Da Vinci's Ghost (3 page)

It’s easy to imagine the scene. After much discussion en route from Milan to Pavia, Leonardo and Francesco sit down together in their quarters at Il Saracino and begin poring over the
Treatise
. Or perhaps Francesco, badgered to exhaustion by Leonardo’s relentless questioning, announces after dinner that he will be retiring for the evening—and, in lieu of answering any more questions, digs the manuscript out of his travel bag, hands it over to Leonardo, and politely suggests that he spend some time combing it for answers. In either scenario one of Francesco’s favorite ideas would have leapt out at Leonardo as soon as he began studying the work, as, indeed, it probably already had during their conversations. “
Basilicas
,” Francesco explained at one point in the text, “[have] the proportions and shape of the human body.”

But Francesco didn’t just state his church-body analogy and move on. He
drew
it, too. That’s because, uncommonly for his time but in complete sympathy with Leonardo, he believed in the explanatory power of images. “Without a drawing,” he explained in the epilogue of his
Treatise
, “one cannot express and clarify one’s idea.” Such thinking led him to toy with his analogy visually—and to produce a phantasmagoric sequence of sketches in the margins of his manuscript in which architectural forms are inhabited by ghostly visions of the human body (
Figures 2
and
3
).

In his
Treatise
, Francesco applied this human analogy to
everything from individual columns to entire cities. The human body, after all, had been created in God’s own image, which meant that it could, and should, be considered to contain a kind of source code for
all
harmonious design.
“Man, called a little world
,” he explained, “contains in himself all the general perfections of the entire cosmos.”

Figure 2 and 3.
Churches and the human body. From Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s
Treatise on Architecture, Engineering, and the Art of War
(c. 1481–84), owned by Leonardo.

Such ideas would have appealed enormously to Leonardo, who since at least 1487 had been rigorously pursuing the study of the human body and human proportions, and investigating the relationship between anatomy and architecture. His investigations, he was coming to believe, would allow him to move beyond surface questions of function and design and ultimately arrive at an understanding of first principles—at which point he would be able to resolve all sorts of artistic problems, scholarly misapprehensions, engineering challenges, and even philosophical mysteries. So what Francesco declared in the opening paragraph of his
Treatise
was music to Leonardo’s ears.
“All the arts and all rules
,” he wrote, “are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body.”

This was an idea much discussed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, for both its practical applications and symbolic resonances. Famously, it derived from an obscure treatise on the art of building, an ancient Latin work much more talked about than read. Highly technical, inexpertly written, and bristling with ancient Greek architectural terminology, the treatise had reached the fifteenth century corrupted by centuries of scribal errors and omissions, which made it inaccessible to all but a few scholars and architectural theorists—and even
they
tended to throw up their hands when asked to make sense of the treatise and its author.
“As far as we are concerned
,” despaired the great
Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti, one of the first to comb methodically through the text, in the mid-fifteenth century, “he might just as well not have written at all.”

A fourteenth-century copy of the work survived in the magnificent Visconti library, in Pavia, which Leonardo planned to visit while in town on his consulting trip. In the confused mangling of a scribe the manuscript was identified there simply as
“Virturbius de architretis
.” But Leonardo and Francesco both knew better. The work’s real title was
De architectura libri decem
, or
Ten Books on Architecture
, and its author was a Roman architect and military engineer who had written it some twenty years before the birth of Christ. His name was Vitruvius.

I have gathered what
I observed to be useful, and brought it together as a single body.

—Vitruvius,
Ten Books on Architecture
(c. 25
B.C
.)

M
ARCUS
V
ITRUVIUS
P
OLLIO
was an army man, a cog in the great lumbering Roman war machine.

For years, assigned to the staff of Julius Caesar and other generals, he rumbled around Italy and the provinces, transporting equipment, fording rivers, pitching camps, digging ditches, sinking wells, constructing catapults, fighting battles, repairing siege engines, surveying captured land, laying out towns, founding colonies. Toiling away behind the scenes, he saw to it that everything
worked
. His efforts helped ensure victory and prosperity for Rome, and allowed his superiors to bask in fame and glory.

That seems to have struck him as not quite fair. In the mid-20s
B.C
., having retired from active duty, he looked back on his
career and found he had almost nothing to show for the labors of a lifetime.
“Little fame has resulted
,” he lamented. “I am unknown to most people.”

But his working life wasn’t yet over. He still had time to make a name for himself and had even decided how he would do it. He would write a book—a how-to guide to the building of empire.

V
ITRUVIUS DIDN’T MAKE
that decision in a vacuum. In the early 20s
B.C
., he and other Romans had watched with a mix of apprehension and pride as a canny new consul named Gaius Octavius Thurinus had asserted his grip on their capital city. In the previous decade Octavius, not yet forty, had avenged the murder of his uncle Julius Caesar and defeated his own archrival, Mark Antony, in Egypt, at last bringing to an end years of devastating civil war. Not long after returning home he had assumed a grand new name, Caesar Augustus, and had dedicated himself to the restoration of Rome. And then, as Vitruvius no doubt observed with delight, he had proceeded to launch the greatest building campaign the world had ever known, one that would fundamentally remake the city of Rome, transform the nature of Roman power and government, and redefine the very idea of empire. It was a campaign that in many ways gave lasting shape to what is today often described as the Western world.

Alive with resonances, the name Augustus inspired confidence. It meant “stately,” “dignified,” and “holy”: in a word, “august.” It implied an association with
augurium
(“augury”), the art of interpreting divine omens, which had long formed the
bedrock on which Roman political, civic, and religious life was built. It also broadcast connections with
augere
(“to increase,” “to grow,” “to prosper”), the meanings of which were embedded in
auctor
(“originator,” “founder,” “author”) and
auctoritas
(“authority,” “power,” “the one in charge”). Augustus was Rome’s new augur, founder, and chief authority—and he would use his powers to bring a new age of prosperity to his people.

Augustus loved order. But what he found when he returned to Rome from Egypt in 29
B.C
. was just the opposite: a decrepit megalopolis ravaged by years of war, political chaos, and administrative neglect. The city that Augustus came home to, wrote Suetonius, one of his first biographers, was
“not adorned
as the dignity of the empire demanded.”

That was putting it mildly. Most of
Rome was a sprawling warren
of precariously built multistory houses that pressed in along the sides of small, unpaved roads, creating suffocatingly close quarters where shopkeepers, street vendors, beggars, day laborers, prostitutes, unemployed soldiers, immigrants, foreign slaves, and beasts of burden all jostled together. Wheeled carts were banned during the day to reduce congestion, which meant a constant clatter at night. Public spaces were few and far between; temples and monuments revealed shocking signs of neglect; and the city’s once vaunted sewer system had fallen into disrepair. From the upper stories of their houses, home owners routinely dumped the contents of their chamber pots into the streets—and pedestrians routinely found themselves on the receiving end of this practice. To walk through much of Rome was to pick one’s way through a morass of garbage, animal refuse, human waste, and even the occasional corpse.
Holding his fingers to his nose, one Roman chronicler of the period described the city as a giant
“disease-ridden body
.”

Rome was sick—but Augustus had the cure. He turned his attention first to the city’s physical infrastructure, launching a major effort to restore its public buildings, renovate its roads, repair and expand its aqueducts, and clean out its sewers. He also organized the citywide distribution of free goods and services: salt, olive oil, theater tickets, and even, at festival times, haircuts. The point of all this was clear: the hard times were over. Romans now could—and should—clean themselves up, rebuild their city, and enjoy a new era of peace and prosperity.

Augustus and his followers attributed the decline of Rome to one cause above all others: the neglect of the gods and their temples. Direct communication with the gods, the Romans believed, was what had allowed them to amass wealth, political power, and military might over the years, but now, with the temples falling into disrepair, and religious traditions with them, this
hotline to the heavens
, as one scholar has called it, had been severed. Right relations with the gods had to be reestablished if Rome was to thrive and rule the world.
“Roman, you will remain sullied
with the guilt of your fathers,” the poet Horace had written not long before, “until you have rebuilt the temples and restored all the ruined sanctuaries.”

So down they came, countless dilapidated structures of timber, mud, and brick. In their place, up rose magnificent new temples and monuments of gleaming, expensive marble, built in a style that deliberately harked back to the classic temple designs of the Etruscans and Greeks: a classical Renaissance
that took place in Italy some fifteen hundred years before the one so often discussed today. Augustus devoted himself with astonishing energy to the task, setting into motion a flurry of construction the likes of which no city had ever experienced, and earning himself a reputation, according to the Roman historian Livy, as
“the founder and restorer
of all sanctuaries.” At the end of his life Augustus himself blandly but proudly catalogued the remarkable fruits of his labors.

I built the Senate House
; and the Chalcidicum adjacent to it; the temple of Apollo on the Palatine with its porticoes; the temple of the divine Julius, the Lupercal, the portico at the Flaminian circus … a pulvinar at the Circus Maximus; the temples on the Capitol of Jupiter Feretrius and Jupiter the Thunderer; the temple of Quirinus; the temples of Minerva and Queen Juno and Jupiter Libertas on the Aventine; the temple of the Lares at the top of the Sacred Way; the temple of the Di Penates in the Velia; the temple of Youth; and the temple of the Great Mother on the Palatine. I restored the Capitol and the theatre of Pompey. … In my sixth consulship I restored eighty-two temples. … In my seventh consulship … I built the temple of Mars the Avenger and the Forum Augustum. … I built the theater adjacent to the temple of Apollo.

And that was just Rome. He also set his sights farther afield. Armies of Roman soldiers, engineers, and bureaucrats now began marching out in all directions into the provinces, making war, “pacifying” rebellious tribes, annexing territory, building
roads, founding colonies, establishing new cities, and erecting monuments, all in Augustus’s name.
“In cities old and new
,” one observer wrote, “they build temples, monumental gateways, sacred precincts, and colonnades for him.” It was happening even in the distant eastern provinces, at the edges of the Roman world.
“The whole of humanity
, filled with reverence, turns to the Sebastos,” wrote one Syrian citizen of Rome, referring to Augustus by his Greek name. “Cities and provincial councils honor him with temples and sacrifices, for this is his due.”