Da Vinci's Ghost (24 page)

But that didn’t stop Leonardo, who now turned his attention from the brain to the interior of the skull that housed it. Observing what he could, and processing that information in the context of medieval brain theory, he then proceeded to produce a series of hauntingly beautiful illustrations (
Plate 8
).

What tends to impress viewers most about these illustrations today is their attention to anatomical detail and their artistic beauty. But their main point, quite literally, is metaphysical. With the confident precision of an architect and an engineer,
Leonardo imagined cutaway views of the skull’s interior—and then coolly proposed coordinates for the seat of the human soul.
“Where the line
am
intersects
the line
cb
,” he wrote, referring to the grid he had superimposed over the lower skull, “will be the confluence of all the senses.”

It’s an astonishing moment: an act of visual speculation in which art, modern science, and medieval philosophy all come together in a statement of boundless investigative possibility. The hidden proportions of body and soul are
not
beyond discovery. Everything can be known; the microcosm can be mapped in full.

Painting is philosophy
.

—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490–92)

I
N
1488
OR
1489, in the midst of all his other activities, Leonardo launched yet another vast project: an exhaustive survey of human proportions.

According to a contemporary who copied some of his now-lost notes, Leonardo envisaged a survey of nothing less than
“the universal measure of man
.” At the most basic level, this meant that his focus would be not anatomy but
anthropometry
, or the measurement of the body’s parts. He was by no means the first to take this on, of course. It was precisely the sort of information that the sculptor Polykleitos had codified in his
Spear Bearer
statue and lost
Canon;
that Greek builders had embodied in their metrological reliefs; that Vitruvius had summed up in his
Ten Books;
that Augustine, in
The City of God
, had suggested might allow a superior human mind to grasp the
nature of the soul; that Hildegard and so many other medieval theologians had used to connect the bodies of Adam and Christ to the order of the heavens; and that Alberti, in
On Sculpture
, with the help of his
finitorium
, had begun to chart in his geography of the human ideal.

In the scope of his ambition, however, Leonardo outdid all of his precursors. Basing his work on the comparative study of a number of live models, he conducted a series of almost unimaginably thorough studies of human proportions. From head to toe, from back to front, he scrutinized every part of the body and meticulously recorded the results of his observations. Even the briefest sampling of his notes and illustrations reveals the obsessive attention to detail that he brought to bear on his task (
Figure 44
).

Figure 44.
Proportions of the human body standing, kneeling, and seated, by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1489).

From the top of the ear
to the top of the head is equal to the distance from the bottom of the chin to the lachrymatory duct of the eye, and also equal to the distance from the angle of the chin to that of the jaw—that is,
of the whole. The small cartilage that projects over the opening of the nose is halfway between the nape and the eyebrow.

The distance from the top
of the throat to the pit of the throat, below
qr
, is half the length of the face and the eighteenth part of a man’s height.

The smallest thickness
of the arm in profile
zc
goes 6 times between the knuckles of the hand and the dimple of the elbow when extended, and 14 times in the whole arm, and 42 in the whole man.

The foot
, from where it is attached to the leg to the tip of the great toe, is as long as the space between the upper part of the chin and the roots of the hair
ab
, and equal to fivesixths of the face.

Significantly, he didn’t just analyze the body in one static pose, as others had before him. He asked his models to
move
. They twisted their bodies and bent their limbs, they stood and sat and kneeled—and at every step of the way, peering close, he tried to capture the changing proportional relationships of their bodies’ parts (“
yl
is the fleshy part
of the arm and measures one head; and when the arm is bent this shrinks
⅔
of its length”).

On and on he went, month after month, gradually amassing reams of data. Today the whole enterprise seems radically
misguided, but to Leonardo it must have felt vital. If he could carry out his task with enough determination, rigor, and insight, if he could somehow make sense of his data and synthesize them with what he was learning in his anatomical investigations, then perhaps he really might be able to take the universal measure of the human body—and soul.

M
EANWHILE, THE DEBATE
about the cathedral of Milan’s
tiburio
was at last coming to a head.

Leonardo had submitted his model in 1488. But he later returned to the project with renewed interest, fussing with his design and asking that the overseers return his model to him for modifications.
On May 10, 1490
, they did just that and even advanced him money for the job: a sign, it would seem, that although they had received at least nine other submissions, they still considered him a contender. But he had precious little time to make his changes. Eager to move forward with the project, the overseers had invited Francesco di Giorgio Martini of Siena to help them evaluate the proposals they’d received—and he was due to arrive in a matter of weeks.

Francesco had made quite a name for himself in the preceding fifteen years. Despite his humble beginnings in Siena, he had enjoyed great professional success in Urbino, serving Duke Federico as a master of artillery and building
some 136 structures
in the area, mainly forts and churches. He had also written a number of technical treatises, most notably his
Treatise on Architecture, Engineering, and the Art of War
—the influential work, replete with all those images of the human body inhabiting architectural forms, that Leonardo himself would later own.
In 1489 he had finally returned to Siena, where, celebrated as one of the town’s most distinguished citizens, he had set to work on a number of local projects and begun a busy new life as a traveling consultant.

By the time Francesco arrived in Milan to weigh in on the
tiburio
project, he had also transformed himself into an expert on classical architecture. Over the years he had regularly visited Rome and other cities to examine ancient ruins, which he had sketched, annotated, and gathered in a manuscript he called
Ancient Monuments
, the first illustrated survey of classical architecture ever compiled. And in the late 1470s or early 1480s, as a natural complement to that project, he had decided to take on an even more ambitious task:
translating Vitruvius into Italian
.

Nobody had ever attempted a translation of the
Ten Books
into any language. It was a daunting job, and when Francesco began he was almost laughably ill-prepared to carry it out. His Latin was weak, his Greek nonexistent, and his understanding of ancient history and literature neither broad nor deep. But he plunged into the work, spurred on by his career ambitions and his developing fascination with the architecture of antiquity. For months, perhaps even years, he stole as much time as he could to work on the project: teaching himself Latin, reading widely, consulting scholars of Latin and Greek, combing through Alberti’s
On the Art of Building
, studying classical ruins all over Italy—and, gradually, based on what he was learning, applying himself to the actual job of translation. By the mid-1480s, through sheer force of will, it would seem, he had in his possession something unique in Europe: a translation, however partial and imperfect, of the only ancient guide to the classical
art of building. He felt justly proud.
“The art of architecture
has been almost rediscovered anew,” he wrote, alluding to both his translation and his study of ancient monuments, “and with no small effort.”

By June 8 Francesco had arrived in Milan, and less than two weeks later he was in the company of Leonardo, traveling south across the Lombard Plain to consult on the design of the cathedral in Pavia.

No record survives of whether the two men had met before that trip. It would be more than a little surprising if they hadn’t, however, given their mutual involvement in the
tiburio
project, their shared connections in Milanese architectural circles, their overlapping interests in architecture and military engineering, and Leonardo’s insatiable desire to seek out experts on matters that interested him. By the second half of June, at any rate, the two were together in Pavia. Of that there’s no doubt, because the overseers of the Pavia project recorded payment for their lodging.
“Item for 21 June
,” it reads. “Paid to Giovanni Agostino Berneri, host of Il Saracino, in Pavia, for expenses he incurred because of Masters Francesco of Siena and Leonardo of Florence, the engineers with their colleagues, attendants and horses, both of whom were summoned for a consultation about the building. Total: 20 lire.”

At this point in the story, with Leonardo and Francesco having arrived and lodged together in Pavia, a fog of uncertainty sets in. How much time did they spend together? Did they get along? What did they talk about? The details are lost. But the two had so many common interests and concerns that one can imagine them engaging in a series of extraordinarily wide-ranging conversations. What they had to talk about was
almost endless. Designs for the cathedral in Pavia and the
tiburio
in Milan. Questions of physics and mechanics. Specialized building techniques and materials. Fundamental principles of architecture, engineering, and mechanized warfare. The challenges of self-education, and techniques for winning the favor of powerful rulers. The list goes on and on. They could have discussed the treatises of Alberti and Filarete, and treatises of their own; the importance, in art as in architecture, of studying both anatomy and proportion; the correspondence between architectural forms and the human body; the need, especially in churches and temples, for designs based on not only the human form but also the circle and the square. And inevitably they would have brought up the subject of Vitruvius, whose work tied so many of these strands of conversation together.

The odds are that Francesco had his translation of the
Ten Books
with him when he traveled to Milan and Pavia. In 1490, after all, he was actively relying on the work to help him make sense of and classify the classical ruins he came across in his travels—a job he liked to refer to, echoing Vitruvius (and anticipating modern literary theorists), as
“reconciling the sign
with the thing signified.” In the late 1480s and early 1490s
he was also borrowing directly
from his translation as he revised and expanded his
Treatise
, working on the edition that Leonardo would later own. Given the amount of time he spent on the road in 1490 as an architectural consultant, it would seem to have been almost necessary for him to have carried both his
Treatise
and his translation of the
Ten Books
with him, so that he could not only consult and work on them in his spare time but also discuss and share them with friends, colleagues, scholars, and
employers. If indeed this is what he did, it’s easy to picture him showing both books to Leonardo—and to picture Leonardo, for his part, pouncing at the chance to have a look.

W
HICH BRINGS US
, at last, to Vitruvian Man.

He was now some fifteen hundred years old. From the day of his birth, in the age of Augustus, he had been kept alive by a succession of anonymous scribes—but in written, not visual, form. He was an abstraction, a ghostly figure who existed in words alone. To be sure, as the centuries wore on, reflections of the idea did flicker across the pages of medieval manuscripts, embodied in all those mesmerizing illustrations of the microcosm: the diagrams of the cosmos, the guides to the constellations, the maps of the world, the pictures of Christ on the cross, the medical and architectural drawings. But throughout that entire period, as best it can be determined, nobody had ever attempted to conjure up an image of him based directly on how Vitruvius had described him in the
Ten Books
. Nobody had tried to work out in visual form, that is, exactly
how
the ideal human body might be made to fit inside both a circle and a square—until the 1480s, when, in the margins of one of his
Treatise
’s opening pages, Francesco di Giorgio Martini sketched the first known picture that can legitimately be called Vitruvian Man (
Figure 45
).