Fritjof Capra (5 page)

Regardless of the term used, the fact that certain individuals possess exceptional and inexplicable creative powers beyond the reach of ordinary mortals was recognized throughout the ages. It was often associated with divine inspiration, especially in connection with poets. For example, in the twelfth century, the German abbess and mystic Hildegard von Bingen was famous throughout Europe as a naturalist, composer, visual artist, poet, and playwright. She herself, however, took no credit for the amazing range and depth of her talents but commented simply that she was “a feather on the breath of God.”
²⁵

In the Italian Renaissance, the association of exceptional creative powers with divine inspiration was expressed in a very direct way by bestowing on those individuals the epithet
divino
. Among the Renaissance masters, Leonardo as well as his younger contemporaries Raphael and Michelangelo were acclaimed as divine.

Since the development of modern psychology, neuroscience, and genetic research, there has been a lively discussion about the origins, mental characteristics, and genetic makeup of geniuses. However, numerous studies of well-known historical figures have shown a bewildering diversity of hereditary, psychological, and cultural factors, defying all attempts to establish some common pattern.
²⁶
While Mozart was a famous child prodigy, Einstein was a late bloomer. Newton attended a prestigious university, whereas Leonardo was essentially self-taught. Goethe’s parents were well educated and of high social standing, but Shakespeare’s seem to have been relatively undistinguished; and the list goes on.

In spite of this wide range of backgrounds, psychologists have been able to identify a set of mental attributes that seem to be distinctive signs of genius, in addition to exceptional talent in a particular field.
²⁷
All these were characteristic of Leonardo to a very high degree.

The first is an intense curiosity and great enthusiasm for discovery and understanding. This was indeed an outstanding quality of Leonardo, whom Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history.”
²⁸
Another striking sign of genius is an extraordinary capacity for intense concentration over long periods of time. Isaac Newton apparently was able to hold a mathematical problem in his mind for weeks until it surrendered to his mental powers. When asked how he made his remarkable discoveries, Newton is reported to have replied, “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait until the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.”
²⁹
Leonardo seems to have worked in a very similar way, and most of the time not only on one but on several problems simultaneously.

We have a vivid testimony of Leonardo’s exceptional powers of concentration from his contemporary Matteo Bandello, who described how as a boy he watched the artist paint
The Last Supper
. He would see the master arrive early in the morning, Bandello tells us, climb up onto the scaffolding, and immediately start to work:

He sometimes stayed there from dawn to sundown, never putting down his brush, forgetting to eat and drink, painting without pause. He would also sometimes remain two, three, or four days without touching his brush, although he spent several hours a day standing in front of the work, arms folded, examining and criticizing the figures to himself. I also saw him, driven by some sudden urge, at midday, when the sun was at its height, leaving the Corte Vecchia, where he was working on his marvelous clay horse, to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie, without seeking shade, and clamber up onto the scaffolding, pick up a brush, put in one or two strokes, and then go away again.
³⁰

Closely associated with the powers of intense concentration that are characteristic of geniuses seems to be their ability to memorize large amounts of information in the form of a coherent whole, a single gestalt. Newton kept mathematical proofs he had derived for months in his mind before eventually writing them down and publishing them. Goethe is said to have entertained his fellow passengers on long coach journeys by reciting his novels to them, word for word, before committing them to paper. And then there is the famous story of Mozart, who as a child wrote out a note-perfect score of Gregorio Allegri’s
Miserere
, a complex chant for a five-part choir, after hearing it only once.

Leonardo would follow people with striking facial features for hours, memorize their appearance, and then draw them when he was back in his studio, reportedly with complete accuracy. The Milanese painter and writer Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo tells the story of how Leonardo once wished to paint some peasants laughing:

He chose certain men whom he thought appropriate for his purpose, and, after getting acquainted with them, arranged a feast for them with some of his friends. Sitting close to them he then proceeded to tell the maddest and most ridiculous tales imaginable, making them, who were unaware of his intentions, laugh uproariously. Whereupon he observed all their gestures very attentively and those ridiculous things they were doing, and impressed them on his mind; and after they had left, he retired to his room and there made a perfect drawing which moved those who looked at it to laughter, as if they had been moved by Leonardo’s stories at the feast.
³¹

In subsequent chapters I shall recount the chronology of Leonardo’s life, following its trajectory from Vinci, the little hamlet, to Florence, the thriving center of Renaissance art, to the Sforza court in Milan, to the papal court in Rome, and to his final home in the Loire valley in the palace of the king of France. However, the documentations of this rich and fascinating life contain hardly any clues to the sources of Leonardo’s genius. Indeed, as classicist Penelope Murray observes in the introduction to her anthology
Genius: The History of an Idea
:

There remains something fundamentally inexplicable about the nature of such prodigious powers. We attribute the extraordinary quality of, for example, Shakespeare’s poetry, Mozart’s music and Leonardo’s paintings to the genius of their creators because we recognize that such works are not simply the product of learning, technique, or sheer hard work. Of course we can trace sources and influences…but no amount of analysis has yet been able to explain the capacities of those rare and gifted individuals who can produce creative work of lasting quality and value.
³²

In view of the persistent failure of scientists to shed light on the origins of genius, it would seem that, after all, Vasari’s explanation may still be the best: “Occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art.”

TWO

The Universal Man

T
he intellectual climate of the Renaissance was decisively shaped by the philosophical and literary movement of humanism, which made the capabilities of the human individual its central concern. This was a fundamental shift from the medieval dogma of understanding human nature from a religious point of view. The Renaissance of fered a more secular outlook, with heightened focus on the individual human intellect. The new spirit of humanism expressed itself through a strong emphasis on classical studies, which exposed scholars and artists to a great diversity of Greek and Roman philosophical ideas that encouraged individual critical thought and prepared the ground for the gradual emergence of a rational, scientific frame of mind.

In Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, the humanists’ enthusiastic embrace of discovery and learning gave rise to a new human ideal—
l’uomo universale
, the infinitely versatile “universal” man, educated in all branches of knowledge and capable of producing innovations in many of them. This ideal became so firmly associated with the Renaissance that later historians have commonly referred to it as the ideal of the “Renaissance man.” In the Florentine society of the fifteenth century, not only artists and philosophers but also merchants and statesmen strove to become “universal.” They became learned in Latin and Greek, conversant with the works of Aristotle, and familiar with classical treatises on natural history, geography, architecture, and engineering.
¹

The Florentine humanists were inspired by several individuals in their midst who seemed to perfectly embody the ideal of the
uomo universale
. One of the first and most famous was Leon Battista Alberti, born half a century before Leonardo, to whom he seems the perfect precursor.
²
Alberti, like Leonardo, was said to be blessed with exceptional beauty and great physical strength, and he was also a skilled horseman and gifted musician. Moreover, he was a celebrated architect and accomplished painter, wrote beautiful Latin prose, studied both civil and canonical law as well as physics and mathematics, and was the author of several pioneering treatises on the visual arts. As a young man, Leonardo was fascinated by Alberti: He read him avidly, commented on his writings, and emulated him in his own life and work.

In his later years, Leonardo, of course, surpassed Alberti in both the breadth and depth of his work. The difference between Leonardo and the other “universal men” of the Italian Renaissance was not only that he went much farther than anyone else in his inquiries, asking questions nobody had asked before, but that he transcended the disciplinary boundaries of his time. He did so by recognizing patterns that interconnected forms and processes in different domains and by integrating his discoveries into a unified vision of the world.

Indeed, it seems that this is how Leonardo himself understood the meaning of
universale
. His famous statement,
“Facile cosa è farsi universale”
—“It is easy to become universal”—has often been interpreted to mean that infinite versatility was easy to acquire. When we read his assertion within the context in which it was made, however, an entirely different meaning becomes apparent. While discussing the proportions of the body, Leonardo wrote in his
Treatise on Painting
,

For a man who knows how, it is easy to become universal, since all land animals resemble each other in the parts of their body, that is, muscles, nerves, and bones, and differ only in length and size.
³

For Leonardo, in other words, being universal meant to recognize similarities in living forms that interconnect different facets of nature—in this case, anatomical structures of different animals. The recognition that nature’s living forms exhibit such fundamental patterns was a key insight of the school of Romantic biology in the eighteenth century. These patterns were called
Urtypen
(“archetypes”) in Germany, and in England Charles Darwin acknowledged that this concept played a central role in his early conception of evolution.
⁴
In the twentieth century, anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson expressed the same idea in the succinct phrase “the pattern which connects.”
⁵

Thus, Leonardo da Vinci was the first in a lineage of scientists who focused on the patterns interconnecting the basic structures and processes of living systems. Today, this approach to science is called “systemic thinking.” This, in my eyes, is the essence of what Leonardo meant by
farsi universale
. Freely translating his statement into modern scientific language, I would rephrase it this way: “For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker.”

LEONARDO’S SYNTHESIS

Leonardo’s synthesis of art and science becomes easier to grasp when we realize that in his time, these terms were not used in the sense in which we understand them today. To his contemporaries,
arte
meant skill (in the sense we still use today when we speak of “the art of medicine,” or “the art of management”), while
scientia
meant knowledge, or theory. Leonardo insisted again and again that the “art,” or skill, of painting must be supported by the painter’s “science,” or sound knowledge of living forms, by his intellectual understanding of their intrinsic nature and underlying principles.

He also emphasized that this understanding was a continual intellectual process—
discorso mentale
—and that painting itself, therefore, deserved to be considered an intellectual endeavor.
⁶
“The scientific and true principles of painting,” he wrote in the
Trattato
,” are understood by the mind alone without manual operations. This is the theory of painting, which resides in the mind that conceives it.”
⁷
This conception of painting sets Leonardo apart from other Renaissance theorists. He saw it as his mission to elevate his art from the rank of a mere craft to an intellectual discipline on a par with the seven traditional liberal arts. (In the Middle Ages, the seven branches of learning known as the liberal arts were the “trivium” of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, whose study led to the Bachelor of Arts degree, plus the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, which led to the Master of Arts.)

The third element in Leonardo’s synthesis, in addition to
arte
(skill) and
scientia
(knowledge), is
fantasia
, the artist’s creative imagination. In the Renaissance, confidence in the capabilities of the human individual had become so strong that a new conception of the artist as creator had emerged. Indeed, the Italian humanists were so bold as to compare artistic creations to the creations of God. This comparison was first applied to the creativity of poets, and was then extended, especially by Leonardo, to the painter’s creative power:

If the painter wants to see beauties that make him fall in love, he is the lord who can generate them, and if he wants to see monstrous things that frighten, or funny things that make him laugh, or things that truly arouse compassion, he is their lord and God…. In fact, whatever there is in the universe, by essence, presence, or imagination, he has it first in his mind and then in his hands.
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For Leonardo, the artist’s imagination always remains closely linked to his intellectual understanding of nature. “The inventions of his
fantasia
,” explains Martin Kemp, “are never out of harmony with universal dynamics as rationally comprehended; they are fabulous yet not implausible, each element in their composition deriving from the causes and effects of the natural world.”
⁹
At the same time, Leonardo insisted on the divine quality of the painter’s creativity. “The godlike nature of the science of painting,” he declared, “transforms the painter’s mind into a resemblance of the divine mind.”
¹⁰

Leonardo realized that
fantasia
is not limited to artists, but rather is a general quality of the human mind. He called all human creations—artifacts as well as works of art—“inventions,” and he made an interesting distinction between human inventions and the living forms created by nature. “Nature encompasses only the production of simple things,” he argued, “but man from these simple things produces an infinity of compounds.”
¹¹

From the modern scientific perspective, this distinction no longer holds, because we know that in the process of evolution, nature, too, produces living forms through an infinity of new compounds from cells and molecules. However, in a broader sense, Leonardo’s distinction is still valid as a distinction between forms that emerge through evolution and forms created by human design. In contemporary scientific language, Leonardo’s term “simple things” would be replaced by “emergent structures” and his notion of “compounds” by “designed structures.”
¹²

Throughout his life, Leonardo referred to himself as an inventor. In his view, an inventor was someone who created an artifact or work of art by assembling various elements into a new configuration that did not appear in nature. This definition comes very close to our notion of a designer, which did not exist in the Renaissance. (Leonardo’s term
disegnatore
, sometimes incorrectly translated as “designer,” always means “draftsman” a better equivalent of “designer” is his term
compositore
.) The concept of design as a distinct profession emerged only in the twentieth century as a consequence of mass production and industrial capitalism.
¹³
During the preindustrial era, design was always an integral part of a larger process that included problem solving, innovation, form giving, decoration, and manufacturing. This process traditionally took place in the domains of engineering, architecture, crafts, and the fine arts.

Accordingly, Leonardo did not separate the design process—the abstract configuration of multiple elements—from the process of material production. However, he always seemed to be more interested in the process of design than in its physical realization. It is worthwhile to recall that most of the machines and mechanical devices he invented, designed, and presented in superb drawings were not built; most of his military inventions and schemes of civil engineering were not realized; and although he was famous as an architect, his name is not connected with any known building. Even as a painter he often seemed to be more interested in the solution of compositional problems—the
discorso mentale
—than in the actual completion of the painting.

It seems to me, then, that the wide-ranging activities and achievements of Leonardo da Vinci, the archetypal
uomo universale
, are best examined within the three categories of artist, designer, and scientist. In his own synthesis, the activities of the inventor, or designer, like those of the artist, are inextricably linked to
scientia
, the knowledge of natural principles. He referred to himself, in one of his most arresting expressions, as “inventor and interpreter between nature and humans.”
¹⁴

THE SUBLIME LEFT HAND

In practice, it was Leonardo’s exceptional drawing facility that formed the link between the three domains of art, design, and science, as he himself recognized:

Drawing, [the foundation of painting], teaches the architect to render his building agreeable to the eye; this is what teaches potters, goldsmiths, weavers, embroiderers. It has found the characters by which different languages are expressed; it has given the arithmeticians their ciphers and has taught geometers how to represent their figures; it instructs the experts in perspective, astronomers, machine builders, and engineers.
¹⁵

With his acute powers of observation and his “sublime left hand” (as his friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, called it), Leonardo was able to draw, in exquisite detail, flowers, birds in flight, whirlpools, muscles and bones, and human expressions with unparalleled accuracy (see Fig. 2-1). Writing about the studies for his early
Madonnas
, Kenneth Clark comments, “They show his matchless quickness of vision, which allowed him to convey every movement or gesture with the certainty and unconscious grace of a great dancer performing a familiar step.”
¹⁶