Da Vinci's Ghost (2 page)

The second story unfolds on a much broader scale. It’s the story of how Vitruvian Man first came into being as an idea more than two thousand years ago and then slowly made its way across the centuries toward its fateful encounter with Leonardo. It’s a saga of grand proportions, spanning centuries, continents, and disciplines, in which people and events and ideas tumble into and out of view: the architect Vitruvius, age-old theories of the cosmos, ancient Greek sculptors, the emperor Augustus,
Roman land-surveying techniques, the idea of empire, early Christian geometrical symbolism, the mystical visions of Hildegard of Bingen, Europe’s great cathedrals, Islamic ideas of the microcosm, art workshops in Florence, Brunelleschi’s dome, the humanists of Italy, court life in Milan, human dissections, Renaissance architectural theory, and much more. At times the story ranges far afield, but never, I hope, without good reason: each new episode, and each new chapter, is designed to help put Leonardo and his picture into deeper perspective.

By definition, the two stories start out at a considerable remove from each other. I’ve constructed them in very different ways, one as a personal story, told at the ground level, and the other as a story of ideas, surveyed from a considerable altitude. But as the book progresses, the two slowly wrap themselves around each other until, in the final chapter, they become one and the same. Both are strongly visual, which is why this book includes so many period drawings and diagrams. Flip through the pages quickly from front to back, and you should be able to see those images flickering to life, almost like movie stills being sped up, as they gradually evolve into Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

“T
HIS WAY, PLEASE
.”

One damp, cold morning in March, a security guard at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice, asked me to follow her through the museum’s grand exhibit halls. For almost two hundred years the Accademia has owned Vitruvian Man, and I had come to see it in person.

Off we went. Without once looking back, the guard strode purposefully through room after room, weaving her way through
packs of museum visitors gazing at some of the most celebrated paintings in the history of Italian art. I scurried to keep up. Eventually we reached the back of the museum, where we were met by another guard. He asked us to wait while he radioed ahead for clearance, then directed us into a cordoned-off stairwell and waved us upward.

Vitruvian Man only very rarely appears on display at the Accademia. Most of the time the picture is kept out of harm’s way, in a climate-controlled archive not accessible to the general public. To see it you have to request special permission from the director of the museum’s Office of Drawings and Prints, Dr. Annalisa Perissa Torrini, who, if she deems your request worthy, will guardedly schedule a private viewing.

When at last I was ushered into the archive, I found her waiting for me. We greeted each other and made pleasant small talk for a short while. Then, moving to a nearby display table, we got down to business. Dr. Perissa Torrini donned a pair of slightly tattered white cotton gloves and asked me to do the same. She walked over to a bank of flat file drawers, slid one open, and lifted out a manila conservation folder, which she carried back and gingerly placed on the table. Straightening up, she looked over at me.

“Okay,” she said, a smile creeping onto her face. “Are you ready?”

Man is a model
of the world.

—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1480)

DA VINCI’S GHOST

O
N
J
UNE
18, 1490, a small group of travelers set out from Milan for the university town of Pavia, some twenty-five miles to the south. A well-worn road connected the two cities, and the journey promised to be a pleasant one—a late-spring saunter across the verdant Lombard Plain. The trip lasted several hours. Riding past clover-strewn meadows, shady stands of poplars, and farmland crisscrossed with irrigation canals, the travelers had plenty of time to take in the scenery, soak up the country air, and make easy conversation.

When at last they reached Pavia, they brought their horses to a clattering halt in front of
an inn called Il Saracino
. The innkeeper, Giovanni Agostino Berneri, must have rushed out to greet his new guests. Two of them, after all, had been summoned to Pavia by none other than Ludovico Sforza, the selfproclaimed duke of Milan, whose dominion extended to Pavia and far beyond. The duke had visited Pavia not long before,
and on June 8, after surveying the construction of the town’s new cathedral, which he had commissioned just two years earlier, he had relayed a request to his personal secretary in Milan.
“The building supervisors
of this city’s cathedral have asked, and made pressing requests,” he wrote, “that we agree to provide them with that Sienese engineer employed by the building supervisors of the cathedral in Milan. … You must talk to this engineer and arrange that he come here to see this building.”

The engineer in question was Francesco di Giorgio Martini, one of the most famous architects of his day, who at the time was in Milan, studying plans for the design of the
tiburio,
or domed crossing tower, soon to be built in the city’s unfinished cathedral. But in a postscript to his letter the duke asked that two experts of his own choosing also be sent. One was Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, a well-known local architect who was working on the
tiburio
with Francesco and had received other commissions from the duke. The other was a much less obvious choice: a thirty-eight-year-old Florentine painter and sculptor, based in Milan, who had no experience as a practicing architect. In his letter the duke called him “Master Leonardo of Florence,” but he’s known today by a different name: Leonardo da Vinci.

The duke’s secretary dutifully looked into the matter and responded two days later. Francesco, he reported, had more work to do but would be able to leave Milan in eight days. Amadeo couldn’t join him, because he was involved in an important project on Lake Como—but Leonardo, he said, had expressed great interest in accompanying Francesco to Pavia.
“Master Leonardo the Florentine
,” he wrote, “is always ready,
whenever he is asked. If you send the Sienese engineer, he will come too.”

Not long afterward, Francesco of Siena and Leonardo of Florence set out for Pavia, accompanied by a small group of colleagues and attendants. Had anybody traveling with the group that day been asked which of the two men would still be remembered five hundred years later, the answer would have seemed obvious: the great Francesco. Even by the middle of the sixteenth century he was already being said to have
contributed more to the development
of Italian architecture than anybody since the legendary Filippo Brunelleschi. Francesco’s reputation stemmed from his accomplishments not only as a prolific master builder but also as an author and a graphic artist;
his illustrated treatises were copied
more often during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than those of any other artist. By the time he came to Milan in 1490, he was perhaps the most sought after architectural consultant in all of Italy. That year alone he traveled from Siena to Bologna, Bracciano, Milan, and Urbino to discuss building projects. And to Pavia, of course, in the company of Leonardo—whose legacy as an artist and engineer would soon eclipse his own.

O
NE OF THE
earliest surviving descriptions of Leonardo, based on the recollections of a painter who knew him personally in Milan, provides an idea of what he looked like when he and Francesco set out for Pavia.
“He was very attractive
,” the description reads, “well-proportioned, graceful, and good-looking. He wore a short, rose-pink tunic, knee-length at a time when most people wore long gowns. He had beautiful curling
hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest.” This already is a largely forgotten Leonardo—not the pensive, bearded elder of legend but a much younger man, still busy fashioning his own image.

If any of this provoked doubts in Francesco about his traveling companion, they can’t have lasted long. According to another artist who knew him, Leonardo was
“by nature very courteous
, cultivated, and generous”—a genial person to spend time with.
“He was so pleasing
in conversation,” one of his earliest biographers records, “that he won all hearts.” Leonardo may well have revealed another side of his personality to Francesco as the two men settled into their journey: his passion for jokes. In his private notebooks he recorded scores of them, many of which involve a kind of inside humor that might have worked to break the ice with a fellow artist.
“It was asked of a painter
why,” one of them went, “since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly. To which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day and his children by night.”

Francesco would quickly have recognized that Leonardo was no court dandy. He would have noticed, for one thing, how Leonardo never stopped scanning his surroundings for scenes of artistic interest.
“From the dawning of the day
,” Leonardo later wrote, “the air is filled with countless images for which the eye acts as magnet.” Whenever something caught his eye he would compulsively open a small notebook that he wore hanging from his belt and begin sketching furiously, with almost mind-boggling virtuosity. He loved his tiny sketchbook and recommended that all serious artists carry one.
“As you go about
,” he wrote, “constantly observe, note, and consider
the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows; the actions of the men themselves, and the bystanders who intervene or look on. And take note of them with rapid strokes thus, in a little book that you should always carry with you. … These things should not be rubbed out but preserved with great care, for the forms and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them.” One can imagine Leonardo en route to Pavia, explaining the function of his notebook to Francesco in similar terms, and suggesting that he, too, consider wearing one on his belt.

Francesco would also soon have noticed that Leonardo’s mind roved every bit as much as his eye. At court in Milan, Leonardo was both renowned and mocked for the all-consuming gyre of his interests—and for the doggedness with which, whenever his thoughts fastened temporarily on a subject, he sought out experts and texts that might help him understand it. The year before he traveled to Pavia with Francesco, for example, he jotted down a collection of notes to himself that, like a nighttime flash of lightning in a jungle, momentarily illuminate a mental landscape absolutely teeming with life.

The measurement of Milan
and suburbs. A book that treats of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio. The measurement of the Corte Vecchio [a courtyard in the duke’s palace]. The measurement of the Castello [the duke’s palace itself]. Get the master of arithmetic [probably an accountant] to show you how to square a triangle. Get Messer Fazio [a professor of medicine and law in Pavia] to show you about proportion.
Get the Brera friar [at a Benedictine monastery in Milan] to show you
De ponderibus
[a medieval text on mechanics] … Giannino, the bombardier, regarding the means by which the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes. Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night. Ask Benedetto Portinari [a Florentine merchant] by what means they go on ice in Flanders. … The measurement of the sun, promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese [probably the French diplomat and art theorist Jean Pèlerin]. The crossbow of Maestro Gianetto. The book by Giovanni Taverna that Messer Fazio has. Draw Milan. Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal, and mill in the Lombard manner. … Try to get Vitolone [the medieval author of a text on optics], which is in the library at Pavia, and which deals with mathematics. … Pagolino Scarpellino, called Assiolo, has great knowledge of waterworks.

These notes reveal Leonardo in his perpetually ravenous information-gathering mode. Benedictine monks, obscure medieval treatises, university professors, popular guidebooks, accountants, itinerant merchants, doctors, foreign diplomats, artillerymen, military engineers, waterworks experts: all are fair game to him as he hunts for information about subjects that interest him.

The notes also help explain why Leonardo so eagerly agreed to travel with Francesco to Pavia in 1490: he clearly considered the town itself a valuable source of experts and books that he needed to consult. And what better person to ply with questions about the many subjects he had ranged over
in his notes than Francesco, one of Italy’s greatest architects, military engineers, and hydraulics experts? Leonardo’s mind must have raced at the thought of having the eminent man almost to himself for several days. The two could even discuss plans for the cathedral
tiburio
that Francesco had come to Milan to work on. Leonardo himself had recently proposed to the overseers that he be the one to build the structure, and had submitted to them a model of how he proposed to do it. Small wonder, then, that after receiving his summons to Pavia he made it clear he would be happy to go—if Francesco would be going, too. He had a lot he wanted to discuss with the Sienese engineer.

T
ODAY JUST ONE
book survives that is known to have belonged to Leonardo: a lavishly illustrated manuscript titled
Treatise on Architecture, Engineering, and the Art of War
, by none other than Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Leonardo’s copy of the work, which contains illustrations by Francesco himself,
dates from the early 1480s
. He probably acquired the work only after Francesco’s death in 1502, but Francesco was actively working on revisions to the text in 1490 and may well have taken it with him to Milan and Pavia.

The
Treatise
is a rambling summary of Francesco’s early thoughts on architectural theory and practice. As such, it’s the best available guide to the ideas that he and Leonardo probably discussed during their time together. Written in an unpolished vernacular Italian that suggests its audience was builders, engineers, and military officers rather than literary men, the work ranges over a number of the subjects that were
preoccupying Leonardo in 1490: geometry and surveying; the design of cities, fortresses, and harbors; hydraulics; building styles for temples, palaces, theaters, and homes; and a variety of ingenious pumps, hoists, cranks, military machines, and other mechanical devices.