Fritjof Capra (13 page)

Leonardo’s “Masque of the Planets” was the climax of the theatrical performance that took place at the grandiose feast in January 1490. On a giant revolving stage, the signs of the zodiac, illuminated by torches, could be seen behind colored glass, and the seven planets, represented by costumed actors, circled through the heavens accompanied by “marvelous melodies and soft harmonious songs.”
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The Masque was a huge success and made Leonardo famous throughout Italy, even more so than his paintings had done. From that point on he was in great demand at the Sforza court as a brilliant magician of the stage, and was referred to in official documents as painter and “ducal engineer.” At the age of thirty-eight, Leonardo had achieved, at last, the position he had desired when he wrote his memorable letter to the Moor years before.

FOUR

A Well-Employed Life

B
eginning in 1490, the whole of Italy experienced several years of peace and political stability, during which its city-states accumulated great wealth. In Milan, palaces were renovated, streets paved, and gardens laid out. There were pageants, costumed tournaments, and a succession of performances in a new theater Ludovico had given the city.

Leonardo had become the Moor’s favorite court artist. He was given a large space for his workshop and living quarters in the Corte Vecchia, the old ducal palace next to the cathedral, where Ludovico housed important guests. He seemed to have had an entire wing at his disposal, where he designed sets and costumes for festivities, invented mechanical devices, carried out scientific experiments, prepared the molds for the
gran cavallo
he was creating, and tested his first flying machines. To satisfy the constant demands of the court, he employed several apprentices, assistants, and contracted workers in addition to maintaining a small household of domestic staff.
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The
bottega di Leonardo
was a very busy place indeed.

For Leonardo himself, the 1490s were a period of intense creative activity. With two major projects—the equestrian statue and
The Last Supper
—his artistic career was at its peak, he was consulted repeatedly as an expert on architectural design, and he embarked on extensive and systematic research in mathematics, optics, mechanics, and the theory of human flight.

NEW FOCUS ON MATHEMATICS

This phase of intense research was triggered by Leonardo’s introduction to the library of Pavia in the summer of 1490. Ludovico had sent him to Pavia, which belonged to the duchy of Milan, to inspect the work on the city’s cathedral together with the architect Francesco di Giorgio. For Leonardo, the journey was intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding in several ways. During the weeks they spent together, he formed a close friendship with Francesco, who was highly regarded as an architect and engineer and whose treatise on civil and military engineering would greatly influence Leonardo in the coming years.
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Even more important for Leonardo, however, was his discovery of the magnificent library in the city’s Visconti Castle. Pavia was the seat of one of Europe’s oldest universities and had become a major artistic and intellectual center. The great hall of its library, its walls lined with shelves of manuscripts, was famous among scholars all over Italy.
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Leonardo was overwhelmed at the sight of this immense intellectual treasure. Indeed, he did not return to Milan with Francesco when their work was completed, but stayed in Pavia for another six months to further explore the library.

While he was immersed in this research, he met Fazio Cardano, a professor of mathematics at the University of Pavia who was a specialist in the “science of perspective,” which in the Renaissance included geometry and geometrical optics.
⁴
Leonardo’s discussions with Cardano and his studies in the library ignited a passion for mathematics, especially geometry, and fueled his subsequent research. Immediately after his return to Milan, he began two new Notebooks, now known as Manuscripts A and C, in which he applied his new knowledge of geometry to a systematic study of perspective and optics as well as to elementary problems involving weights, force, and movement—the branches of mechanics known today as statics, dynamics, and kinematics.

Leonardo’s research in statics and dynamics was concerned not only with the workings of machines but also, and even more important, with understanding the human body and its movements. For example, he investigated the body’s ability to generate various amounts of force in different positions. One of his key aims was to find out how a human pilot might generate enough force to lift a flying machine off the ground by flapping its mechanical wings.
⁵

In his studies of machines during that period, Leonardo began to separate individual mechanisms—levers, gears, bearings, couplings, etc.—from the machines in which they were embedded. This conceptual separation did not arise again in engineering until the eighteenth century.
⁶
In fact, Leonardo planned (and may even have written) a treatise on
Elements of Machines
, perhaps influenced by his discussions with Fazio Cardano of Euclid’s celebrated
Elements of Geometry
in Pavia.

Amazingly, in the midst of those years of intensive research, and while his workshop was fully occupied with a stream of orders from the Sforza court, Leonardo also continued his literary self-education. In 1493 he began to study Latin. In a special little Notebook, Manuscript H, he copied passages from a popular book of Latin grammar as well as Latin words from a contemporary vocabulary. It is very touching to see passages in which Leonardo, over forty years old and at the height of his powers and fame, wrote out the same basic conjugations—
amo, amas, amat
…—schoolboys have to memorize at age thirteen.

FRIENDSHIP AND BETRAYAL

In the midst of his studies and experimentation, and his final preparations for the casting of the giant bronze horse, Leonardo received the commission from Ludovico to paint
The Last Supper
—the masterpiece that most would argue stands at the climax of his career as a painter. It was to be a large fresco in the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The monastery was the Moor’s favorite place of worship; the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples was a traditional subject for decorating convent refectories.

As always, Leonardo contemplated the subject carefully within its religious, artistic, and architectural context. He made numerous preparatory sketches and completed the painting within two or three years—a relatively short period considering that he had to divide his time between painting in the “Grazie” and working on
il cavallo
in the Corte Vecchia.

Leonardo’s
Last Supper
, generally considered the first painting of the High Renaissance (the period of Italian art between, approximately, 1495 and 1520), is dramatically different from earlier representations of the subject. Indeed, it became famous throughout Europe immediately after its completion and was copied innumerable times. The first highly imaginative feature one notices is the way Leonardo integrated the fresco into the architecture of the refectory. Demonstrating his mastery of geometry, Leonardo contrived a series of visual paradoxes to create an elaborate illusion—a complex perspective that made the room of the Last Supper look like an extension of the refectory itself, in which the monks ate their meals.
⁷

One consequence of this complex perspective is that from every viewing position in the room, the spectator is drawn into the drama of the picture’s narrative with equal force. And dramatic it is. Whereas traditionally the Last Supper was pictured at the moment of communion, a moment of calm, individual meditation for each apostle, Leonardo chose the ominous moment when Jesus says, “One of you will betray me.”

The words of Christ have stirred up the solemn company, creating powerful waves of emotion. However, the effect is far from chaotic. The apostles are clearly organized into four groups of three figures, with Judas forming one of the groups together with Peter and John. This is another striking compositional innovation. Traditionally, Judas was pictured sitting on the other side of the table, facing the apostles, with his back to the spectator. Leonardo had no need to identify the traitor by isolating him in this way. By giving the apostles carefully chosen expressive gestures, which together cover a wide range of emotions, the artist made sure that we immediately recognize Judas, as he shrinks back into the dark of John’s shadow, nervously clutching his bag of silver. The depiction of the apostles as embodiments of individual emotional states and the integration of Judas into the dramatic narrative were so revolutionary that after Leonardo, no self-respecting artist could go back to the previous static configuration.

Throughout his career as a painter, Leonardo was famous for his ability to capture emotional subtleties—the “movements of the soul”—in facial expressions and eloquent gestures, and to weave them into complex compositional narratives. This exceptional ability was already apparent in his early
Madonnas
and reached its climax in
The Last Supper
and his other mature works.

The playwright and poet Giovanni Battista Giraldi, whose father knew Leonardo, provided a fascinating glimpse of the artist’s methods in achieving this singular mastery. “When Leonardo wished to paint a figure,” Giraldi wrote, “he first considered what social standing and what nature it was to represent; whether noble or plebeian, gay or severe, troubled or serene, old or young, irate or quiet, good or evil; and when he had made up his mind, he went to places where he knew that people of that kind assembled and observed their faces, their manners, dresses, and gestures; and when he found what fitted his purpose, he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying in his belt. After repeating this procedure many times, and being satisfied with the material thus collected for the figure which he wished to paint, he would proceed to give it shape.”
⁸

During this period, while Leonardo painted
The Last Supper
and meditated on the nature of human frailty and betrayal, his personal life was enriched by an encounter that would turn into a lasting friendship. In 1496 the Franciscan monk and well-known mathematician Luca Pacioli came to teach in Milan. Fra Luca had established his reputation as a mathematician with a vast treatise, a kind of mathematical textbook, titled
Summa de aritmetica geometrica proportioni et proportionalità (Summary of Arithmetic, Geometry of Proportion, and Proportionality).
Written in Italian rather than in the customary scholarly Latin, it contained synopses of the works of many great mathematicians, past and present. Leonardo, who had been keenly interested in mathematics since his studies at the library of Pavia, was fascinated by Pacioli’s treatise and immediately attracted to its author.

Fra Luca was a few years older than Leonardo and a fellow Tuscan, which may have helped them establish an easy rapport that soon turned into friendship. This friendship gave Leonardo a unique opportunity to deepen his mathematical studies. Pacioli not only helped him understand various portions of his own treatise, but guided him in a thorough study of the Latin edition of Euclid’s
Elements
. With the help of his friend, Leonardo systematically worked through all thirteen volumes of Euclid’s foundational exposition and filled two Notebooks with mathematical notes.
⁹

Soon after they began their study sessions, Leonardo and Fra Luca decided to collaborate on a book, titled
De divina proportione
, to be written by Pacioli and illustrated by Leonardo. The book, presented to Ludovico as a lavish manuscript and eventually published in Venice, contains an extensive review of the role of proportion in architecture and anatomy—and in particular of the golden section, or “divine proportion”—as well as detailed discussions of the five regular polyhedra known as the Platonic solids.
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It features over sixty illustrations by Leonardo, including superb drawings of the Platonic solids in both solid and skeletal forms, testimony to his exceptional ability to visualize abstract geometric forms. What further distinguishes this work is that it is the only collection of drawings by Leonardo published during his lifetime.
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While Leonardo drew the illustrations for Pacioli’s book, he also continued work on
The Last Supper
. Progress was steady but slow, as the artist worked on in his typical thoughtful and meditative way. He spent considerable time roaming the streets of Milan looking for suitable models for the faces of the apostles.
¹²
By 1497 the only part left to complete was the head of Judas.
¹³
At that point, the prior of the convent became so impatient with Leonardo’s slowness that he complained to the duke, who summoned the artist to hear his reasons for the delay. According to Vasari, Leonardo explained to the Moor that he was working on
The Last Supper
at least two hours a day, but that most of this work took place in his mind. He went on, slyly, to say that, if he did not find an appropriate model for Judas, he would give the villain the features of the petulant prior. Ludovico was so amused by Leonardo’s reply that he instructed the prior to be patient and let Leonardo finish his work undisturbed.

A few months later
The Last Supper
was completed. Unfortunately, it soon began to deteriorate. The painting is not a fresco, strictly speaking; it was not painted
al fresco
with water-based pigment on damp, fresh plaster. The fresco technique resulted in lasting murals but required fast execution, which was incompatible with Leonardo’s way of painting. Instead, the artist experimented with a mixture of egg tempera and oil. Because the wall was damp, the painting soon began to suffer. Tragically, subsequent attempts to halt or reverse its deterioration have been unsuccessful. Over the centuries there have been countless restorations of
The Last Supper
, many involving questionable techniques and often without exact records being kept. As Kenneth Clark wrote in 1939, “It is hard to resist the conclusion that what we now see on the wall of the Grazie is largely the work of restorers.”
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