Da Vinci's Ghost (11 page)

All in all, it was an intoxicating time for the young man from Vinci. Preternaturally gifted as an artist, ravishing to look at, and only in his early twenties, he had risen with disconcerting rapidity to become a partner at one of the most important workshops in one of the world’s most prosperous and artistically vibrant cities. Few certain traces of Leonardo survive from this phase of his life, but one that does—a note he scrawled to himself on the back of his earliest surviving drawing—at least fleetingly suggests a mood of contentment. Written in 1473, it reads simply,
“I am happy
.”

T
HAT’S SURELY NOT
the way he felt when, three years later, he was handed a court summons. An anonymous complaint against him and three other young men had been filed with the Florentine authorities in early 1476, and in response the city’s moral police, known as the Officers of the Night and Monasteries, had opened a criminal investigation. The youths were
being summoned to face charges of having engaged in sodomy with a seventeen-year-old apprentice goldsmith named Jacopo Saltarelli—a notorious debauchee who, as the anonymous complaint put it,
“pursues many immoral activities
and consents to satisfy those persons who request such sinful things from him.” Saltarelli, it seems, moonlighted as a prostitute.

Homosexuality was not uncommon in late-fifteenth-century Florence, especially not in the city’s tight-knit art studios, with their all-male staffs, their intimate living quarters, and their perpetual focus on the beautiful male body. Several leading artists in Renaissance Florence are known to have been homosexual. By the 1470s a Renaissance cult of Plato had also taken hold among the city’s political and scholarly elite, prompting a revival in upper-class society of the ancient Greek ideal of erotic love between men and boys. As a result of all this, not surprisingly, Florence acquired something of a reputation as a gay haven.
The word
Florenzer
, or Florentine, even came to mean “sodomite” in German slang of the period.

Plenty of clues scattered throughout Leonardo’s notebooks suggest that he was a homosexual. But, as with so many of his passions, his interest in sex ultimately transformed itself into a kind of detached curiosity about the mysterious workings of the body: an almost reverent fascination, not without its humorous side, that comes across clearly, for example, in an extended rumination on the penis that he would later record in one of his notebooks.
“It has dealings
with human intelligence,” he wrote, “and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimes
it moves on its own without permission or any thought by its owner. … This creature often has a life and an intelligence separate from that of the man, and it seems that man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it. That which he seeks to cover and hide, he ought to expose solemnly, like a priest at mass.”

The priests of Florence wouldn’t have appreciated that comparison. Most routinely railed against homosexuality from their pulpits, and their remonstrations fell on plenty of receptive ears. The city authorities themselves prosecuted
more than a hundred
accused “sodomites” annually, with punishments ranging from the mild (public humiliation, the payment of fines) to the extreme (branding, execution).

Prostitution, illicit sexual practices, backstabbing anonymous accusations, investigations by the morality police, a tawdry arrest, public humiliation: this was the seamy underbelly of big-city life, and Leonardo now had firsthand experience of it. He can’t have taken the charges against him lightly. Fortunately, in the summer of 1476 he and the others were absolved of the charges against them—not necessarily because they were innocent but simply for lack of a witness willing to testify against them. Leonardo must have been greatly relieved, but by then his reputation had suffered a blow. In the aftermath of his arrest, some of those closest to him even seem to have shunned him.
“As I have told you
before,” he wrote to a leader of the Florentine guilds in a petition for support, “I am without any of my friends.”

Later in life Leonardo composed a fable that captures the turn his mood seems to have taken after the Saltarelli affair.
Written in a high-allegorical mode, the tale exudes nostalgia for the country life Leonardo had left behind in Vinci—and a powerful sense that he regretted ever leaving home at all.

A stone of good size
, washed bare by the rain, once stood in a high place, surrounded by flowers of many colors, at the edge of a grove overlooking a rock-strewn road. After looking for so long at the stones on the path, it was overcome with desire to let itself fall down among them. “What am I doing here among plants?” it asked itself. “I ought to be down there, with my own kind.” So it rolled to the bottom of the slope and joined the others. But the wheels of carts, the hooves of horses, and the feet of passersby had before long reduced it to a state of perpetual distress. Everything seemed to roll over or kick it. Sometimes, when it was soiled with mud or the dung of animals, it would look up a little—in vain—at the place it had left: that place of solitude and peaceful happiness. That is what happens to anyone who seeks to abandon the solitary and contemplative life to come and live in town, among people of infinite wickedness.

B
Y
1477 L
EONARDO
had struck out on his own.

The details are murky. Sometime that year—perhaps now out of favor with Verrocchio because of the Saltarelli affair—he seems to have set up an independent studio.
According to one of his earliest biographers
, sometime in the years immediately afterward he lived and worked in the service of Florence’s de facto ruler, the wealthy and powerful art patron Lorenzo de’ Medici. The claim is improbable: no other source mentions
this relationship, which would have provided Leonardo with considerable renown and income, and nothing, not even a passing mention, survives of any work that Leonardo ever did for Lorenzo. But there’s little doubt that by the late 1470s, primarily because of his affiliation with Verrocchio, Leonardo had been exposed to the world of the Medici—the rarefied world of Florentine humanism, that is, in which art was beginning to be thought of as something far loftier than a mere craft.

One person above all others had created the first stirrings of this transformation: the remarkable Leon Battista Alberti, born in 1404. A figure of prodigious classical learning, wide-ranging practical talents, and apparently boundless energy, Alberti was one of the leading lights of the early Italian Renaissance. While working by turns as an architect, cartographer, civil engineer, cryptographer, grammarian, memoirist, satirist, and surveyor, he also wrote influentially on the theory of art—and by the time of his death, in 1472, several of his treatises had become virtually canonical in Florentine art circles.

The most influential of these was
On Painting
, a work he composed in the 1430s, hoping it would help bridge the gap that had long existed in art between theory and practice. No longer, he believed, should there be one class of people who worked only with their minds, and another only with their hands. To that end, unusually for his time, he produced two versions of the treatise. The first he wrote in Latin, for the edification of well-born patrons and scholars; the second he wrote in Italian, for practicing artists. Both were circulating widely in Florence by the 1460s. Leonardo would come to know it well—and would take many of its lessons profoundly to heart.

In many ways,
On Painting
represented the perfect supplement to the medieval
Craftsman’s Handbook
. It introduced and explained, for example, one of the most important artistic developments of the early Italian Renaissance: linear perspective. The technique, which involved organizing the space of a picture into a mathematically consistent grid, enabled artists for the first time to render a three-dimensional subject realistically on a two-dimensional surface. It had been perfected earlier in the century by Brunelleschi, and in
On Painting
(the Italian edition of which was dedicated to Brunelleschi) Alberti codified it for the very first time, a move that would have profound consequences for Renaissance art and science.

But explaining artistic technique wasn’t the point of
On Painting
. Whereas
The Craftsman’s Handbook
had taught that proper materials and practices were the foundations of good art,
On Painting
put its emphasis elsewhere: on the cultivation of a painter’s mind and character. Learning how to paint still meant learning how to prepare to paint—but now that preparation involved not grinding bone and mixing colors but educating oneself roundly in the liberal arts. Only then could one tap into the unified principles of harmony and proportion that governed the makeup of the world. As an art rather than a craft, painting as Alberti described it provided a powerful visual means of capturing truths about the natural world and human nature, and then conveying them to others in beautiful, instructive works of art. Hence the importance of linear perspective: it gave an artist of exceptional ability and great learning the almost godlike ability to re-create the world in miniature. “Painting,” he wrote, “
possesses a truly divine power
.”

That Leonardo knew
On Painting
well is clear from his notebooks, which are shot through with echoes of Alberti’s ideas. One that recurs repeatedly is the notion of the artist as a figure who, thanks to his careful study of the workings of the world, has become a Creator.
“The divine character of painting
,” Leonardo wrote at one point, “means that the mind of the painter is transformed into an image of the mind of God.” At another point he elaborated on the idea.
“The painter is lord
,” he wrote, and then continued, “In fact, whatever exists in the universe—in essence, in appearance, in the imagination—the painter has first in his mind and then in his hand; and these are of such excellence that they can present a proportioned and harmonious view of the whole, which can be seen simultaneously, at one glance, just as things in nature.”

A small sketch in one of Leonardo’s notebooks, datable to sometime between 1478 and 1480, gives this idea a strikingly visual form. It shows a young artist, possibly Leonardo himself in his studio, drawing with the help of what he calls a “perspectograph,” a device that corresponds nicely to one described by Alberti in
On Painting
. And what the young artist is putting into perspective, so that it can be seen at one glance, is surely not just a random choice. It’s a miniature model of the cosmos, known as an armillary sphere—a device at the center of which artists and theologians of the period sometimes imagined they could see the figure of Christ embodying the earth (
Figures 17
and
18
).

Figures 17 and 18. Top:
A possible self-portrait of the young Leonardo, drawing an armillary sphere with the help of his “perspectograph” (c. 1478–80).
Above:
A sixteenth-century illustration of an armillary sphere with Christ at the center, embodying the world.

* * *

I
T’S IMPOSSIBLE TO
say when Leonardo first embraced the idea of the artist as a kind of creator-god, but the idea was one he would carry with him throughout his life. It wasn’t only Alberti who taught him to think this way. By the time he had begun to work independently, this sort of idea was part of the air he breathed in Florence, especially after he began interacting with the city’s elite. In Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle, Neoplatonism was all the rage—and one of the movement’s central tenets was that the human spirit, if properly cultivated through the study of the liberal arts, could partake of the divine.

The idea had an ancient pedigree. “Understand that you are god,” Cicero had declared in his
Dream of Scipio
, a widely studied metaphysical fable written not long before Vitruvius composed his
Ten Books
.
“You have a god’s capacity
of aliveness and sensation and memory and foresight, a god’s power to rule and govern and direct the body that is your servant, in the same way as God himself, who reigns over us, directs the entire universe.”