 Federico Zuccaro condemned it as “dry and lacking in good taste, it is to be avoided” (“secha e di poco gusto e da fugirla”).4 Leonardo was famous mainly as an artist, until the late seventeenth century.

For nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians, in particular, Leonardo became the paradigm of the Renaissance polymath, ahead of his time (“he was a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were asleep,” noted Sigmund Freud, quoting Dmitri Merejkowski5). He was the elusive artist, who produced beautiful, mythical paintings;

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the theorist, scientist, and inventor whose mind often defied convention. Much of Leonardo’s work speaks across the centuries with a timeless, astonishingly modern voice. How can one look at his towering legacy with a fresh and historically accurate eye?

The Monna Lisa offers an authentic document of his process of design, almost untarnished by the popular imagination, in the underdrawing and underlying layers of modeling revealed by means of a sophisticated protocol of imaging with infrared reflectography combined with other techniques. The major findings during non-invasive scientific examinations of the picture by the C2RMF (Paris) were published in 2006 and 2014 (see pls. 7.17, 7.18).6 In exposing a painting to electromagnetic waves in the infrared band of the spectrum, which are slightly longer than those of visible light, some waves can penetrate through the upper surface, while others are absorbed and reflected off the underlying layers. The initial stages of a composition, particularly if containing traces of carbon in the design, can be detected with the aid of special infrared-sensitive cameras, permitting one to see differences in the absorption of infrared light by the underlying layers, as if some pigments were transparent.7 The underdrawing in the Monna Lisa (see pl. 7.17) especially suggests the quality of “work in progress” in the design of the painting.

The earliest outlines on the surface of the primed poplar wood panel depict the slender overall proportions of the underdrawn figure (especially in the arms), beneath the voluminous draperies, much closer to a late fifteenth-century, Florentine ideal. It is the raw state of primary evidence, of creative acts on paper or below the picture surface, that can often provide the ground for historical reassessments.

As most specialists would agree, Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts shed daylight upon his work. But more general authors of elegantly written studies of the critical reception and historiography of Leonardo’s career have all too frequently failed 1.1 (ri g h t, top ) Opening ceremony for the exhibition of Leonardo’s Monna Lisa at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., on 8 January 1963, on loan from the Musée du Louvre, Paris. From left to right are President John F. Kennedy, Mme. André Malraux, André Malraux (French Minister of Cultural Affairs), First Lady Jacqueline B. Kennedy, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives.

1.2 (ri g h t, bottom ) The exhibition of Leonardo’s Monna Lisa in the great Medieval Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in February 1963, on loan from the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The display opened on Monday, 4 February 1963.

r e c u p e rat i n g l e o na r d o ’s l e g ac y to capitalize on the rich evidence of his vast corpus of drawings and notes in such investigations.8 The basic framework of this four-volume book is biographical. It is the kind of larger reconstruction that seeks to render an integrated portrait of Leonardo’s life, personality, and career, that keeps pace with the development of his thought, close-up and step-by-step. My aim has been to achieve a greater immediacy than has been previously attempted, without sacrificing historical authenticity. In choosing a biographical structure, I have particularly emphasized process – the “becoming” of Leonardo – searching to capture his work as an artist and thinker in the unfolding of his career, and noting in some detail his gradual self-making as an author. Another revelatory, at times fascinating dimension of his biography is the dramatis personae – the patrons, intermediaries, family members, friends, pupils, assistants, intellectual and artistic collaborators. As will be seen throughout this narrative, a surprising number of connections have emerged in this respect (and no doubt will continue to emerge), since, with some archival digging, it has become clear that certain figures entered the stage of Leonardo’s activity much before the time in which they became professionally relevant for him in a significant way. In these and other respects, asking different questions about the evidence and the wider exploration of methods of analysis can and should open the door for future rediscoveries.

I begin this reassessment of Leonardo’s life, work, and legacy by focusing sustained attention on what must be the most precious body of evidence that could be mined by the historian, but potentially also the most severely misunderstood – his drawings and manuscripts. A sensitive, contextualized analysis of the artist’s drawings and manuscripts requires a fair amount of historical, documentary, and archaeological reconstruction. This chapter is largely dedicated to this complex but necessary level of excavation. Were Leonardo’s production on paper not to exist, posterity would simply not know of his multifaceted genius and the totality of his career and vision. His legacy on paper also offers the surprising glimpses that manage to humanize his genius, while revealing the arresting and undeniable distance that separates him from his contemporaries and the modern viewer.

His legacy on paper enables one to assess Leonardo as a figure of his time – fully aware of contemporary art and thought, while constantly reworking his sources – as well as a figure who justly transcends his time.

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The Largest Extant Oeuvre on Paper by an Early Artist Leonardo’s production on paper constitutes an absolutely staggering legacy. Nearly 4,100 sheets with drawings, fragments, and manuscript notes (usually accompanied by sketches) by him have survived.9 Of this material, a disproportionately large number of sheets date from the last two decades of his life. While this is not in itself unexpected, since late drawings by Renaissance artists tend to be more abundantly preserved than early work, there is an additional explanation: he was fortunate to find a diligent curator of his legacy in his devoted, unfathomably patient pupil and artistic heir, Giovan Francesco Melzi (1491/93–ca. 1570), also the transcriber of his manuscripts, who entered the master’s life and household late on, around 1506–8.10 Melzi is the unsung hero in the story of the preservation of Leonardo’s work. Even though what has survived must represent only a fraction of Leonardo’s total output, the quantity remains vast.11 As a point of comparison, the extant oeuvre of drawings by such a highly prolific sixteenth-century Italian draftsman as Parmigianino (1503–1540), who, like Leonardo, was a notoriously dilatory painter, adds up to no more than 1,000 sheets.12 Or, one may invoke the contrasting example of Michelangelo (1475–1564), who was Leonardo’s great artistic rival around 1503–8,13 and to whom a little more than 600 extant sheets of drawings have been attributed by some scholars.14 Fifteenth-century artists have left considerably fewer drawings. The total corpus by the most prodigious fifteenth-century draftsmen, Pisanello (?1395–1455) and Filippino Lippi (1457/58–1504), approaches at most 200 to 300 sheets apiece.15 Leonardo’s draftsmanship provides especially revealing testimony of his activity, since all too frequently drawings constitute the sole proof, or the major evidence, of his work on a given project, and in many cases they provide the sole documented proof of his work. Precisely this point about the transcendent value of Leonardo’s drawings was made in Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Idea del tempio della pittura (Milan, 1590). Noting the lamentable loss of Leonardo’s murals, Lomazzo observed: “only the drawings remain, and these certainly neither time, nor death, nor any other accident can ever vanquish [sarà mai per vincere, one of many puns on Leonardo’s name], but will survive to his great praise and glory into eternity.”16 In his commentary of 1759–60 to the 1568 edition of Vasari’s Vite, Giovanni Bottari exclaimed that, if Leonardo’s drawings alone remained, he would nevertheless be greatly esteemed, as he deserved – that was how marvelously excellent they were (“se di Lionardo

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non rimanessero altro, che i disegni, tuttavia si sarebbe di lui quella grande stima, che egli merita, tanto sono maravigliosamente eccellenti”).17 The historical value of Leonardo’s drawings was recognized also by Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794–1868), the director of the Königliche Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, who traveled through England visiting collections of works of art first in 1835, and again in 1850. After examining the stupendous holdings of Leonardo’s drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, he wrote: “My chief attention was directed to Leonardo da Vinci, who, from the very small number of pictures, leaves us, more than any of the great Italian masters, to arrive in some measure at a satisfactory knowledge of his genius by means of his drawings.”18 Waagen, who stood at the threshold of modern connoisseurship at a time when Leonardo’s drawings were not yet understood in a complete, philological sense, got it entirely right.

The actual corpus of extant paintings by Leonardo is extremely small: if one were to count generously, a little more than twenty pictures might be accepted today as autograph, including those that are only partly by him and those of somewhat disputed attribution.19 Scarcely more than a handful of paintings produced by him after 1500 survive, and that is, again, to count generously.20 Leonardo’s two mural paintings, the Last Supper (ca. 1493/94–98; pls. 1.3, 4.84) and the unfinished Sala delle Asse (ca. 1497–98, executed with heavy intervention of the workshop), are greatly damaged and exhibit restoration, thus representing a truncated semblance of his original intentions.21 On 20–30 December 1517 Antonio de Beatis visited the Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

He noted that it had begun to deteriorate: “I do not know if it is because of the humidity produced by the wall or because of other negligence” (“incomincia ad guastarse non so si per la humidità che rende il muro o per altra [in]advertentia”).22 This was barely nineteen years after Leonardo had finished the mural, for the damage may have started soon after 1515.23 By the time Leonardo’s Cenacolo was mentioned in Giovanni Battista Armenini’s De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1586 and 1587), it was “half damaged.”24 The Last Supper mural (much restored since25) had been commissioned by the Dominican friars of the Grazie with the patronage of Ludovico Sforza “Il Moro” around 1493/94. Leonardo, with assistants, executed the incomplete and now-ruined Sala delle Asse (pl. 4.145), situated in the northeast tower of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, for Ludovico, and a document of 21 April 1498 mentions this project.26 Sixteenth-century biographies of Leonardo often refer to him in the same breath as “painter and sculptor” (“pittore et

scultore”).27 One early text, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Milan, 1584) mentions Leonardo’s activity as “filosofo” and “architetto” before that of “pittore e scultore.”28 The same author’s later treatise, the Idea del tempio della pittura of 1590, called Leonardo “pittore, statuario e plasticatore” (painter, sculptor, and modeler in clay and wax).29 Leonardo may have been influential for Renaissance sculptors and architects, especially through the visual grandeur of his preparatory drawings, but his ambitious projects for sculptures,30 buildings, and urban redesigns31 were not realized in any final form. He was essentially a “paper architect.” In his temperament, he never managed to fit within the practical traditions of art production and the socioeconomic structures of the Italian Renaissance, and he disappointed a good number of his patrons by leaving projects unfinished, or by never even commencing them. In his little-known commentary to Vasari’s 1568 edition of Leonardo’s Vita, the unsympathetic Federico Zuccaro (1541– 1609) – one of the most expeditious painters of his generation – railed against Leonardo’s inability to finish anything (“per non dar fine mai a cosa alcuna”), including the Monna Lisa.32 The relationships between artists and clients were by tradition carefully defined, often in legal terms, especially in the case of significant commissions.33 Yet, in at least two major instances, the Virgin of the Rocks and the Battle of Anghiari, the body of extant documents illustrates vividly just how egregiously Leonardo broke his contractual obligations.34

Leonardo’s Drawings, Manuscripts, and Art Theory In a profound sense, the vast corpus of sheets by Leonardo with drawings and manuscript notes constitutes the foundation on which an understanding of his work and genius rests. This corpus tells an exciting story of his achievements. His drawings and manuscripts both afford an intimate glimpse over the artist’s shoulder and attest eloquently to his versatility as an engineer, anatomist, “natural philosopher,” theorist, and teacher. Yet to render a sufficiently nuanced portrait of Leonardo, it is necessary to envision the forest of his drawings and writings as an integrated, material whole, rather than to treat each work as an individual tree to be felled for discrete, fact-yielding, abstract fragments.35 A precisely historical, integrated method goes a long way in recovering the scope of Leonardo’s vision, the gradual development of his thought and graphic language. An analysis of the techniques and functions of his drawings in the context of the practices of his time illuminates the dimensions of his

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1.3 Leonardo, Last Supper, ca. 1493/94–98. Tempera grassa and oil on plaster, 460 × 880 cm (main composition). Milan, Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

draftsmanship and thought that were truly innovative, in contrast to those that were relatively conventional. His drawings often obscure this difference because they can totally seduce the viewer with their magical beauty.

He made a lasting contribution with his notes for his unfinished treatise on painting, or Libro di pittura, to refer to this body of work by Melzi’s given title in the rather faithful, final redaction of notes presented in the Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, which is itself extremely incomplete,36 but includes numerous important passages for the history of Renaissance drawing. The mainstream art-historical literature, for instance, has rarely allocated Leonardo the full credit he deserves for his innovative discourse and theoretical conception of disegno – in the dual meaning of drawing and design that the term in Italian encom-

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passes. Michelangelo has instead been most closely associated with this, following Vasari’s vastly influential biography of that great master published in 1568. In the proem to the third part of the Vite, the Terza parte, Vasari declared the supremacy of Michelangelo’s disegno in words that appear unchanged in both the 1550 and 1568 editions, and which would carry a lapidary weight for the rest of the sixteenth century: “He who bears the palm among the dead and the living, transcending and eclipsing all others, is the divine Michelagnolo Buonarroti” (“quello che fra i morti e’ vivi porta la palma, e trascende e ricuopre tutti, è il divino Michelagnolo Buonarroti”).37 Vasari’s introduction to the 1568 edition of Michelangelo’s Vita sums up the lessons revealed in the artist’s mastery of disegno. It distills these in terms of three elements that in the biographer’s mind unified Michelangelo’s command of the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture: “the perfection of design and drawing in the disposition of outlines, shadows, and highlights, which conveys a sense of relief to objects in painting;

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it leads to a correct judgment in the execution of sculpture, and renders houses comfortable and secure, healthy, cheerful, well-proportioned and rich with ornament in architecture” (“la perfezione dell’arte del disegno nel lineare, dintornare, ombrare e lumeggiare, per dare rilevo alle cose della pittura, e con retto giudizio operare nella scultura, e rendere abitazioni commode e sicure, sane, allegre, proporzionate e ricche di varii ornamenti nell’architettura.”38 Vasari’s introduction to the Vita of Leonardo is comparatively parsimonious (see below on this carefully constructed biography).39 Although it is Vasari’s critical vocabulary and model regarding the arts of disegno that have become ingrained in the literature on the Renaissance theory of art, Leonardo had much earlier described the component parts of disegno in the analogous terms of outlines (“lineamenti”), shading (“ombrare”), and highlighting (“lumeggiare”). Vasari’s general awareness of the contents of Leonardo’s unfinished treatise on painting can be discerned from a passage in the much-corrected 1568 edition of the master’s Vita. The biographer describes an unnamed painter who visited him in Rome, seeking his advice in getting Leonardo’s notes on painting published.40 Leonardo’s thoughts in lost writings of about 1492, not well known beyond modern specialists, are preserved in the Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, scribed by Melzi, of which a version of some kind was probably seen by Vasari (or by one of the Aretine’s learned editorial advisers). Leonardo’s recorded words may be translated paraphrastically: There are two principal parts into which painting is divided; that is the outlines, which surround the shapes of solid bodies and such outlines require drawing. The second part is what is called shading. But the concept of design and drawing is of such excellence that it not only investigates the works of nature, but [it] also [suggests] infinitely more than those [works] made by nature. Disegno requires the sculptor to render all the shadows with science, and teaches all the manual arts, even if they are infinite, a perfect purpose. On account of this, we should conclude that disegno is not only a science but a deity that should be duly accorded that title. This deity reflects all the visible works of almighty God. Due sono le parti principali nelle quali si divide la pittura, cioè lineamenti, che circondano le figure de’ corpi finti, li quali lineamenti si dimanda disegno. La seconda è detta ombra. Ma questo disegno è di tanta eccellenzia, che non solo ricerca l’opere di natura, ma infinite più che quelle che fa natura. Questo commanda allo scultore terminare con scienza li suoi simulacri, et a tutte l’arti manuali,

ancora che fussino infinite, insegna il loro perfetto fine. E per questo concluderemo non solamente esser scienzia, ma una deità essere con debito nome ricordata, la qual deità ripete tutte l’opere evidenti fatte dal sommo iddio.41 Though quite fragmented, Leonardo’s autograph notes in the Paris MS A, of about 1490–92, passionately argue for the intellectual dimension of painting as a profession, to establish it like poetry among the noble, liberal arts. One of these passages discusses the very issue of painting, disegno, and manual labor, with respect to the endeavor of the poet: You have placed painting among the mechanical arts. Certainly, if painters were capable of praising their own words in writing as you do, I doubt that they would be attributed such a vile surname. If you call it mechanical because it is manual labor, because the hands depict what they find in the fantasia [creative imagination], you writers are designing manually with the pen what is found in your mind. And if you say it is mechanical, because it is done for a price, who falls more than you into this error, if one can call it an error?

If you read for universities, do you not go to the one that rewards you the most? voi auete messa la pittura i[n]fra / larte mechaniche cierto . se i pittori fussino atti alaldare collo scriue/re lop[er]e loro come voi io dubito no[n] djacierebbe i[n] si uile cognome se uoi la ciamate mechanica p[er]che [o]p[er]a manvale chelle manj figu/rano quel che truovano nella fa[n]tasia voi scrittori djsegna[n]do cola / pena manvalme[n]te quelo nelo i[n]giegnjo v[o]stro si truova esse voj / djciessi essere mechanicha p[er]che si fa a prezo chi chade i[n] questo erore / se erore si po chiamare piv dj voi se voi legiete p[er] li studj no[n] a[n]date voi / a chi piv vi premja[?]42 Leonardo’s vigorous efforts in writing and rewriting his notes for the Libro di pittura date from various points between 1490–92 and 1515–16, and the details of this chronology,43 as well as the overall character of work in progress of the treatise, are crucial elements in understanding the maturation of his theories on painting. Ultimately, the conception of the Libro di pittura remained that of an “open” text, never finite or finished, in 1.4 Cristoforo Coriolano (Cristoforo Lederer of Nuremberg), after Giorgio Vasari, portrait of Leonardo. Illustration published in Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari . . . , edition of 1568, Florence: Giunti Family. Woodcut, 24 × 16 cm (full sheet). Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art Library N6922.V2 1568 (Gift of E. J. Rousuck).

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relatively continuous evolution during the course of the artist’s lifetime.44 The thoughts on the ambitious variety of subjects he hoped to address in this treatise accrued on the pages of his notebooks over time, as he pursued his work on a multitude of other endeavors. This is among the reasons why the great master’s vocabulary often does not seem unified in Melzi’s edited Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270. Much of the material intended for the Libro di pittura will be discussed here in the relevant chapters, according to a rough chronology.

Drawing as Language in Leonardo’s Work of “Non-artistic” Intent Particularly in his mature years, Leonardo’s way of drawing culminated in a visual language of unprecedented syntactical clarity and mimetic representation. But in the vastness and diversity of type, his corpus of drawings and manuscript notes not directly associated with “artistic” projects (that is, painting and sculpture) also pose numerous problems of interpretation.

Without doubt, significant underlying unities of method existed in Leonardo’s thought and use of drawing as a language for artistic and scientific-technological expression, as has been eloquently argued.45 As I shall attempt to demonstrate in this book, however, this unity and elegance of thought were the result of rigor and a hard-won process of self-education and maturation over the course of decades. The overall sense of his remarkable development has been quite obscured by the predominant scholarly models of discussing Leonardo’s oeuvre as a draftsman and author of manuscripts in a thematized way (anatomy, horses, plants, machines, and perspective, for example, are discussed as separate themes), or in styles of narration that move back and forth anachronistically within his nearly fifty-year professional career. Much is clarified about the innovations of his thought and work as one pursues the exercise of an integrated chronology of his career as artist and “non-artist,” as far as is possible, and compares his production within the larger heritage of Renaissance culture and systems of knowledge. It is demonstrable that throughout his career he developed his vocabularies of form in various endeavors as responses to traditions of visual representation by his predecessors and contemporaries.

The unity and universality of vision on which Leonardo insisted (“tu, pittore per essere universale e piacere a’ diversi giudici. . .”46) are most manifest in his maturity, in his theoretical writings of around 1507–8 onward.47 At given moments

in his career, his conceptualization of subjects and the development of pictorial devices in his related drawings often cut across fields of discipline. For example, during the 1490s, as is evident in his studies of the transmitted motion in machines in the Codex Madrid I (a volume, in quarto size, from around 1493–99, with elegantly coherent, relatively finished notes on statics and mechanics48), Leonardo formulated a refined visual vocabulary for the portrayal of some mechanisms. The techniques of an expository view of mechanical forms often inform some of the graphic conventions in his early anatomical illustrations. A concrete touchstone in dating his earliest anatomical drawings is provided by the inscription, “a dj 2 daprile 1489” (on the 2nd day of April 1489), on one of his sheets with skull studies (Windsor, RL 19059r; pl. 6.124).49 Some years later, he theorized: “Il moto e chavsa dognj vita” (motion is the cause of all life). Leonardo added this aphorism in red chalk below his rudimentary, partly canceled exercises in Latin verb conjugations, written in pen and ink (Paris MS H3, fol. 2v = MS H, fol. 141r).50 It is a received Aristotelian notion, probably emanating from a contemporary text in a vernacular translation (see Chapters 5 and 6). The deliberately aestheticized calligraphy with which he wrote down this maxim, to remember it, using a scribal initial “I” and ornate loops for the “g” and “v,” indicates the importance of this intellectual content for Leonardo. This part of the tiny pocket-size Paris MS H notebook, in sedicesimo format, is also dated by him “1493” and “1494.” It coincides with the early phase of work on the Last Supper mural at Santa Maria delle Grazie.51

Anatomy and Mechanics To underline points that are specific to this decade in his development (1489–99), it was not yet Leonardo’s common practice to produce drawings of human anatomy comprehensively based on actual dissections. His most precise direct anatomical research was confined to animal tissue, the individualized study of the human head and skeletal structures. The intensity and detail of his research on mechanics, by contrast, were then at a peak of refinement.52 His interest in writing on the “Elements of Machines” after 1500 diminished, with fewer ebbs and flows, though never ceased altogether. Most of his efforts around 1508 and later focused on heavily rewriting and reorganizing his earlier seminal research of the 1490s (see, for instance, the Codex Arundel, fols. 1–28, of about 1508; Paris MS F, of about

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1.5 Leonardo, Codex Madrid I, fols. 45r–44v, ca. 1493–99. Pen and brown ink, over leadpoint, 21.4 × 30.8 cm, open spread of leaves (approximate dimensions). Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España MS 8937.

1508; Paris MS G, of about 1510–11 and 1514–15; and Paris MS E, of about 1513–14).53 In two famous facing leaves of the Codex Madrid I (fols.

45r–44v; pls. 1.5, 6.52), with drawings of around 1493–99, Leonardo depicted, at right, an elegant rendition of a volute gear for a barrel spring in a three-quarter view, and, above, he pursued a variation on the detail that is obscured in the main study, but in section. At left, on the facing leaf, he rendered a device for stretching rope, yarn, or thread in three-quarter

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bird’s-eye view at the top, and in plan below. Other leaves of the Codex Madrid I (fols. 102r–101v; pl. 6.54) portray the movement of axles and bearings, which are the causes of their wearing out. Those drawings are usually more abstractly shown in section and magnified detail.

Leonardo similarly relied on the general principle of imaging form in section in a well-known anatomical study of about 1493–94 (Windsor, RL 12603r; pl. 6.135), comparing the layers of skin and superficial muscles on the human head to an onion.54 The sheet on which it is executed corresponds to his manuscripts in quarto size.55 He drew the man’s profile in the main portion of the paper in pen and brown ink over red chalk, then sketched and described the onion at left more faintly and only in

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red chalk. He repeated the detail of the eye in profile section, in a scribble in pen and ink at lower left, representing next to it the section of the cranium seen from the top. Immediately above, he enlarged and labeled the diagram of the layers of skin with superficial muscles in a further profile section. But the concept of this visual description is a cleaner redaction from previous notes (i.e., a “fair copy” by the artist). The preparatory sketch, a diagram in section, details the cutaneous layers from hair (“a – capellj”) to brain (“f – cervello”). It is developed on a spread of leaves in the Codex Forster III (fols. 28r–27v; pl. 6.134), the tiniest of all of Leonardo’s pocket-size notebooks, in a sedicesimo format.56 The large illustration on the Windsor sheet (pl. 6.135), therefore, depends on small portable notes done on a page that was roughly one-quarter of its size (pl. 6.134).57 The same tiny leaf of the Codex Forster III with the anatomical diagram of the head in section includes unrelated, unillustrated notes on mechanics – about blow and movement.58 A work from the middle of Leonardo’s career as an anatomist, the sheet of drawings of the brachial plexus and the junction of the skull to the spinal column, of about 1508–9 (Windsor, RL 19021v; pl. 1.6), emanates from the so-called Anatomical MS B, a carefully redacted notebook in quarto format.59 It presents a stark contrast to the anatomical naïveté of some of his studies of about 1487–90,60 or to the breathtaking naturalism of those of about 1510–11 (compare pls. 6.111, 6.113, 6.114–119; 10.103– 123). The latter date from the time of his association with the brilliant professor of natural philosophy and medicine at the studium of Pavia, Marcantonio della Torre (1481–1511).61 In plate 1.6, Leonardo’s earlier imaginary reconstruction integrates his own empirical research based partly on actual dissection, while building on his received knowledge from the writings of the most famous author on anatomy of antiquity, Galen of Pergamum (ca. 129–199/217), with which the artist became gradually acquainted through his network of learned colleagues and friends in Lombardy.62 The artist illustrated a seemingly surreal, almost mechanistic conception of the human body. This deliberately schematized sheet of about 1508–9, of orderly image and text, from the Anatomical MS B,63 marks a culminating stage in Leonardo’s writings on anatomy. It attempts to articulate and distill larger theoretical principles visually, rather than focusing, as he would in his drawings of about 1510–11 in the Windsor Anatomical MS A, on the inherent naturalism and immediacy of minuscule anatomical structure and detail.64 In contrast to later studies, the main drawing at the top of the delicately drawn Anatomical MS B sheet (pl. 1.6) portrays the

cervical vertebrae (“spondili”), two pairs of the vertebrosternal ribs, the clavicles, and only four of the five nerves comprising the brachial plexus, the cord-like form of these nerves considered by Leonardo as continuous with the fibers of muscles.

While the diagram with its attachment of the “nerves-muscles” to the vertebral column may resemble a ship’s rigging, it is in its abstract ideation, as an anterior view in shallow perspective, remarkably similar to modern illustrations of the brachial plexus in standard medical books.65 Leonardo’s drawing of about 1508–9 (pls. 1.7, 10.58) reconstructs an image of the overall visual structure of the anatomical motif in a sufficiently mimetic perspectival rendition, but it abstracts or suppresses detail in the service of clarity. As he commented below the image, “in this demonstration, it is enough to depict only 9 vertebrae, of which 7 belong in the neck” (“In questa djmosstratione bassta figurare sola mente 9 spondjli de quali / 7 ne va[n] nel chollo”).66 This same syntactic clarity characterizes the two less anatomically correct detail-drawings on the lower part of the sheet demonstrating the vertebral joining of the skull and spine. At left, the exploded detail is offered in an anterior view that is in partial cross section, while at right the enlarged detail in a posterior view is unsectioned.

The vertebrae are portrayed as though pulled apart (but only one vertebra is shown) with two nerves running through the sides as if they were pipes in a neat piece of plumbing. These “pipe-line” nerves do not actually exist in the body, and at this stage of his anatomical knowledge, Leonardo thought of them in the conventional terms of his time, as conduits for medulla (or the “animal spirits”), carrying sensations to the brain. His block of notes below the drawings, at the very bottom of the sheet, is telling in that it suggests his intended public may have been other artists: “This demonstration is as necessary to good draftsmen as is the etymology of Latin words to good grammarians, because he will badly render the muscles of figures in movement and action . . . if he does not know what muscles cause such motion”67 (“Questa djmostratione ettanto necessaria a buonj djsegnatori quanto allj / buonj gramaticj ladjrivatione de uochauoli latinj perche male fara li mvsco/li delle figure 1.6 Leonardo, the brachial plexus and the junction of the skull to the spinal column, with notes (verso), ca. 1508–9. Pen and two hues of brown ink, over black chalk; remains of stitch holes along the right border of the sheet, 19 × 13.3 cm (approximate dimensions). From the Anatomical MS B, fol. 4v. Windsor Castle, Royal Library 19021v. (Reproduced larger than actual size.)

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1.7 Leonardo, the skeletal and muscular structures of the human hand, with notes (recto), winter of 1510 or 1511. Pens with nibs of different thickness and two different hues of brown ink (one darker than the other), brush and brown wash, over black chalk, 28.8 × 20.2 cm. From the Anatomical MS A, fol. 10r. Windsor Castle, Royal Library 19009r.

nellj moujmenti e attionj dj tal figure chi non sa qualj sieno li mu/scoli chesson chausa dellj lor movimentj”).68 The corpus of research formulated in the Anatomical MS B followed on the heels of Leonardo’s resumed writing of the treatise on painting, the Libro di pittura, in about 1503–7. These are also the years of his most energetic work on the Battle of Anghiari.69 One of the major intellectual themes of Leonardo’s career was his research on mechanics and the “Elements of Machines.”

It was partly rooted in a conception of the world and human knowledge according to the received thought of his time:

medieval Aristotelian physics and natural philosophy, and classical geometry (see especially Chapters 5, 6, 9, and 11). This research concurrently stimulated the theoretical and practical underpinnings for much of his empirical study of motion (and statics) in his work as a painter, anatomist, and author of the Libro di pittura. In this artistic context, his interest in mechanics is traceable from at least the late 1470s until his last years.70 His application to anatomy surfaced in the later 1480s to early 1490s, and achieved unity two decades later. He inserted a note innocuously toward the top, between the arrestingly beautiful drawings of the skeletal and muscular structures of the human hand, in a large sheet in folio format from the Anatomical MS A (Windsor, RL 19009r; pls. 1.7, 10.116), of about 1510–11. It effectively correlates these endeavors: “Make it so that the Book on the Elements of Machines with its practice should precede the proofs relating to the motion and force of man and other animals, and by means of these, you will be able to prove each of your propositions” (“fa chellib[r]o dellie / lementi machina/li colla sua pra/ticha vada ina[n]ti / ala djmostratione / del moto [drawing] e fo/rza de [drawing] llomo / ealtrj anjma/li eme [drawing] dja[n]te quelli tu [drawing] potraj / prova [drawing] re ognj / tua p[r]o [drawing] positio/ne”).71 Leonardo’s annotated technological and anatomical illustrations of a relatively finished character (though not final products) reveal his gradual development of clear, expository modes of drawing and discourse, over the course of little more than three decades. Whether made early or late in his career, many of his relatively finished drawings and manuscripts of “non-artistic” purpose are distinguished by more or less carefully deliberated layouts of image and text on the paper, if possible with ample blank margins, and insertions of captions and exegetical notes also as blocks of text of exactly justified margins, sometimes even outlined. His model in this appears to have been the scholastic tradition of late medieval and Renaissance manuscripts with its glossing of the main text. (This practice of the gloss was also adopted in most early printed books, from the 1470s and later.72) Most important of all, his images with accompanying notes on a subject in the same manuscripts rarely if ever seem to exhibit overlapping or redundant content. At the height of his powers, this artist, who so carefully thought about image and text as integrated wholes, seemed to transition fluently between his explicatory drawings and written notes in order to advance content (see Chapter 5 for more on this).

In drawings of “non-artistic” purpose, Leonardo tended to use precise types of parallel-hatching technique. In the 1480s

r e c u p e rat i n g l e o na r d o ’s l e g ac y and 1490s, this parallel hatching was of pitch-straight diagonal lines, while in 1500 and after, there is a greater concession to the volume of inanimate forms so that the parallel hatching is often enriched with curved strokes that follow the rounded shape of objects.73 He also applied wash modeling, but usually shunned pictorial drawing media, such as chalk and charcoal, and pictorial effects, such as sfumato, with which his designs of “artistic” intent are so closely associated. His general adoption of these practices for his carefully executed drawings of “nonartistic” purpose suggests that he was guided by his concerns in producing images and content that were precise. At least in principle, parallel hatching and carefully curved strokes could be rendered in print.74

Leonardo and the Print Medium Leonardo understood the potential of the print medium for the dissemination of knowledge and design. Paolo Giovio’s Leonardi Vincii vita, of about 1527–28 (a biography written from firsthand knowledge of the great artist, but which was not published until the 1770s), affirms as much in regard to Leonardo’s anatomical drawings. These were said by Giovio to have been wondrously detailed because of Leonardo’s intentions to reproduce them in engravings (“typis aeneis excuderentur”) and in infinite impressions (“infinita exempla”), for the greater benefit of art.75 The artist’s abiding ambition to be a published author surfaced early in his career. He was interested enough in the mechanics of printing about 1478–83 to draw designs for the improvement of printing presses (see Codex Atlanticus, fol.

995r; pl. 3.113).76 In a much later monumental sheet of notes and sketches (Codex Atlanticus, fol. 696v), of about 1513–16, he also went as far as calculating the number of letters of movable type necessary in printing a book of 160 pages (52 × 50 and 2600 × 160): “416,000” letters.77 But in his regard for the revolutionary media of printmaking and book publishing Leonardo stood on complicated ground. It may be recalled that Italian engravers of the 1460s to about 1500 predominantly modeled form with diagonal parallel hatching of pitch-straight lines.78 Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), whom Leonardo probably met by 1500–1, if not earlier, and who was a brilliant draftsman and had employed pen and ink with parallelhatching since the late 1460s. He was among the first artists of real genius to concern himself with the medium of engraving.79 Leonardo himself invented a resourceful, relief etching

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technique whereby the designs or letters were scratched onto a copperplate covered with a ground of lead-white powder and eggs, for a direct printing of the images from his drawings and writings. He described this recipe in the Codex Madrid II, of about 1503–5, one of his two volumes of manuscript discovered in 1964–65.80 He also later attempted a hybrid of frottage and photonegative techniques for his botanical studies.

In one such recipe (Codex Atlanticus, fol. 197v), of about 1510–12, the artist explained how direct impressions could be taken from leaves. First, a paper was tinted nearly black with candle smoke tempered with glue; then, a tree or plant leaf lightly dipped in a mixture of lead white and oil was pressed onto the black-covered paper to blacken its fine protruding forms (e.g., the tip, margins, midrib, veins, and petiole). Finally, this blackened leaf was pressed onto regular white paper. He illustrated the passage with a natural impression of a sage leaf.81 The rest of the sheet contains notes on the study of weights of an object and the proportional relationships of air and fire. In his late years particularly, he may have come to despise the crude line quality of woodcut illustrations and wished to suggest better alternatives. This much is intimated by his slightly enigmatic words (“io i[n]segno il modo dj stanpare”) in the concluding notes, crammed below the exquisitely detailed studies of the spinal column, at bottom right in the Windsor sheet RL 19007v (pl. 10.114).82 This sheet originally formed part of the Anatomical MS A, of about 1510–11, a binding of drawings dedicated primarily to the skeletal and muscular structures of the human body. The drawings in their full bloom of tonal rendering techniques (with hatching and washes, over delicate armatures of constructed pen lines), would have totally defied translation into the medium of woodcut.

Drawing, Writing, and the Biographical Dimension First and foremost, his identity was as a draftsman and painter committed to a pictorial vocabulary of tonal and coloristic effects. “But drawing especially enraptured him” (“Ma sopratutto lo rapisce il disegno”) was Giovanni Bottari’s judgment of the young Leonardo’s passionate dedication to the art of drawing, stated as a marginal note at the beginning of his edition of Vasari’s Vita of Leonardo, which was published in Rome in 1759–60.83 The details of Leonardo’s personal circumstances, such as they are, matter in understanding his activity as an artist, because

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of the insights they can provide. But the challenge, of course, resides in how one may apply a biographical method for an interpretation that is sensitive, historical, and reasonably based on fact. Such a subject is his (nearly certain) homosexuality, although the actual documentation is less explicit. Two charges of sodomy made anonymously on 9 April and 7 June 1476 were dropped in July of that year; and a letter of 4 February 1479 mentions a “Paulo de Leonardo de Vinci da Firenze” exiled to Bologna for the undescribed crime of “male conversationi” (which can be translated as “bad company” or, more literally, as “bad conversations”; see Chapters 2 and 3). His preferred company of men, especially youths, is reported indirectly in documents and by Vasari, his biographer, but the concrete evidence goes no further (see Chapters 4, 7–9).

Despite the voluminous amounts of his extant writings, little can be found in them prima facie that could be considered of a significantly personal, autobiographical nature. Only slightly more than twenty drafts of letters by him have survived, and these are (with a handful of exceptions) in a very fragmentary state. Their content is usually official, about professional appeals to a patron or supporter, and their evidence will be discussed where relevant in this book. Therefore, perhaps the most telling personal dimension of the artist is to be found in his drawings. When confronted by the sheer quantity of his output on paper, not to mention the dazzling fluency and immediacy of his sketches, one has the impression that drawing for Leonardo was a defining act of existence. He was without doubt a born draftsman. His contemporaries would have agreed about this (“wondrous gifts are sometimes rained upon by the heavens on mere mortal spirits,” begins Vasari’s Vita of Leonardo84). Yet at the same time, for all his innate genius as a draftsman, his early drawings, particularly those of the 1470s, often depict figures with clumsy features and ill-proportioned anatomies, even with infelicities of mark.85 Such artistic mishaps frequently plague the works of a very young draftsman in the making. An example is the ruined, small fragmentary sketch of a man’s profile in pen and brown ink in Florence (Uffizi GDS 449 Er), of around 1470–75, which is unmistakably autograph, modeled with fluent, left-handed, diagonal parallel hatching. But for the very minor exceptions such as these at the beginning of his career, a quill pen, chalk, or a metalpoint in his hand became natural extensions of his keenly observant eye and an immediate creative release for his boundless imagination.

When considering Leonardo’s colossal contribution to the wide-ranging traditions of design and illustration in the Renais-

sance, in his work as an artist and “non-artist,” it is apparent that he conceived of drawing as an intrinsically functional language of expression (more nuanced than the written word), to be used with visual logic and consistency of description.86 Drawing was his medium for eloquentia (to invoke here a quality that his learned contemporaries would have celebrated), deployed with its various media and formal vocabularies during the course of a very long career.

Leonardo wrote in red chalk on the verso of one of his lesserknown small sheets, now in Bayonne, almost certainly a small fragment of a leaf from a pocket-size notebook of sedicesimo format: “Jl djsegnjo ^ci^ mecte le chose inoj . p[er] la uia . / dellochio . elle parole . p[er] la . via dellj orechi” (drawing conveys things to us through the means of the eye, and words through the ears).87 Very closely comparable in content to the Paris MS H, the recto of this loose sheet in Bayonne portrays a carefully drawn, blown-up detail of a device for a hydraulic project, of about 1498–1500 (pl. 1.8). His declaratory voice in the note on the Bayonne verso is authoritative, as the teacher imparting knowledge to his pupils, as the experienced practitioner, and as the theorist on the scientia of painting.88 By the 1490s at the Sforza court in Milan, Leonardo had become deeply engaged in the theoretical debates about the comparisons (“paragoni”) of the arts, the scientie, and the five senses; his nowlost manuscript on the subject was produced at the instance of Ludovico Sforza “Il Moro,” according to Lomazzo’s Trattato of 1584, and must have included so much more than what is preserved today in either the Paris MS A of about 1490–92 or in the first part of the Libro di pittura in the Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, scribed by Melzi.89 The note on the tiny Bayonne verso is therefore one of the very rare autograph writings by Leonardo relating to the sections on the paragone in the Libro di pittura.

He argued somewhat sophistically for the superiority of painting on the basis that it was a mathematical discipline, and was not constrained by manual labor as was sculpture; moreover, the eye reigned supreme over all senses.90 In one realm of Leonardo’s activity, drawing operated as the persuasive rational edifice of visual description, but in other realms drawing was a mode of profoundly personal self-expression. It often provided the playground for his creativity, when his pen seemed to run away on the paper into spontaneous sketching, magnificent leaps of fantasy, outpourings of quick forms or scribbles emanating from the deeper wells of his unconscious. He asserted: “it is a true thing: because the eye sees a thing more clearly in dreams,

r e c u p e rat i n g l e o na r d o ’s l e g ac y than with the imagination while awake” (“e certa la cosa / p[er]che vede ^piv certa la cosa^ lochio ne sognj / che colla imaginatione sta[n]do dessto”).91 Leonardo’s note, written about 1504–5 in the Codex Arundel,92 represents a time in his private circumstances when the pure reason of mathematics no longer provided enough certainty, or order, in his world.93 In examining the groups of drawings by Leonardo related to his pictorial projects (e.g., the Adoration of the Magi, the Battle of Anghiari, the Virgin and Child with St. Anne),94 the suspicion is all but proven that he continued to draw and sketch for these projects long after he picked up the brush and commenced the task of painting. In fact, as his drawings also reveal, his head continued to be filled with ideas for these projects, even long after he had stopped actively painting them. A similar scenario may have been true of his sculptural projects, in that it is possible that he continued to rework designs and produce drawings for intended sculptures even after his patrons lost interest or hope in his endeavors (see Chapters 2, 4, 8–9, 12). The act of drawing all too often gloriously derailed him in his primary purpose. In it was the “siren song” – drawing for the sake of drawing. He may not have resisted putting away his pen, unable or unwilling to recognize the point at which the stages of cogitated preliminary drawing for a particular composition had passed. The ancient Protogenes could not lift his brush from the work, and the same inability to finish was also said to be true of Leonardo as a painter. The parallel between the two artists was real enough to the critics of the time, as Lomazzo’s Rime (Milan, 1587) stated: “To Protogenes, who did not lift his brush from his paintings, the divine Vinci was comparable, whose work is likewise unfinished” (“Protogen che’l pennel da sue pitture / Non levava, agguagliò il Vinci divo / Di cui l’opera non è finita pure”).95 The use of sketchbooks and notebooks served Leonardo particularly well in his creative processes of exploration, of record-keeping, and of reworking of ideas, since an extreme mobility and instability marked certain periods of his life and professional career. This was especially true of his later years, roughly speaking, between the time of the fall of Milan to the French in the autumn of 1499 (when he lost his main sources of patronage from Ludovico Sforza and his court), and the time of his death in France in 1519 at the small Château du Clos Lucé (Cloux) in the town of Amboise,96 where he went to serve the young François I, king of France, in late 1516. After 1499 Leonardo’s lifestyle and career were surprisingly itinerant for a major artist of his time. While his apprenticeship in Andrea

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1.8 Leonardo, fragment of manuscript leaf with a magnified detail of a device for a hydraulic project, ca. 1498–1500. Red chalk, 6.5 × 7.3 cm. Bayonne, Musée Bonnat-Helleu AI 1329; NI 1784. (Reproduced larger than actual size.)

del Verrocchio’s workshop and early independent career took place in Florence (about 1464/66–82), Leonardo went to live and work more productively in Milan for two long periods of time (first around 1482–99, and then about 1506–13); his second period in Florence (about 1500–6) was interrupted by constant travel in Tuscany and the Papal States. During the early part of his second period in Milan, he also moved back and forth frequently between Milan and Florence. This was because he sought employment from the French; because he was still obliged under penalty by the Florentine republic to finish the Battle of Anghiari; and because his inheritances from his uncle and father were contested in lawsuits with his legitimately born half-siblings. He lived at the papal court in Rome (1513–16), working for Giuliano de’ Medici, the brother of Pope Leo X, before his final years in France.

Although not intended to function as diaries or journals in any modern sense of the terms, two of Leonardo’s notebooks of topographical material (the pocket-size Paris MS L of about 1497–1502 and 1504, nicknamed the “Cesare Borgia Notebook,” and the larger portion of the Codex Madrid II of about 1503–5, a binding in quarto size97) offer vivid testimony of his

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mobility. Both of these manuscripts contain abundant dated jottings. Even when Leonardo settled for a time in a particular place, he was an inveterate local excursionist. Over the course of his career, his other drawings and notes make reference to numerous sites visited in Lombardy and Piedmont, and to forays in the Veneto and Friuli in the northeast of the Italian peninsula, while quick sketches and finished studies allude to his topographical surveys in Central Italy (in the regions of EmiliaRomagna, Tuscany, Umbria, the Marche, and Lazio); he may have traveled as far south in the peninsula as Naples.98 In sum, this Florentine-trained artist spent about thirty years wandering away from the territory of his roots, citizenship, and traditions.

Considering both his propensity for empirical research and the mobility of his career and lifestyle, it is not surprising that sketchbooks and notebooks became his favorite medium. They were above all practical, providing small, conveniently transportable working surfaces; this also, fortuitously, means that drawings and manuscript notes kept in bound form, or as loose papers nestled into gatherings, were better protected against the vicissitudes of time and accident, and, as a result, have survived more intact than single sheets kept entirely unattached.

Given the problematic state of early biographical accounts of Leonardo (to be discussed below), and the frequent gaps of evidence in the documents pertaining to his life and work, it is fortunate for historians that he himself wrote numerous notes and self-reminders on his drawings and manuscripts. It was a lifelong habit. These promemorie are usually neatly written (serving almost as a kind of incipit within his bindings of notes), and often state exact dates, places, and circumstances (see pl. 1.30, for one of his earliest sheets). The immense extent of this record-keeping

by Leonardo within the body of his drawings and manuscripts is exceptional among artists of his time, although this was not a self-conscious act of autobiography in the modern sense. His personal history did play a role in this, for the impulse to record was reinforced by deeply ingrained family habits: Leonardo’s father and most of the men in his family, going back to the late fourteenth century, were notaries, notai, by profession.

His Father, Ser Piero da Vinci The importance of Leonardo’s father (full name, Ser Piero di Antonio di Ser Piero di Ser Guido da Vinci [1426–1504]) shall become apparent during the course of this book, as the son’s artistic career is explored (see especially Chapters 2, 3, and 8).

1.9 Ser Piero da Vinci (1426–1504), front flyleaf to his thick volume of notarial acts for the years 1499–1502, incipit with his drawing of his personal device as a notary. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Notarile Antecosimiano, vol. 16838.

Further interpretations based on the few, lacunous, documented biographical tidbits regarding this father-son relationship are for a professional psychologist to create, though at risk.

The same year of Leonardo’s illegitimate birth, Ser Piero married for the first time. All in all he married four times and had (legitimate) living children only with his third and fourth wives. Here I draw attention to the libri di protocolli notarili di contratti (log books of notarial transactions and contracts) by the long-lived Ser Piero da Vinci, which cover the years 1448 to 1504, less than one month before his death (ASF, Notarile Antecosimiano, vols. 16823 to 16840). Physically large and heavy, Ser Piero’s eighteen, very thick volumes of legal documents amount

r e c u p e rat i n g l e o na r d o ’s l e g ac y to an enormous, possibly intimidating body of detailed technical writings, and are characterized by his dense, extremely orderly right-handed cursive. Their visual impact could not have been lost on his son Leonardo. Every entry within Ser Piero’s notarial books begins with precise records of date, parties involved, and subject at hand, stated in standard legal language. Strict rules of the Florentine guild of judges and notaries, the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, considered the most intellectually prestigious of all the guilds, forbade the admittance of an illegitimately born son, and the entrance examinations administered to the young candidates (before they reached the age of twenty-one) included Latin grammar and scriptura (handwriting).99 All three basic requirements would have certainly excluded Ser Piero’s brilliant son, had the father wished Leonardo to pursue the prominent family profession. Leonardo was a natural left-handed writer who struggled with Latin for a lifetime (see Chapters 5, 6).

The habits of good record-keeping were also part of Florentine culture, sanctioned by long-established practices. In this too the da Vinci family was no exception (see the diary ASF, Notarile Antecosimiano, vol. 16912, fol. 105v).

A strong tradition existed in medieval and Renaissance Tuscany of keeping ricordanze and zibaldoni, notebooks of family events and business accounts.100 The basic immediacy of fact regarding time and place in Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts is yet another reason why attentive study of them within this larger, cultural context is central to an understanding of his work. Yet his record-keeping was very often somewhat haphazard. Those manuscripts of his that are still in their relatively intact bindings reveal especially that he tended to insert such dated reminders at the beginning or end (sometimes in both places) in a given notebook or quire of loose sheets.101

Patterns of Thought On yet other levels, one can glean in Leonardo’s drawings evidence of deeper, more complex psychological truths. For example, the young artist filled a small leaf from a sketchbook with quick designs for a seated Virgin and Child with a flower, three delightful unrelated doodles of faces in profile, some very abstract architectural studies of brick masonry, and a diagram of a technological device that is possibly a perspective frame (see pl. 3.5).102 This early sheet dates from about 1478–81 (when Leonardo was in his late twenties), and illustrates vividly the quickness – the effortless fluency – with which he considered

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artistic and technological ideas. This way of thinking on the paper – by responding intuitively to the suggestiveness or underlying analogies of form and content, rather than by following consciously linear progressions of theme and subject – is typical of Leonardo’s entire career.

Another sheet incorporates the design of a hygrometer (pl.

3.55) along with figural sketches intended for the spectators in the background of the unfinished Adoration of the Magi altarpiece, which was commissioned in 1481 by the Augustinian regular canons of San Donato a Scopeto.103 Among the many other, later examples illustrating this “non-linear” process of design in his drawings is the very impressive double-sided sheet from about 1503–4 at Windsor (RL 12337r–v; pls. 8.31, 8.32) that includes on one side of the paper a dynamic study for a rearing horse in the monumental Battle of Anghiari cartoon and three rapid sketches for the substantially smaller painting of Leda and the Swan (destroyed between 1692/94 and 1775).104 In contrast, as will be seen, the reverse of this Windsor sheet portrays a large, messy working draft for a military fortification attacked by a lethal shower of stones fired by a row of mortars (pl. 1.10). Like the Battle of Anghiari, this military project of about 1503–4 seems to relate to Leonardo’s employment by the Florentine republic, when Niccolò Machiavelli, the famous author of Il principe (MS 1513–16) and a close acquaintance of Leonardo, if not a friend, was rising to political prominence.105 At that time, Machiavelli was secretary to the Council on War (the Dieci di Guerra) and the right-hand man of Piero Soderini, the gonfaloniere a vita (chief government official) of the Florentine republic. Macchiavelli was also a witness and co-signatory of Leonardo’s revised contract of 4 May 1504 for the Battle of Anghiari project.106 The military fortification sketch on the Windsor verso (pls. 1.10, 8.32) served as a rough draft for a more finished presentation drawing (pls. 1.11, 8.38).107 If close attention is paid to the general consistency of Leonardo’s drawing technique and use of medium in these sheets, one can see that it is proof that he drew the artistic designs and technological ideas within a very short time span. Most of his now-loose sheets and fragments with drawings and notes were originally contained within bindings or quires of nestled paper (quarderni), and the leaves from his workbooks often amalgamate motifs of unrelated subject matter, whether produced in his early years or late career in Rome and France in 1513–19.108 The early collectors of Leonardo sought to rein in the apparent “disorder” in his drawings and manuscripts through thematic arrangements, a method that was applied particularly

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1.10 Leonardo, a row of mortars firing stone or cannon balls across a fortification with notes (verso), ca. 1503–4. Soft, grayish black chalk, partly reworked by the artist in pen and brown ink, 29.2 × 41.2 cm. Windsor Castle, Royal Library 12337v.

1.11 Leonardo, a presentation design: four mortars firing into the courtyard of a fortification (recto), ca. 1504. Pen and brown ink, brush with gray-brown and yellow-brown wash, traces of lampblack, over an extensive construction with incised and leadpoint ruling, compass work and freehand underdrawing in leadpoint, 32.6 × 47.6 cm. Windsor Castle, Royal Library 12275r.

by Pompeo Leoni (ca. 1533–1608), the ambitious sculptor who by 1590 had amassed the largest collection of Leonardos after Melzi, who became the great master’s direct heir in 1519.109 The principle of classifying the dismembered drawings and notes by Leonardo according to broad categories of subject matter was not an injudicious choice by Leoni and other early collectors.

It gave rise to groupings dedicated to Leonardo’s material on anatomy and proportion, physiognomy, horses, allegories, architecture, technology, water studies and hydraulics, topography, landscape, and botanical studies.110 Modern scholars have also frequently embraced this approach of thematic typologies in the study of Leonardo’s drawings.

Certain themes and motifs held a particular fascination for Leonardo, recurring in his work with great eloquence and visual force, during the arc of many decades. Some interests seem to span his entire career: the most salient were his concerns with landscape, horses, hydraulic machinery, and physiognomy. He also repeatedly returned to the study of human anatomy, theoretical mechanics, transformational geometry, architecture, and topography. As he expressed in the Turin Codex on the Flight of Birds, of about 1505–6, fresh from his experiences of writing on the paragone, or comparison of the arts: “the knowledge of technological instruments, or rather of machinery is most noble,

and it is useful above all others” (“La sscie[n]tia strumentale ov[ver] machinale / e nobilissima essop[r]a p[er] tutte laltre e utilissima”).111 He proclaimed in the Paris MS E, the small notebook in octavo size of about 1513–14: “On mechanics: mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences, because it leads to the fruits of mathematics” (“la mechanicha / La mechanicha e il paradjso delle scie[n]tie matema/tiche p[er]che cho[n] quella si viene al frutto matema/ticho”).112 Leonardo’s passion for the mechanics of flight became manifest in the late 1470s while he was still in Florence.113 It stimulated his ambitious designs for flying machines by human propulsion in the late 1480s and early 1490s during his years in Milan.114 Although in about 1505–6 he was still imagining and testing ornithopters (flying machines propelled by the batting of wings), alluding to the most grandiose of his inventions as “il grande uccello” (the great bird),115 these dreams increasingly dissipated with his empirical research on the aerodynamics of natural bird flight. His notebooks of about 1505–6 and 1508–14 contain the evidence for this final transformation in his studies of flight.116 While it is at times undoubtedly helpful to examine his drawings and manuscript notes in a structure of order (whether this is in a reconstructed sequence of design or in an arrangement of thematic content), this goal is not always attainable given the

r e c u p e rat i n g l e o na r d o ’s l e g ac y gaps in the material evidence, and, I might add, it may not be ultimately desirable. Too much order imposed by the historian inevitably seems to blur the authenticity of Leonardo’s eye and voice, and diminishes the supremely mellifluous workings of his mind.

True enough, in his maturing as a theorist, Leonardo sought to arrive at an understanding of the unities of principle underlying a diversity of forms and phenomena. He often relied on a richly evocative language of simile, although some of his comparisons were traditional in medieval scholastic literature; his language was gradually informed by his (mediated) encounters with humanist culture.117 For instance, in writing to the administrators of the cathedral of Milan around 1490, the artist likened the services needed by a good architect to those of a physician (in modern Italian, “questo medesimo bisogna al malato domo, cioè uno medico architetto”; in the original, “Questo medesimo bisognja almalato [crossed out: edjfitio] domo . cioe vno medjco architetto”).118 His proem to the intended treatise on water in the Paris MS A (fol. 55v), of about 1490–92, begins with the arresting metaphor that “man is said by the ancients to be the world in miniature, and to be sure this name is apt, because in as much as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, his body resembles that of the earth” (“comj[n]ciame[n] to del trattato delacq[u]a. / lomo e detto . dalj antiquj . mo[n] do mjnore . , e cierto . la djtione . desso . nome ebene cholocatta / imp[er]o . chessi . chome . lomo . e cho[n]posto . dj terra . acq[u]a. aria . effocho . questo chorpo . della terra / e il simiglante”).119 By about 1506–10 he also considered the blood vessels the “rivers of the body” and rivers the “blood vessels of the earth” (“le terrest[r]e vene”), and so on.120 His contact, perhaps friendship, with Marcantonio della Torre after 1509 may have further solidified his conceptual grasp of such analogies in becoming familiar with Aristotle’s and Galen’s writings (which were the celebrated expertise of della Torre). It is no surprise that della Torre’s commentary in manuscript on the Metereologica

by Aristotle, for example, was to compare similarly medicine to domificatoria, the art of building architecture.121 One must also emphasize that, much like Petrarch scaling Mont Ventoux in the spring of 1336, Leonardo was often moved in his research by no other purpose than a desire to see what the great height was like. To quote Petrarch precisely, “the summit is the ultimate goal, the terminus of the road on which we journey. Everyone wishes to arrive there, but, as Ovid says: ‘to wish is not enough; to gain your end you must ardently yearn.’ ”122 No artists of Leonardo’s time, or later, yearned as

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widely, or tested the limits of their expository powers in the enterprise of visually communicating content, as he did. And rarely did the courage of his vision and artistic quest yield to the undertow of self-doubt. The exception may have been his failed Battle of Anghiari mural.

Ample testimony of Leonardo’s visionary mind as an inventor in the late 1480s to early 1490s is manifest in his drawings and notes about flying machines, or volatili, as he called them.123 The Codex Madrid I offers concrete visual and intellectual proof of his powers of synthesis in discoursing on theoretical and practical mechanics.124 It speaks to his achievements as a technologist and author on the subject.125 Some of his contemporaries recognized this: “Most assiduous inventor of new things [di cose nove assidui inventori], our Leonardo da Vinci . . . who as a sculptor and painter can outdo anyone to the credit of his surname.”

Such were the marveling and punning words in about 1498 of the Franciscan mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli of Borgo Sansepolcro, Leonardo’s close friend, in De divina proportione (pl. 1.25).126 In the spirit of the age, in which praise was measured by antique paragon, Leonardo’s inventive genius was compared with that of Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287–211/12 b.c.e.). “Nec minus archimedaeo ingenio notissimus,” stated Pomponio Gaurico’s De sculptura (Florence, 1504).127 The “man ahead of his time,” the prophet who foresaw countless inventions of the modern world, is probably the Leonardo who speaks most directly to the public today. It is the view that has prevailed in many recent popular monographs.

The sublimely rational, however, is only part of Leonardo’s persona.128 In his theory of painting, the human body, especially the face, reveals an infinite capacity for gesture as signs of the “motions of the mind.” He variously called the latter the “passioni dell’anima,” the “moti mentali,” or the “accidenti mentali” in his fragmentary writings.129 The essentially Aristotelian conception of the “moti” (the invisible spiritual force, or “moto spirituale”; the prime mover of all things, or “moto materiale”) constituted the rationalized basis for his research. It was received “scientific” knowledge of his time, as will be seen in Chapters 4 and 5. Yet if one regards his studies of figural gesture and physiognomic types as a group, it becomes evident that portrayals of the heads of grotesquely deformed old men and women exist in such profuse quantities in Leonardo’s drawings (throughout his career) that it is tempting to apply psychoanalytic tools of interpretation in order to explain the deeper dimension of such extraordinarily obsessive imagery of ugliness in his creative process and personal ethos.130