Da Vinci's Ghost (17 page)

The idea would have great staying power. Fifteenth-century visitors would describe the cathedral of Florence
in remarkably similar terms
, and when Leonardo turned his attention to the cathedral of Milan in 1487, he, too, would approach its design with the human analogy in mind.

F
RUSTRATINGLY LITTLE IS
known about the specifics of cathedral construction in medieval Europe. But this much can be said with certainty: the cathedrals did not arise according to a set of “organic” proportional relationships, like the ones proposed by Vitruvius. Instead, they arose according to abstract principles of geometry. Each individual element of the building, and the building as a whole, was built not according to preestablished numerical ratios (if the width of the base is
x
, the height must be
y
) but according to reiterations of particular shapes, most commonly the triangle and the square.

The theory seems to have gone something like this. Building a cathedral
ad triangulum
(“to the triangle”) or
ad quadratum
(“to the square”) meant that no matter how haphazardly and idiosyncratically it arose, its soundness as a structure would be guaranteed by the basic rules of geometry. These were the same rules, after all, that God the architect, with metaphorical set square and compass in hand, had used in constructing
the universe. And geometrical shapes, of course, had symbolic meanings. The triangle, with its three sides, signified the Trinity and represented the elements surrounding the earth (air, water, fire). The square, for its part, with its four sides, signified the earth itself and represented all of the other sets that came in fours: the elements, the bodily humors, the cardinal directions, the seasons, the Gospels, and more.

Then as now a down-to-earth lot, builders aren’t likely to have cared much about all of this. Geometry for them was primarily a practical means to an end: the successful construction of a building. They probably had no choice but to sit through many a long-winded lecture from their patrons, however, about the importance of geometrical symbolism. One eleventh-century German monk, Heribert of Cologne, seems to have given many such lectures; he is described in one manuscript as
“seeking out architects
from foreign borders and imparting to them the science of all building.” For monks like Heribert, geometrical symbolism, not the hands-on cobbling together of structures, was the true science of all building.

No figure in European history provides a more revealing or entertaining view into this forgotten world of medieval church building than an idiosyncratic thirteenth-century Frenchman named Villard de Honnecourt.

Nobody really has any idea who Villard was. His name has survived for one reason alone: sometime in the early 1200s, thirty-three parchment sheets of his illustrations were bound into a pigskin folio, along with his notes, annotations, and a dedicatory preface.
“Villard de Honnecourt greets you
,” he wrote in the preface, “and prays to all who will use the devices found in this book that they will pray for his soul and remember
him, because in this book you can find sound advice on the great techniques of masonry and on the devices of carpentry. Also, you will find the technique of representation that the discipline of geometry requires and instructs.”

The sense of didactic purpose in Villard’s dedication, combined with the wealth of architectural and geometrical detail that his portfolio contains, suggests that he may have been a builder of some sort: a wise master, perhaps, who pulled the portfolio together as a model book for his apprentices. But his dedication has the strong feeling of a cursory, after-the-fact justification of a personal indulgence—and nothing in the portfolio suggests that he actually ever did any work as a builder. No record of his name or deeds survives anywhere outside his portfolio, in fact, which has led a growing number of modern scholars to argue that he was more of a crossover figure: an itinerant, educated dilettante, who loved architecture and geometry and machines, who thought primarily in terms of visual analogies, and who couldn’t help recording and working out his thoughts by doodling in private. If that’s the case, he represents the emergence of the artist-engineer in Europe: a fascinating new breed that would eventually give rise to such figures as Brunelleschi, Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and Leonardo.

Villard’s illustrations are a delight to look at. He showed his readers details and plans of the churches he visited; he sketched a variety of building tools and machines, including a mill-powered saw; he detailed a variety of geometrical techniques; and everywhere, all over his pages, he doodled playful portraits of people and animals. And many of his most memorable illustrations, needless to say, make unusual and striking connections between architectural form and the human body. On one sheet,
which juxtaposes a drawing of the Madonna and Child with a sketch of a nave-aisle window from Reims cathedral, the general contours of the two images are so similar that the ghosts of Mary and Jesus seem to have taken shape and arisen directly from the window (
Figure 26
). On another sheet Villard drew two wrestlers, and on the sheet directly opposite them he drew the plan for a church choir that he says he himself
“imagined
.” The two pictures again are so remarkably similar in outline that it seems as though the wrestlers themselves helped Villard come up with the church plan—and, indeed, one scholar has superimposed the two images to show just how neatly they correspond, in both form and scale (
Figure 27
).

Figures 26 and 27. Left:
Madonna and child, and a nave-aisle window from Reims cathedral, by Villard de Honnecourt.
Right:
Wrestlers and church choir, by Villard de Honnecourt, drawn separately but here superimposed to highlight their correspondences.

But Villard didn’t just see the human body in the makeup of churches. He also saw geometrical figures—notably, triangles and squares—in the makeup of the human form (
Figure 28
). This is a far cry from the ideas of Vitruvius about the relationship between the human body and architecture. Villard reduced the form of whatever he was drawing not to numerical proportions but to geometrical figures, and that—whether or not Villard was actually an architect himself, or thought about geometry in mystical terms—aligns him with the master builders of medieval Europe’s cathedrals.

B
Y THE END
of the fourteenth century, it wasn’t just northern Europeans who were building cathedrals and looking to master builders for help. Many of the big Italian cities had decided to get into the game.

That was certainly the case in Milan. Local leaders there had drawn up plans for a cathedral in 1386, ambitiously imagining that they could erect it themselves. As work got under way, however, they soon recognized that they were out of their depth. Unable to decide such matters as whether the cathedral
“ought to rise
according to the square or the triangle,” as church records put it, they reluctantly decided to seek the advice of a northern expert. The man they ended up with, in 1399, was a French engineer named Jean Mignot, who, not long after he arrived, having discovered the ad hoc manner in which the project was advancing, threw up his hands in disgust.

One can understand why. A key element of the plan that the overseers had hatched for their cathedral involved the construction of what they called a
tiburio
—a central cupola, or dome,
the vertical dimensions of which, grandly, had been designed to
correspond to those of the Pantheon
, in Rome. Mignot doubted the soundness of the proposed structure. Oozing scorn, he lectured the Milanese about the need to marry the practical art of masonry and building, which Italians were renowned for, with something northern builders knew much more about: the theoretical science of geometry.

Figure 28.
The geometrical underpinnings of everything: a sheet from Villard de Honnecourt’s portfolio.

The Milanese didn’t want to hear it. Geometry was important, they acknowledged, and they made noises to Mignot about having worked with the dictates of geometry in mind. But science was one thing and art another, they told him. They had devised their plan according a symbolic model that involved much more than the mere arrangement of triangles and squares—a model that they knew
their
artisans could render durably in stone. In their model, they explained,
“The Lord God is seated
in Paradise in the center of the throne, and around the throne are the four evangelists according to the apocalypse, and these are the reasons why they were begun.”

This kind of talk made Mignot’s blood boil. The overseers were designing their cathedral
“in a fashion
more willful than sound,” he wrote. They were “ignorant people” who didn’t understand that “art without science is nothing,” which could lead to only one outcome. “If the church were to be made with said towers in this position,” he declared, “it would infallibly fall”—as had happened a century earlier, with the collapse of the choir vaulting at Beauvais cathedral, in France.

The Milanese kept Mignot on for more than a year, during which time he continued to make his case, at one point even appealing to a committee of other northern experts. Not
surprisingly, they came down in support of his views, as did a few of the cathedral deputies themselves, one of whom focused politely on the technical qualifications of those currently working on the cathedral.
“You have appointed
as engineers,” he told his colleagues, “workers in granite, painters, glove-makers, and carpenters, decent men for the rest as I see it, but inexpert in these things.” Another Mignot supporter expressed himself less diplomatically, insisting that a complex building project had to be carried out
“by a prudent geometrician
, expert in such things, and not by idiots who call themselves masters yet know nothing.” Observing how work was proceeding on the cathedral’s first great northern pier, another of the cathedral deputies couldn’t contain himself.
“May God help me
,” he exclaimed, “I’ve seen shacks and huts of straw and hay constructed with better order. … The whole thing should be torn down.”

The majority of the cathedral’s deputies remained unconvinced, however, and gradually their patience with Mignot wore thin. On October 22, 1401, they dismissed him and proceeded to build their cathedral as planned.

By the early 1470s, after a succession of failed efforts, a dome of some sort was at last in place—and by the early 1480s it was on the verge of collapse. What happened next isn’t clear. Either the dome actually did collapse, or the deputies, fearing that outcome, had it dismantled. What
is
certain is that in the early 1480s they summoned another northern master builder to help them build a new dome: this time a German, who for several years grappled with the problem of the dome’s construction. In late 1486, however, after some kind of falling out with the
deputies, he returned home, leaving behind nothing to show for his efforts except a newly rancorous debate among the Milanese authorities about how to proceed with their dome.