Fritjof Capra (11 page)

Other inventions he created from that time involved fire and hot air.
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In addition to the self-regulating spit mentioned earlier, Leonardo invented a method of creating a vacuum to raise water by means of a fire burning in a closed bucket, based on the observation that a burning flame consumes air. During these early years he also developed his first versions of a diving apparatus. During a visit to Vinci he designed an olive press with more efficient leverage than the presses used at the time. While he was engaged in these multiple projects of invention, design, and engineering, Leonardo also painted his
Annunciation
, two
Madonnas
, and the portrait of
Ginevra de’ Benci
.

In 1477, Leonardo left Verrocchio’s workshop to establish himself as an independent artist. But he did not seem to devote much energy to this enterprise. A few months later, perhaps through the influence of his father, he received a prestigious commission for an altarpiece in the chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo Vecchio.
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He was paid a sizable advance but never delivered a finished painting. Around this time, he wrote in his Notebook, “Have begun two Virgin Marys” without giving any further details.
²³

In fact, very little is known about Leonardo’s activities between the years 1477 and 1481. Some historians assume that, after many years of rigid discipline in the
bottega
, Leonardo—now a dashing, athletic young man of twenty-five—simply joined the extravagant life of the well-to-do Florentine youth. “Presumably,” writes art historian and critic Kenneth Clark, “Leonardo, like other young men with great gifts, spent a large part of his youth…dressing up, taming horses, learning the lute [and] enjoying the
hors d’oeuvres
of life.”
²⁴

If true, it was not a time without frustrations, however. For unknown reasons, the Medici never extended to Leonardo their vast patronage of the arts. Although Verrocchio was on excellent terms with the family, enjoyed their support, and would not have failed to recommend Leonardo to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lorenzo did not offer Leonardo a single full-scale commission.
²⁵

A family of bankers and merchants, the Medici were the undisputed rulers of Florence for two centuries, despite the fact that they never held public office. With their enormous wealth and their passionate patronage of the arts, literature, and learning, they influenced every facet of Tuscan public life and culture. They also counted among their family members several cardinals, three popes, and two queens of France. In the words of Serge Bramly, “The Medici behaved less and less like businessmen and more and more like princes, becoming the avowed masters of a city that remained a republic in name only.”
²⁶

Lorenzo de’ Medici, also known as
il Magnifico
, at the young age of twenty followed in the footsteps of his father as the ruler of Florence. Lorenzo was just three years older than Leonardo, and the two had much in common, including a love for horses, music, and learning. However, there was also much in their characters and tastes that kept them apart.
²⁷
Lorenzo was not a handsome man and dressed with deliberate simplicity. Leonardo, on the other hand, was strikingly beautiful and flamboyant in his gestures and behavior. Lorenzo had received a classical education and had a genuine love for formal learning. He surrounded himself with writers. Leonardo, by contrast, was self-taught; he knew no Latin or Greek and despised what he must have perceived as literary pretension at the Medici “court.” These contrasts were apparently so strong that they stood in the way of any mutual sympathy forming between them. Nevertheless, Lorenzo’s low esteem of Leonardo as an artist is surprising.

Prudent and cunning, Lorenzo de’ Medici could be brutal as well as magnanimous. When he came to power, he consolidated his control of the government, restructured the family banks and trading houses, made new alliances, and dissolved old ones. He also inaugurated lavish festivals and spectacles for the city to assure his popularity.

However, Lorenzo’s political maneuvers inevitably generated opposition.
²⁸
He had allied himself with the city-state of Venice against Rome and Naples, whereupon Pope Sixtus IV transferred the management of Vatican finances from the Medici to the rival Pazzi family. Lorenzo quickly retaliated by accusing one of the Pazzi of treason, and arresting him. The Pazzi family, in turn, planned revenge with the support of the pope, and in April of 1478, Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano were attacked while attending mass in the cathedral. Giuliano was killed; Lorenzo was seriously wounded but managed to escape. But the Pazzi conspiracy did not succeed in triggering a revolt against the Medici, as the pope had intended. Because of Lorenzo’s popularity, the citizens of Florence soon hunted down the criminals, including a member of the Pazzi family, an archbishop, and several priests. All were hanged within hours of the attempted uprising.

The turbulent time of the Pazzi conspiracy brought a sudden end to the city’s extravagant festivals, and perhaps this helped Leonardo to concentrate again on his work. The year 1478 is the date of his earliest drawings of machines in the Codex Atlanticus, most of them renderings of devices invented by Brunelleschi for the construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.
²⁹
The Pazzi conspiracy may also have turned Leonardo’s mind to the science and engineering of war. In the following years he recorded numerous military inventions, including multibarreled guns, assault bridges for attacking ramparts, and mechanisms for overturning ladders used for scaling fortified walls. Many of these creations were derived from the work of previous inventors, although they were invariably modified, and significantly improved.
³⁰

When the Vatican’s support of the Pazzi conspiracy became apparent, Florence declared war on the pope. But Lorenzo resolved the crisis with a daring move. He traveled to Naples and negotiated a peace agreement with King Ferrante, thus depriving the pope of his strongest ally. Shortly thereafter, Florence and Rome were reconciled again, and in 1481—three years after conspiring to kill him—Pope Sixtus IV asked Lorenzo to lend him his best painters to decorate the Sistine Chapel, which he had just built and which had been named after him. It was a tremendous opportunity for Florentine painters, and Leonardo must have been very keen to participate. Once again, however, he was conspicuously ignored by Lorenzo, who sent several of Leonardo’s former companions to Rome, including Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino.

The humiliation may have been the lowest point in Leonardo’s career. Over the years, he had been repeatedly snubbed by the Medici and passed over in favor of lesser artists. Now he was deprived of the chance to seek glory in Rome, which he certainly deserved. But Leonardo put aside his feelings of disappointment and despair, and marshaled his powers of concentration to paint his first masterpiece.

In March 1481 the monks of the Augustinian monastery of San Donato (whose legal affairs were handled by Ser Piero) commissioned Leonardo to create a large altarpiece representing the
Adoration of the Magi
. The artist made numerous preparatory drawings and worked on the project intensely for a year.
³¹
His first approach was a masterful exercise in linear perspective, showing a courtyard with two flights of stairs and elaborate arcades. “This carefully measured courtyard,” writes Kenneth Clark, “has been invaded by an extraordinary retinue of ghosts; wild horses rear and toss their heads, agitated figures dart up the staircase and in and out of the arcades; and a camel, appearing for the first and last time in Leonardo’s work, adds its exotic bulk to the dreamlike confusion of forms.”
³²

In the final painting, Leonardo abandoned the use of perspective in favor of a dynamic configuration created by the highly emotional gestures of an agitated throng of figures surrounding the Virgin and Child. In the background of the painting, a group of clashing horsemen represents the moral blindness of violence, in contrast to the Epiphany’s glorious message of peace on earth, foreshadowing Leonardo’s forceful condemnation of war in
The Battle of Anghiari
two decades later.
³³
Indeed, the entire painting is full of visual themes that would recur in the artist’s later work.
³⁴
Art historian Jane Roberts describes Leonardo’s
Adoration
as “the first mature and independent statement of his genius.”
³⁵
At the same time, it is a radical departure from traditional representations of the subject as a calm ceremonial gathering. As Daniel Arasse explains, “To paint the moment when the presence of the Son of God was publicly recognized as such, [Leonardo] depicted the tumult of a universal dazzlement—reflecting in this the meaning that Saint Augustine and the monks of his order who had commissioned the painting gave to the Epiphany.”
³⁶

Early in the following year, while Leonardo was still working on his
Adoration of the Magi
, Lorenzo de’ Medici decided to make a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza, his most powerful ally, in the form of a gift. As the Anonimo Gaddiano reports, “It is said that when Leonardo was thirty years old, the
Magnifico
sent him to present a lyre to the Duke of Milan, with a certain Atalante Migliorotti, for he played upon this instrument exceptionally well.”
³⁷
Sending Leonardo to the Sforza court in Milan as a musician rather than as a painter may have seemed like another indignity. However, Leonardo did not hesitate. He must have felt that it was time for a fresh start; without Lorenzo’s support, his avenues to further commissions were limited in Florence. So he put down his brushes, packed his belongings, and, with his masterpiece unfinished, left the city that had nurtured his art.

MILAN

Milan in the 1480s was a vibrant trading center of tremendous wealth that exported armaments, wool, and silk. It was comparable to Florence in size, but very different in its architecture and culture. Its Latin name, Mediolanum, was probably derived from its location in the middle of the Plain of Lombardy
(in medio plano).
It was definitely a northern city. Most of its palaces and churches were built in the Romanesque or Gothic style. Unlike Florence, Milan had no elegant town plan. The city’s medieval houses huddled together, creating a labyrinth of narrow, bustling streets.

The duchy of Milan had been ruled by the Sforza family since 1450. Like the Medici, the Sforzas were cunning and ruthless, but their family tended to be full of warriors rather than bankers. Ludovico Sforza, only a few months older than Leonardo, was one of the wealthiest and most powerful Renaissance princes.
³⁸
Nicknamed
il Moro
(“the Moor”) because of his dark hair and skin, he was also a subtle diplomat whose alliance with the king of France was a potent ingredient in the volatile mixture of Italian politics. With his wife, Beatrice d’Este, Ludovico held an elegant court and spent immense sums of money to further the arts and sciences.

When Leonardo arrived in Milan, the city had no renowned painters or sculptors, although the Sforza court was filled with doctors, mathematicians, and engineers. Its culture was linked to that of the great universities of northern Italy, whose emphasis was on the study of the physical world rather than on moral philosophy, as had been the case in Florence.
³⁹
While the Medici spent their time composing verses in Tuscan and Latin,
⁴⁰
Ludovico organized scientific debates among learned professors. In this stimulating intellectual environment, Leonardo soon transcended his Florentine workshop culture and turned toward a more analytic and theoretical approach to the understanding of nature.

Because he arrived at the Sforza court as a musician, he and Atalante (who was his student on the
lira
, according to the Anonimo Gaddiano) probably played frequently to entertain the court. But Leonardo had no intention of pursuing a musical career. Realizing that the power of the Sforzas came from their military might, and that Milan’s dominant position in trade required a well-functioning city infrastructure, he wrote a carefully composed letter to the Moor, in which he offered his services as a military and civil engineer, and also mentioned his skills as an architect, sculptor, and painter. Leonardo began his letter with a telling reference to his “secrets,” revealing a taste for secrecy that became a characteristic trait of his personality as he became older.
⁴¹
“Most illustrious Lord,” he wrote, “having now sufficiently seen and considered the works of all those who claim to be masters and artificers of instruments of war…I shall endeavor, without prejudice to anyone else, to reveal my secrets to your Excellency, and then offer to execute, at your pleasure and at the appropriate time, all the items briefly noted below.”

He then proceeded to list under nine headings the different instruments of war he had designed and was prepared to build: “I have models for strong but very light bridges, extremely easy to carry…an endless variety of battering rams and scaling ladders…methods of destroying any citadel or fortress that is not built of rock…mortars that are very practical and easy to transport, with which I can fling showers of small stones, and their smoke will cause great terror to the enemy…secret winding underground passages, dug without noise…covered wagons, safe and unassailable, which will penetrate enemy ranks with their artillery…bombards, mortars, and light artillery of beautiful and practical forms…engines to hurl large rocks, fire-throwing catapults, and other unusual instruments of marvelous efficiency.”

“In short,” he concluded his list, “whatever the situation, I can invent an infinite variety of machines for both attack and defense.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “In peacetime, I think I can give perfect satisfaction and be the equal of any man in architecture, in the design of public and private buildings, and in conducting water from one place to another. Furthermore, I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay; and likewise in painting I can do any kind of work as well as any man….” And finally, he ended with an enticing prospect: “Moreover, the bronze horse could be made that will be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the Prince your father of blessed memory, and the illustrious house of Sforza.”
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