Fritjof Capra (4 page)

In other words, in Leonardo’s mind, animals develop sensitivity to pain because it gives them a selective advantage in avoiding injury when they move about.

By all accounts, Leonardo was a man of unusual tenderness. He had tremendous compassion for the suffering of people and animals. He was vehemently opposed to war, which he called
pazzia bestialissima
(“most bestial madness”). In view of this, it seems contradictory that he should have offered his services as military engineer to various rulers of his time.

Part of the answer to this contradiction had to do with his pragmatic attitude when it came to securing a stable income that would allow him to pursue his scientific research. With his extraordinary talent for designing machines of all kinds, and in view of the endless political rivalries and conflicts on the Italian peninsula, Leonardo shrewdly recognized that employment as a consulting military engineer and architect was one of the best ways to secure his financial independence.

However, it is also clear from his Notebooks that he was fascinated by the destructive engines of war, perhaps in the same way that natural cataclysms and disasters fascinated him. He spent considerable time designing and drawing machines of destruction—bombards, explosive cannonballs, catapults, giant crossbows, and the like, even as he remained adamantly opposed to war and violence.

As biographer Serge Bramly points out, despite his many years of service as military engineer, Leonardo never participated in any offensive action. Most of his advice consisted of designing structures to defend and preserve a town or city.
¹²
During a conflict between Florence and Pisa, he proposed to divert the river Arno as a means to avoid a bloody battle. He went on to add that this should be followed up with the construction of a navigable waterway that would reconcile the combatants and bring prosperity to both cities.

Leonardo’s most explicit condemnation of war consists of a long and detailed description of how to paint a battle, written when he was in his late thirties. Even a few excerpts from this text, which runs over several pages, reveal how vividly the artist intended to picture the horrors of war:

You will first paint the smoke of the artillery, mingled in the air with the dust raised by the commotion of horses and combatants…. Let the air be full of arrows of all kinds, some shooting upwards, some falling, some flying level. The bullets from the firearms will leave a trail of smoke behind them…. If you show a man who has fallen to the ground, reproduce his skid marks in the dust, which has been turned into blood-stained mire…. Paint a horse dragging the dead body of its master, and leaving behind him in the dust and mud the track where the body was dragged along. Make the vanquished and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain…. Represent others crying out with their mouths wide open and running away… others in the agonies of death grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with their fists clenched against their bodies, and their legs contorted.
¹³

A decade after he wrote this, Leonardo, who was then over fifty and at the height of his fame, received a commission for a huge mural, which gave him the opportunity to turn his words into action. The Signoria, the Florentine city government, had decided to celebrate the military glory of Florence by decorating its new council chamber with two large frescoes depicting its victories in two historic battles—against Milan at Anghiari and against Pisa at Cascina. The Signoria commissioned the former fresco from Leonardo and the latter from his young rival Michelangelo.

The Battle of Anghiari
was the most important public commission Leonardo had ever received. He completed the huge cartoon (or sketch) within a year, as stipulated in his contract, and then spent over half a year painting the fresco’s central scene, a group of horsemen fighting for a standard. Because of technical problems that resulted in the rapid deterioration of the mural, he never completed the huge painting. (Michelangelo left Florence for Rome to paint the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, without starting his
Battle of Cascina
.) The central part of Leonardo’s composition, known as
The Struggle for the Standard
, remained on the wall of the council chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio for almost sixty years before the Signoria finally had its last traces removed. During those decades it dazzled spectators and was copied by several other Renaissance masters.

Figure 1-2: Peter Paul Rubens after Leonardo,
The Struggle for the Standard,
c. 1600–1608, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Leonardo left many preparatory drawings for
The Battle of Anghiari
, from which art historians have reconstructed the painting’s general composition.
¹⁴
While he intended to present the unfolding of the battle with great clarity and historical accuracy, Leonardo used the central episode as a symbolic statement exposing the fury and “bestial madness” of war.

The superb copy of
The Struggle for the Standard
by Peter Paul Rubens (Fig. 1-2), now at the Louvre, shows Leonardo’s incredibly tight composition of a confused melee in which, in Vasari’s words, “fury, hate, and rage are as visible in the men as in the horses.” Moreover, by dressing the combatants in unrealistic theatrical costumes rather than in battlefield armor, Leonardo enhanced the symbolic character of the scene, underscoring the artistic declaration of his abhorrence of violence. Had he completed the fresco, and had it survived, it might well stand alongside Picasso’s
Guernica
as one of the art world’s most forceful condemnations of the folly of war.

SECRECY AND CONTRADICTIONS

Biographers have often been exasperated by the illusive task of presenting a clear picture of Leonardo, the man. He was worldly, eloquent, and charming, but also solitary, accustomed to spending long periods in intense concentration. He had an eminently practical mind, yet delighted in fables, allegories, and fantasies.
¹⁵
He displayed physical strength and virile energy as well as refined elegance and feminine grace. As Serge Bramly comments wryly, “With Leonardo, everything seems to have two sides.”
¹⁶

Leonardo not only embodied a dynamic tension between contradictory paradoxes in his personality, but he himself was also fascinated by opposites throughout his life. While he searched for a canon of ideal human proportions, he was strangely attracted by grotesque appearances. “He so loved bizarre physiognomies, with beards and hair like savages,” Vasari recounts, “that he would follow someone who had caught his attention for a whole day. He would memorize his appearance so well that on his return home he would be able to draw him as if he had him before his very eyes.”
¹⁷

Leonardo made many drawings of these “grotesques,” which enjoyed great popularity in his time and were the forerunners of the famous caricatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the most typical of Leonardo’s caricatures is a bald, resolute elderly man with a terrific frown and “nutcracker” nose, who is often juxtaposed on the same sheet of paper with a beautiful youth of soft, feminine features. Old age and youth, virility and grace, are examples of the interplay of opposites—of the yang and the yin as they are called in Chinese philosophy—that are so striking in Leonardo’s personality and art.

The artist’s fascination with grotesque forms also led him to devise the most extravagant, and often quite macabre, practical jokes, which delighted the courtiers in Milan and Rome. At the papal court in Rome, Vasari tells us that Leonardo obtained a large lizard to which he attached “with a mixture of quicksilver some wings, made from the scales stripped from other lizards, which quivered as it walked along. Then, after he had given it eyes, horns, and a beard he tamed the creature, and keeping it in a box he used to show it to his friends and frightened the life out of them.” On another occasion, according to Vasari, Leonardo cleaned and scraped the intestines of a bullock and “made them so fine that they could be compressed into the palm of one hand. Then he would fix one end of them to a pair of bellows lying in another room, and when they were inflated they filled the room in which they were and forced anyone standing there into a corner.” Reportedly, he perpetrated hundreds of follies of this kind.

The challenge of presenting a consistent portrait of Leonardo da Vinci is further complicated by the fact that he was very secretive about his personal thoughts and feelings. In the thousands of pages of manuscripts that have come down to us, there is barely a trace of Leonardo’s emotional life. There are very few affectionate references to anyone, family or friends, and hardly any clues to his feelings about the people and events of his time. While he was a master at expressing subtle emotions in his paintings, it seems that Leonardo kept his own innermost feelings to himself.

This secrecy also extends to his sexuality. It is widely assumed that Leonardo was gay, but there is no definite proof of his homosexuality. Art historians have pointed to various features of his drawings and writings that might indicate that he was attracted to men, and it has often been noted that there is no record of any woman in Leonardo’s life, while it was well known that he always seemed to be surrounded by strikingly beautiful young men.
¹⁸
But even though there were many openly homosexual and successful Florentine artists in the Renaissance, Leonardo was as secretive about his sexuality as he was about other aspects of his personal life.

Leonardo was equally secretive about his scientific work. Although he intended to eventually publish the results of his investigations, he kept them hidden away during his entire life, apparently out of fear that his ideas might be stolen.
¹⁹
In Milan, he designed his studio so that the platform holding his work could be lowered through the floor to the story below, using a system of pulleys and counterweights, to hide it from inquisitive eyes whenever he was not working.
²⁰

Much has been made in this context of the fact that Leonardo, who was left-handed, wrote all his notes in mirror writing, from right to left. In fact, he could write with both hands and in either direction. But, like many left-handed people, he probably found it more convenient and faster to write from right to left when he jotted down his personal notes. On the other hand, as Bramly points out, this extraordinary handwriting also suited very well his taste for secrecy.
²¹

The main reason Leonardo did not share his scientific knowledge with others, although he shared his knowledge of painting with fellow artists and disciples, was that he regarded it as his intellectual capital—the basis of his skills in engineering and stagecraft, which were the main sources of his regular income. He must have feared that sharing this body of knowledge would have diminished his chances of steady employment.

Moreover, Leonardo did not see science as a collective enterprise the way we see it now. In the words of art historian and classicist Charles Hope, “He had…no real understanding of the way in which the growth of knowledge was a cumulative and collaborative process, as was so evidently the case with the major intellectual enterprise of his time, the recovery of the heritage of classical antiquity.”
²²
Leonardo had no formal education and was not able to read the scholarly books of the time in Latin, but he studied Italian translations whenever he could obtain them. He sought out scholars in various fields to borrow books and elicit information, but he did not share his own discoveries with them—neither in conversations, as far as we know, nor in correspondence or publications.

This secrecy about his scientific work is the one significant respect in which Leonardo was not a scientist in the modern sense. If he had shared his discoveries and discussed them with the intellectuals of his time, his influence on the subsequent development of Western science might well have been as profound as his impact on the history of art. As it was, he had little influence on the scientists who came after him, because his scientific work was hidden during his lifetime and remained locked in his Notebooks long after his death. As the eminent Leonardo scholar Kenneth Keele reflected, “The intellectual loneliness of the artist-scientist Leonardo was not merely contemporary; it has lasted for centuries.”
²³

SIGNS OF GENIUS

Since Leonardo da Vinci is widely viewed as the archetype of a genius, it is interesting to ask ourselves what we mean by that term. On what grounds are we justified in calling Leonardo a genius, and how does he compare with other artists and scientists known as geniuses?

During Leonardo’s time, the term “genius” did not have our modern meaning of a person endowed with extraordinary intellectual and creative powers.
²⁴
The Latin word
genius
originated in Roman religion, where it denoted the spirit of the
gens
, the family. It was understood as a guardian spirit, first associated with individuals and then also with peoples and places. The extraordinary achievements of artists or scientists were attributed to their genius, or attendant spirit. This meaning of genius was prevalent throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, the meaning of the word changed to its familiar modern meaning to denote these individuals themselves, as in the phrase “Newton was a genius.”