Fritjof Capra (9 page)

Leonardo’s idea of urban health, based on the view of the city as a living system, was reconceived very recently, in the 1980s, when the World Health Organization initiated its Healthy Cities Project in Europe.
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Today, the Healthy Cities movement is active in over one thousand cities around the world, most likely without participants being aware that the principles on which it is based were set forth by Leonardo da Vinci more than five centuries ago.

THE ARTIST AS MAGICIAN

One of the essential duties of the courtly artist in the Renaissance was to design the settings and scenery for court festivities—pageants and theatrical performances—with all the accessory decorations, costumes, and ephemeral architecture. Through these spectacles, the artist created for the court the images of magnificence, wealth, and power that its ruler wanted to project. The Sforza court in Milan was famous for the ostentatious affluence of its pageants, which took place at annual religious festivals as well as at a series of spectacular royal weddings. Leonardo was well aware of the importance of his role in creating dazzling spectacles for such events. He dedicated considerable time and energy to these tasks and excelled in them no less than in his other artistic pursuits. Indeed, as Arasse points out, during his lifetime “Leonardo [owed] much of his fame to his unrivaled talents as artist of the ephemeral.”
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Theatrical performances in particular were an ideal vehicle for Leonardo to show his diversity and brilliance as a designer. For many plays at court he acted as producer, stage and costume designer, and makeup artist as well as inventor of stage machinery.
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He carefully studied these theatrical arts and went on to create many innovations. For example, it was Leonardo who invented the first revolving stage in the history of the theater; he was also the first to raise the curtain, rather than have it fall at the start of the performance, as had been the custom.
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For the most elaborate performances, Leonardo combined his skills of painting, costume design, musical composition, and engineering to create a complete spectacle, with moving scenery and “special effects” produced by his stage machines. To his contemporaries, these performances were awe-inspiring, bordering on magic. For example, in the production of Baldassare Taccone’s
Danaë
, Leonardo created dazzling illusions of Zeus’s transformation into golden rain, and of Danaë’s metamorphosis into a star. During the latter “the audience could see a star…rising up slowly towards heaven, with sounds so powerful that it seemed the palace would fall down.”
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When he staged the play
Orfeo
by Angelo Poliziano, Leonardo invented a system of gearwheels and counterweights to create a mountain that would suddenly split open, revealing Pluto on his throne, rising from the depths of the underworld, accompanied by terrifying sounds and illuminated by “infernal” lights.
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These spectacular performances firmly established Leonardo’s fame as a brilliant engineer and peerless magician of the stage.

INTERWOVEN STRANDS

The tapestries and other decorative elements designed for the courtly pageants and “masques” usually included elaborate emblems and allegories, rich in symbolism and wordplay, which served to glorify the ruling powers. Leonardo produced many of these allegorical drawings, with complex symbolic messages, many of which have been impossible for modern scholars to interpret. He also became fascinated with and used a more abstract kind of emblem featuring tangled curves in the form of knots and scrolls. These knot designs, which were very popular in the late fifteenth century, were known as
fantasie dei vinci
, after the reeds
(vinci)
used in basketry. Exploiting the fortuitous connection with his name, Leonardo used such interlaced
vinci
motifs as his signature designs in numerous sketches.
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During his last two years at the Sforza court, Leonardo created the ultimate emblem for Prince Ludovico—a vast and complex
fantasia dei vinci
that covered the walls and vaulted ceiling of an entire room. Known as the Sala delle Asse (Room of the Wooden Boards), this is a large square room in the north tower of the Sforza Castle, in which four lunettes on each wall combine to generate an elaborate vaulting. Leonardo’s highly inventive decoration shows a grove of mulberry trees rooted in rocky subsoil, their trunks rising up to the ceiling like columns supporting the actual vaulting, their branches crisscrossing the vault in a Gothic rib structure of elegantly intertwined curves.
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The smaller twigs and leaves form a luxuriant tangled labyrinth of greenery spreading around the walls and across the ceiling. The entire composition is held together by a single endless golden ribbon winding in and out of the branches, in the complex arabesques of traditional knot designs.

The painting in the Sala delle Asse is remarkable on several levels. With his extensive knowledge of plants, Leonardo gave the branches and leaves a surprisingly realistic appearance of exuberant growth, and he gracefully and beautifully integrated these natural growth patterns into the existing architectural structure and into the geometry of the formal decoration (see Fig. 2-6). In addition, Leonardo wove multiple meanings into his leafy labyrinth that went far beyond the obligatory glorification of the Prince.
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The dedication of the room to Ludovico’s magnificence is obvious. Inscriptions on four prominently placed tablets praise his politics, and a shield bearing the joint coats of arms of Ludovico and his wife, Beatrice d’Este, adorns the center of the vault. The intertwining branches were meant to commemorate their union.

But there are more subtle layers of meaning to Leonardo’s design. The mulberry tree itself is rich in symbolism. The use of a stylized tree with leaves and roots was one of the Sforza emblems. The mulberry is an allusion to the prince’s well-known appellation
il Moro
(“the Moor”), which also means “mulberry.” The mulberry was also considered a wise and cautious tree, since it flowers slowly and ripens quickly, and hence was known as a symbol of wise government. In addition, the mulberry was connected with silk production, a major industry in Milan which Ludovico strongly encouraged. This link to industry is reinforced by the golden ribbon, which not only evokes the elegance of the Sforza court but is also a reminder of the manufacture of gold thread, another Milanese specialty.

Figure 2-6: Detail from the Sala delle Asse, 1498–99, Castello Sforzesco, Milan

At an even deeper level, Leonardo’s decoration conveys in symbolic form his conviction that human industry should integrate itself harmoniously into nature’s living forms. Indeed, it may not be too far-fetched to see the
vinci
decoration of the Sala delle Asse as a symbol of Leonardo’s science. The individual trunks, or columns, on which it rests, might be seen as the treatises he planned to write on various subjects, grounded in the soil of traditional knowledge, but intended to break through the rocks of the Aristotelian worldview and take human knowledge to new heights. As the contents of each treatise unfolded, they would interlink with each other to form a harmonious whole. The similarities of patterns and processes that interconnect different facets of nature provide the golden thread that integrates the multiple branches of Leonardo’s science into a unified vision of the world.

One hundred years after Leonardo, the French philosopher René Descartes compared science (or “natural philosophy,” as it was then called) to a tree. “The roots are metaphysics,” he wrote, “the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences.”
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In Descartes’ metaphor, physics, itself grounded in metaphysics, was the single foundation of all the sciences, the discipline that provides the most fundamental description of reality. Leonardo’s science, by contrast, cannot be reduced to a single foundation, as we have seen. Its strength does not derive from a single trunk, but from the complex interconnectedness of the branches of many trees. For Leonardo, recognizing the numerous patterns of relationships in nature was the hallmark of a universal science. Today, we, too, sense a greater need for such universal, or systemic, knowledge, which is one of the reasons why Leonardo’s unified vision of the world is so relevant to our time.

In the following chapters I shall follow Leonardo’s golden ribbon along various branches of his science of living forms. But before beginning that journey, it is important to know more about when and where those branches grew and foliated in his own life.

THREE

The Florentine

I
n view of the enormous fame Leonardo enjoyed during his lifetime and the voluminous notes he left behind, it is astonishing that reliable biographical information about his life is very scant. In his Notebooks, he rarely commented on external events; he rarely dated his entries or drawings; and there are very few exact references to specific events in his life in official documents or the letters of his time.

Thus it is not surprising that succeeding generations of biographers and commentators relied to a degree on legends and myths about this great genius of the Renaissance. It was not until the late nineteenth century, when the Notebooks were finally transcribed and published, that the full extent of Leonardo’s intellect began to emerge, and only in the twentieth century that biographers and art historians finally were able, with a great deal of detective work, to separate fact from fiction and produce accurate biographies.
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These detailed accounts make it clear that Leonardo’s life was driven by his tremendous scientific curiosity. He always sought to find stable situations with regular incomes that allowed him to engage in his intellectual pursuits relatively undisturbed, rather than relying on infrequent commissions for works of art. Leonardo was very successful in this endeavor, living quite comfortably for most of his life. He was employed as court artist and engineer by various rulers in Milan, Rome, and in France, and he did not hesitate to change his allegiances when the political fortunes of his patrons shifted—as long as the new ruler again offered him a stable income and enough freedom to continue his scientific investigations.

Leonardo’s desire for stable circumstances, in which he could calmly practice his art and science as well as carry out the many duties expected from him at court, stands in strong contrast to the turbulent times in which he lived. Italy in the fifteenth century was a kaleido-scope of over a dozen independent states, which formed ever-shifting alliances in a constant struggle for economic and political power that was always on the verge of degenerating into war. The principal powers of the time were the duchies of Milan and Savoy and the republic of Venice in the north, the republic of Florence and the territories of the papacy in the center of the peninsula, and the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily in the south. In addition, there were a number of smaller states—Genoa, Mantua, Ferrara, and Siena.

Leonardo had to move many times in the face of impending war, foreign occupations, and other changes of political power. Thus the trajectory of his life led him from Florence to Milan, from Milan to Venice, back to Florence, back again to Milan, then to Rome, and finally to Amboise in France. In addition, he made many short journeys within Italy, including several trips from Florence to Rome and to various places in Tuscany and Romagna, and from Milan to Pavia, Lake Como, and Genoa. About the many sudden changes and forced movements in his life, there is hardly a word in Leonardo’s Notebooks. Considering that travel by horse and mules took considerable time in those days, it is evident that he spent a significant portion of his life on the road, which makes his vast scientific and artistic output even more impressive.

In spite of all these peregrinations, Leonardo’s art and culture remained rooted in Florence. He spoke a distinctive, eloquent Tuscan that was greatly admired at the Sforza court in Milan, and throughout his life he was known as “Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine.” Before he acquired his Florentine culture, however, Leonardo had several formative childhood experiences in the Tuscan countryside that exerted lasting influences on his character and intellect.

CHILDHOOD IN VINCI

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, a charming Tuscan village on the slopes of Montalbano, some twenty miles west of Florence. His father, Ser Piero da Vinci, was a young and ambitious notary,
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his mother a peasant girl named Caterina. Leonardo was an illegitimate child, which severely limited his career options later on. Soon after his birth, his mother was married off to a local peasant, while his father married a young woman from the Florentine bourgeoisie, probably in order to further his career in Florence, where he gradually built up a clientele. The boy was raised by his elderly grandparents and his uncle Francesco, who managed their farm in Vinci.

Francesco da Vinci, only sixteen years older than Leonardo, was very fond of his nephew and soon became a father figure to him. He was a gentle and contemplative man who loved nature and knew it well. He would have spent many hours with the boy, walking through the vineyards and olive groves that surrounded Vinci (as they do today), observing the birds, lizards, insects, and other small creatures that inhabited the countryside, teaching him the names and qualities of the flowers and medicinal plants that grew in the region.

Doubtless it was Francesco who instilled in the young Leonardo his deep respect for life, his boundless curiosity, and the patience required for intimate observation of nature. Leonardo also began to draw early on in his childhood. In his Notebooks he listed “many flowers portrayed from nature” among the works he had produced in his youth,
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and his earliest extant drawing, done at age twenty-one, is a view of the Tuscan countryside of his childhood, tilled fields framed by the foothills and rocks of Montalbano.
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It is striking that in this early drawing as well as in that of a ravine with waterbirds (Fig. 3-1) that he made a few years later, Leonardo already pictured the dramatic rock formations that would form the backgrounds of most of his paintings. It seems that his lifelong fascination with pinnacles of rocks, carved out by water and eventually turning into gravel and fertile soil, originated in his childhood experience of the mountain streams and rocky outcroppings that are typical of parts of the countryside around Vinci.

As a young boy, Leonardo explored these mysterious rock formations, waterfalls, and caves. Over the years, their memory no doubt intensified as he embraced the ancient analogy of macro-and microcosm and began to view the rocks, soil, and water as the bones, flesh, and blood of the living Earth. Thus the rock formations of his childhood became Leonardo’s personal mythical language that would forever appear in his paintings.

In Vinci, Leonardo attended one of the customary
scuole d’abaco
(“abacus schools”), which taught children reading, writing, and a rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic adapted to the needs of merchants.
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Students who prepared for university then moved on to a
scuola di lettere
(“school of letters”), where they were taught the humanities based on the study of the great Latin authors. Such an education included rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.

Being an illegitimate child, Leonardo was barred from attending university, and hence was not sent to a
scuola di lettere
. Instead he began his apprenticeship in the arts. This had a decisive influence on his further education and intellectual development. Being “unlettered” meant that he knew almost no Latin and was therefore unable to read the scholarly books of his time, except for the few texts that had been translated into the vernacular. It also meant that he was not familiar with the rules of rhetoric observed in philosophical disputations.

In his later life, Leonardo constantly strove to overcome this handicap by educating himself in numerous disciplines, consulting scholars wherever he could and assembling a considerable personal library. On the other hand, he also realized that not being constrained by the rules of classical rhetoric was an advantage because it made it easier for him to learn directly from nature, especially when his observations contradicted conventional ideas. “I am fully aware that, not being a man of letters, certain presumptuous persons will think that they may with reason discredit me,” he wrote in his own defense as he approached forty. “Foolish folk!…They don’t know that my matters are worth more because they are derived from experience, rather than from the words of others, and she is the mistress of those who have written well.”
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Figure 3-1: Ravine with waterbirds, c. 1483, Windsor Collection, Landscapes, Plants, and Water Studies, folio 3r

Leonardo showed great artistic talent early in his youth; his synthesis of art and science was also foreshadowed early on. This is vividly illustrated in a story related by Vasari. When Piero da Vinci was asked by a peasant to have a “buckler” (a small wooden shield) decorated with a painting in Florence, he did not give the shield to a Florentine artist but instead asked his son to paint something on it. Leonardo decided to paint a terrifying monster.

“To do what he wanted,” writes Vasari, “Leonardo carried into a room of his own, which no one ever entered except himself, a number of lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, bats, and various strange creatures of this nature. From all these he took and assembled different parts to create a fearsome and horrible monster…. He depicted the creature emerging from a dark cleft of a rock, belching forth venom from its open throat, fire from its eyes, and smoke from its nostrils in so macabre a fashion that the effect was altogether monstrous and horrible. Leonardo took so long over the work that the stench of the dead animals in his room became unbearable, although he himself failed to notice because of his great love of painting.”

When Ser Piero came to see the finished painting, “Leonardo went back into the room, put the buckler on an easel in the light, and shaded the window. Then he asked Piero to come in and see it. When his eyes fell on it, Piero was completely taken by surprise and gave a sudden start, not realizing that he was looking at the buckler and that the form he saw was, in fact, painted on it. As he backed away, Leonardo stopped him and said: ‘This work certainly serves its purpose. It has produced the right reaction, so now you can take it away.’”

The story illustrates several of the qualities that became essential elements of Leonardo’s genius. The painting is an expression of the boy’s
fantasia
, but it is based on his careful observation of natural forms. The result is a picture that is both fantastic and strikingly real, and this effect is greatly enhanced by the artist’s flair for the theatrical when he presents his work. Moreover, Vasari’s description of the youth working for long hours, undisturbed by the stench of rotting corpses, eerily anticipates the anatomical dissections Leonardo would vividly describe some forty years later.
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APPRENTICESHIP IN FLORENCE

At the age of twelve, Leonardo’s life changed dramatically. His grandfather died, and his uncle Francesco got married. As a result, Leonardo left Vinci to live with his father in Florence. A few years later he began his apprenticeship with the renowned artist and craftsman Verrocchio. Ser Piero, in the meantime, had remarried after his first wife died in childbirth. The exact sequence of Leonardo’s movements at this time of his life is uncertain. He may have stayed in the country with his grandmother a couple of years longer, or he may have joined Verrocchio’s workshop at the age of twelve. Most historians believe, however, that he began his apprenticeship at about age fifteen.

Florence in the 1460s had no more than 150,000 inhabitants, but in its economic power and cultural importance it was on a par with Europe’s great capitals.
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It had trading posts in the major regions of the known world, and its wealth attracted scores of artists and intellectuals, who made it the focal point of the emerging humanist movement. The Florentines were proud of their city’s importance, its liberty and republican government, the beauty of its monuments, and especially of the fact that Florence had left its chaotic medieval past behind and embodied the spirit of a new era.

Throughout the 1300s, Florence had been the scene of many deadly feuds; succeeding factions had fought openly in the streets, and the wealthy families had built their houses like citadels, often fortified with imposing towers. By the time Leonardo arrived in the city, most of these menacing fortresses had disappeared. Narrow and twisting medieval streets had been widened and straightened; the unhealthiest districts had been cleaned up, and the wealthy Florentine bourgeoisie were busy building magnificent
palazzi
, using the local sandstone known as
pietra serena
and the severe symmetries of the new Renaissance architecture to give their city a uniform air of noble elegance.