Da Vinci's Ghost (12 page)

The Neoplatonists in Florence, who emerged as a cultural force in the latter half of the fifteenth century, latched onto this analogy between the human and the divine. The movement’s hugely influential leader, the scholar and translator Marsilio Ficino, deployed it in a vast treatise titled
Platonic Theology
. Human nature, he wrote,
“possesses in itself
images of the divine things upon which it depends. It also possesses the reasons and models of the inferior things. … Therefore it can with justice be called the center of nature, the middle point of all that is, the chain of the world, the face of all, and the knot and bond
of the universe.” Ficino wasn’t the only one thinking this way. In 1486 one of his disciples, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, laid down a famous variation on the theme in his
Oration on the Dignity of Man
, a work that quickly became something of a humanist manifesto. In the
Oration
, Pico had God address Adam not long after creating him.
“I have placed you
at the very center of the world,” God tells him, “so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains.” Visual variations on this theme would appear in countless Renaissance texts (
Figure 19
).

Ahead of his time, Alberti pursued the logical implications of this human analogy years before Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, bringing it down to earth in a way that would appeal powerfully to the young Leonardo. Lofty Ciceronian
talk about the godly nature of the human spirit was fine for scholars, Alberti suggested. But scholars were pale, flaccid, ineffectual creatures—
“chained,” he wrote, “to the reading of manuscripts and condemned to solitary confinement … in the wretched obscurity of libraries.”
Artists could offer a much more practical and accessible sense of all that the world contains, he suggested, by thoroughly investigating the proportions of the human body.

Figure 19.
Man and the cosmos, from Gregor Reisch’s
Margarita philosophica
(1503).

A
S A GUIDE
to that investigation, Alberti decided to make a map.

For inspiration, he looked to a model laid out by the ancient Greek polymath Claudius Ptolemy. In the second century
A.D
., Ptolemy had produced a text known as the
Geography
, in which he had described the mapping of the world according to the coordinate-based system we still use today: latitude and longitude. Not only that, he had gathered together the coordinates of some eight thousand places, which allowed him to plot a fuller and more mathematically consistent map of the world than had ever been made before. After Ptolemy’s death the work had disappeared for centuries, and with it the idea of coordinate-based mapping. But it resurfaced in Europe in about 1400, in Florence, and as the century progressed it exerted an increasingly powerful influence on Renaissance thought. In the minds of the city’s humanists, in particular, the
Geography
provided not just a cartographic picture of the ancient world but also a visual metaphor for a powerful new idea: that the individual human mind, with the help of ancient learning, could find its way to a scientific understanding of the world as a whole.

This idea appealed to Alberti, who studied Ptolemy carefully. When, in the mid-1400s, he decided to map the human body, he devised a coordinate-based system of his own, which he explained in detail in a treatise titled
On Sculpture
. The system didn’t rely on latitude and longitude. Instead, it used a coordinate system designed to allow the mapping of a body in three dimensions. The key was an instrument of his own design, which he called the
finitorium
, or “definer”: a circle marked off in degrees with one end of a ruler attached to its center. This, Alberti, proposed, could be placed centrally over a human subject or statue, allowing one to measure the location of any part of a body along three different axes: height, width, and depth (
Figure 20
).

Alberti designed his system so that, in theory, sculptors could map and therefore re-create any body they wanted. But what he cared about most was the reproduction not of any one specific body, with all its eccentricities and imperfections, but rather of the human ideal—which is precisely what he went on to do in
On Sculpture
. After introducing his readers to the
finitorium
, he explained his method:

So that the subject
may be clarified by examples and my work most useful to many people, I took on the task of recording the dimensions of man. I proceeded accordingly to measure and record in writing, not simply the beauty found in this or that body, but, as far as possible, that perfect beauty distributed by Nature, in fixed proportions, as it were, among many bodies; and in doing this I imitated the artist at Croton, who, when making the likeness of a goddess, chose all remarkable and elegant beauties of form
from several of the most handsome maidens and translated them into his work. So we, too, chose many bodies, considered to be the most beautiful by those who know, and took from each and all their dimensions, which we then compared one with another, and leaving out of account the extremes on both sides, we took the mean figures validated by the majority of models.

Figure 20.
Alberti’s “definer,” a device for mapping the human body in three dimensions, from a seventeenth-century edition of Alberti’s
On Sculpture.

Just as Ptolemy had done in the
Geography
, Alberti appended a matter-of-fact list of coordinates to the text of his treatise under the heading “Tables of Measurements of Man.” He listed
sixty-eight
different bodily dimensions, covering everything from the basics (overall height, arm span, head size) to such minor details as the height of “the recess below the fleshy part
of the inside lower leg,” the “maximum width between nipples,” and the “thickness of the arm at the wrist.” And at last, using the data he had gathered so methodically, he—or the copyists of his manuscripts—cobbled together a visual geography of the human ideal (
Figure 21
).

Figure 21.
The proportions of the ideal human form, from a late-fifteenth-century manuscript of Alberti’s
On Sculpture.

Ten manuscript copies of
On Sculpture
survive, the earliest of which dates to 1466, the year Leonardo arrived in Florence. During his time in Verrocchio’s studio or in his early working life as an independent young artist, Leonardo is sure to have come across the work and discussed it with colleagues and friends.
In one of his notebook sketches
he played directly with Alberti’s approach to body mapping, and on another page, in a passage datable to about 1490,
he set out some preliminary thoughts
for a text of his own, also to be titled
On Sculpture
, in which he explained how to transfer specific bodily measurements from a clay model to a marble statue. These examples suggest that Leonardo read Alberti’s
On Sculpture
literally, as a practical guide. But in the heady Neoplatonic spirit of his times, he would also have understood Alberti’s geography of the human ideal as something more ambitious—as a kind of map of the microcosm that could reveal all sorts of metaphysical truths.

Alberti himself seems to have felt the same way, as he made clear in
Momus
, a literary work he produced at about the same time as
On Sculpture
.
“Let me tell you
what I was told by a certain painter,” he wrote. “In studying the lineaments of human bodies, he saw more than all you star-gazing philosophers put together.”

The painter’s mind
must of necessity enter into nature’s mind.

—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1492)

L
EONARDO HAD TROUBLE
with deadlines.

His first recorded commission dates to 1478. On January 10 of that year, the Florentine authorities awarded him
the job of painting the altarpiece
in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall of Florence. It was a hugely desirable assignment, for which he received an ample advance. But he never delivered. In 1481 he received another important commission, this time to paint an altarpiece for a monastery just outside of the city. Records from the period show him to have been struggling financially at the time—but once again he failed to complete the job.

It was a pattern that would endure throughout his career. According to a story recounted by Vasari, when Leonardo, late
in his life, was commissioned by the pope himself to paint a portrait, he didn’t set to work immediately, as most painters would have done. Instead, he began an intense round of experimentation with different herbs and oils, trying to concoct a special new varnish that he could apply to his finished portrait.
“Alas!
” the exasperated pontiff exclaimed. “This man will do nothing at all, since he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning.” Vasari himself more charitably attributed the problem to Leonardo’s genius.
“In his imagination
,” he explained, “he frequently formed enterprises so difficult and so subtle that they could not be entirely realized and worthily executed by human hands. His conceptions were varied to infinity.”

Indeed they were. But there’s a more prosaic way of explaining Leonardo’s trouble with deadlines. By the time he received his first independent assignment he had decided that he would not—and could not—simply churn out generic works as part of a factory collective. What he wanted to do was to become, as he put it,
“the universal master
of representing every kind of form produced by nature.” But to achieve that, he realized, he would have to investigate the makeup and function of
everything
: a gloriously fruitful but ultimately quixotic quest that would last for the rest of his life. Decades later, he was still grasping out in every direction to collect pieces of the ever-expanding puzzle.
“Describe the tongue
of the woodpecker and the jaw of the crocodile,” he wrote at one point.
“Of the flight
of the 4th kind of butterfly that consumes winged ants,” he wrote at another.

Most artisans and craftsmen of Leonardo’s time wouldn’t have dreamed of concerning themselves with such things. They inhabited the realm of surfaces and appearances. Natural philosophy was the province of the scholastics: learned university
types who toiled away minutely parsing the Bible and the doctrinally acceptable works of the great ancient and medieval authorities, which, they assumed, contained all it was necessary to know about the natural world and the meaning of existence.

Leonardo—the unlettered craftsman, the artist-engineer, the playful tinkerer, the mixer of potions, the visual thinker—recoiled at this idea. He stayed down to earth. His approach to natural philosophy, he decided, would be resolutely empirical: he would get his hands dirty. The scholastics considered such an approach ignorant and ignoble, but he didn’t care.
“They will say
,” he wrote, “that because I have no book learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to treat of. But they do not know that for their exposition my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.”