Da Vinci's Ghost (7 page)

Vitruvius didn’t conjure up Vitruvian Man only as an abstraction. He also wanted his readers to associate the figure directly with a specific person: the august ruler who had just begun to build a body of empire in his own perfect image, and whose
ideal form was embodied in all temples. Vitruvian Man, in other words, was none other than the figure to whom Vitruvius dedicated his
Ten Books:
Caesar Augustus himself.

That’s how Vitruvian Man came into the world, at least. But in the centuries that followed, he would take on a life of his own.

Behold the human creature
! For man holds heaven and earth and other created things within himself. He is one form, and within him all things are concealed.

—Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1150)

I
N THE YEAR
1100 or thereabouts, a young German girl living in the Rhineland witnessed an ethereal sight.
“In the third year of my life
,” she would later recall, “I saw so great a brightness that my soul trembled.”

So began the mystical life of St. Hildegard of Bingen, one of the most extraordinary figures in medieval history.

In the decades that followed, Hildegard would stun all of those who knew her with the range of her interests and activities. She would write at length about her visions and their mystical meanings. She would produce wide-ranging treatises on medicine and the natural world. She would correspond with popes, emperors, kings, and clerical authorities, and often
chide them fearlessly for their shortcomings. She would preach publicly throughout central Europe and found a monastery of her own. She would write the first known morality play, compose a large corpus of sacred music, and invent a secret language. And she would do it all while professing herself to be unschooled and unlearned—nothing but, as she put it, a
“poor little womanly creature
.”

Hildegard regularly had visions as a girl. Each time they arrived they overwhelmed her—incapacitating her at their onset, terrifying her with their intensity, nauseating her as they played out before her eyes, and exhausting her in their aftermath. Sickly and bedridden as a child, she developed a paralyzing fear of these visions and resolved to keep them secret. But she couldn’t help observing what was happening to her with a kind of detached fascination.
“I grew amazed
at myself,” she wrote, “that whenever I saw these things deep in my soul I still retained outer sight, and that I heard this said of no other human being.” The visions, moreover, didn’t come to her in dreams.
“I see them wide awake
, day and night,” she wrote. “And I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me.”

Based on the ways in which she described her visions and the symptoms that attended them, the medical consensus today is that Hildegard suffered from acute migraine headaches. But she didn’t know that. Instead, as she grew older, she came to understand her affliction as a kind of gift. Recalling one episode, she wrote,
“When I was twenty-four
years and seven months old, I saw an extremely strong, sparkling, fiery light coming from the open heavens. It pierced my brain, my heart, and my breast through and through, like a flame. … And
suddenly I had an insight into the meaning and interpretation of the psalter, the Gospel, and the other Catholic writings of the Old Testaments.”

Again and again she had similar experiences. Finally, at the age of forty, having lived for some thirty-two years as part of the religious order at the monastery of St. Disibod, she could keep her secret no longer. She confided in her superior—who, astonished at what she told him, hastened away for urgent consultations with the abbot. Soon the two returned to Hildegard with a diagnosis of her condition. Her visions, they said, descended directly from God.

Her condition now accepted and admired, Hildegard began to speak and write openly about what she saw, and this set into motion a rise to fame and influence almost unthinkable for a woman (or just about any man) in the Middle Ages. Word spread fast.
“Crowds of people
of both sexes came flocking to her,” records one early account, “from every part of threefold Gaul and from Germany.” Even Pope Eugenius III found himself smitten. Quoting the Song of Songs in a letter, he asked,
“Who is this woman
who rises out of the wilderness like a column of smoke from burning spices?”

Hildegard spent the final decades of her life near the town of Bingen, as the abbess of St. Rupert’s monastery, which she herself had founded at the end of the 1140s. And it was there, unforgettably, that a dazzling sequence of visions arose before her. What appeared to her again and again were human incarnations of the microcosm, and they looked a lot like Vitruvian Man.

* * *

I
T’S IMPOSSIBLE TO
say what happened after Vitruvius finished his
Ten Books
. Did he present Augustus with a copy? Did the emperor read it? Did he like it and have it distributed? Nobody knows. One ancient source reports that late in his career Vitruvius worked on the aqueducts of Rome,
standardizing the size of the water pipes
under the direct command of Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s deputy; this suggests that his book did indeed manage to get the attention of the emperor and that it helped advance Vitruvius’s career.

But one thing is certain: during his lifetime Vitruvius didn’t win the fame he had hoped for. He seems to have died in obscurity; not one reference to him by a contemporary survives. The
Ten Books
itself disappears almost entirely from the historical record for centuries after his death—and when at last it reemerges, in the eighth century, in the form of a precious manuscript copy being lugged from Italy to England by an Anglo-Saxon abbot named Ceolfrith, the world that Vitruvius had known was long gone. The Augustan body of empire had now split in two. In the west was a Latin-speaking half, based in Italy, and in the east a Greek-speaking half, based in Constantinople.

Those changes alone would have struck Vitruvius as deeply unsettling. But he would have been stunned to learn that both halves of the empire now looked to a new man-god as their supreme authority: not an imperial heir of Augustus but an obscure Jew known to his followers as Jesus Christ. And it was this Christ, born not long before the death of Augustus, who now gave shape to the body of empire. Appealing to pagan sympathies, St. Paul had described Jesus in terms that deliberately echoed descriptions of Augustus and his imperial heirs.
“In him all things hold together
,” Paul wrote about Christ. “And he is the head of the body, the church.”

By the time Ceolfrith carried the
Ten Books
to England—and with it the ghost of Vitruvian Man—much of the western half of the empire had been overrun by Germanic tribes from the north. Europe as a whole had devolved into a grimly feudal place, derided by the Byzantines and Arabs alike as geographically and culturally irrelevant.
“As regards the peoples
of the northern quadrant,” one Arab observer would write in 947, “the warm humor is lacking among them; their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy.”

Yet some Roman learning and culture did survive in early medieval Europe, thanks largely to bands of zealots who had begun to establish small communities across the continent: Christian monks. Without their efforts, hundreds of texts from antiquity would not have survived until the age of printing and mass reproduction. That’s certainly true of the
Ten Books
, which monks in early medieval Europe copied and recopied for centuries in their scriptoria.
One recent inventory
records that 132 of those manuscripts survive—evidence of a powerful current of interest in Vitruvius that flowed right through the Middle Ages.

The copying of manuscripts was punishingly hard labor in the Middle Ages. Scribes hunched over their writing tables for days and weeks, painstakingly scratching line after line of text onto sheets of vellum, itself prepared laboriously by scraping clean the skins of sheep.
“Let me tell you
,” one twelfth-century Irish scribe complained to his readers, “the work is heavy. It makes the eyes misty, it bows the back, crushes the ribs and
belly, brings pain to the kidneys, and makes the body ache all over. … As the sailor finds welcome in the final harbor, so does the scribe in the final line.”

Given the grueling nature of this work, texts had to have an obvious value to be copied—and at first glance Vitruvius’s
Ten Books
would not seem to have been worth the effort. The scribes assigned to copy it wouldn’t even have been able to understand most of what they had in front of them; Vitruvius had strewn the work with ideas and terminology that came directly from Greek, a language almost completely forgotten in early medieval Europe. Moreover, the monks who
did
consult the work would have had little interest in, or ability to understand, its archaic discussions of building techniques and architectural history.

So why keep copying the book? The answer can be deduced from the way in which monks themselves described it. In the ninth century, for example,
the librarian of one German monastery
catalogued the book in the company of works by the Church Fathers, a choice that suggests he and his brethren valued the book not as a practical manual or historical survey but as a springboard for spiritual contemplation. What early medieval monks sought in ancient texts were passages that, despite the pagan context in which they had been written, provided new ways of conceptualizing the Christian God. And in the case of the
Ten Books
they found precisely what they were looking for in the description of Vitruvian Man.

Some of the earliest excerpts and summaries of the
Ten Books
, dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, include the passage on Vitruvian Man copied out in full. It’s easy to understand why. In the form in which Vitruvius described him, as an
exemplar of Augustus, the figure bore an uncanny resemblance to Christ. Each was the son of a god; each represented a cosmic ideal; and each, in its spread-eagled pose, inhabited temples, held the empire together, and embodied the world.

Other early medieval librarians and writers placed the
Ten Books
in a different place: alongside treatises on geometry, land surveying, and astronomy. This would seem an entirely different way of thinking about the book—but, as was the case with the
Ten Books
, monks turned to these works not so much for practical information as for analogies of the divine.
“We use whatever appropriate symbols we can
for the things of God,” one widely read sixth-century authority declared, adding elsewhere that God had created geometrical forms so that
“he might lift us
in spirit up through the perceptible to the conceptual, from sacred shapes and symbols to the simple peaks of the hierarchies of heaven.”

The most popular geometrical treatise in Europe from the ninth to eleventh centuries, often known simply as
Geography I
, put this way of thinking into practice. The work brought together excerpts and summaries of all sorts of ancient astronomical and geometrical theories—and made it very clear to readers that their importance was metaphysical, not practical. Astronomy and geometry, the author explained, represented the perfect way
“to approach the heavens
with the mind, and to investigate the entire construction of the sky, and in some measure to deduce and to recognize, by sublime mental contemplation, the Creator of the world, who has concealed so many beautiful secrets.”

This was the top-down approach. One dutifully contemplated the heavens in all of their vastness—the
macrocosm
, as
the Greeks had called it—and then tried to discern in them an image of God. But early in the Christian era some authorities began to propose another way. Did not the Bible itself declare that God had created man in his own image? In the fourth century, just after the Roman emperor Constantine the Great had officially embraced Christianity, the Latin astronomer Julius Firmicus Maternus seized on the idea and ran with it. “
God
,” he wrote,

the fabricator of man, created his form, his condition, and his entire material frame in the image and likeness of the cosmos. For he made the body of man just as of the world, from the mixing together of the four elements, namely of fire, water, air, and earth, in order that the harmonious union of all these might adorn the living being in the form of a divine imitation.

Writing in the seventh century, Isidore of Seville, the greatest encyclopedist of the so-called Dark Ages, reprised the theme.
“All things are contained
in man,” he wrote. “And in him exists the nature of all things.” In the following century the Venerable Bede, one of the most influential of all medieval Christian theologians, took the idea a step further. One way of gaining access to the secrets of the heavens, and thus of understanding the nature of God, he noted, was to study the nature of the human being—
“whom the wise
,” he wrote, “call a
microcosm
, that is, a little world.”

In time, this analogy would come to underlie much of medieval and Renaissance thought, occupying a position as central in any explanation of the natural order as evolution does for us
today. But Isidore and Bede alluded to it primarily as a kind of thought exercise, as the diagrams with which they illustrated it make clear (
Plates 1
and
2
). European theologians and artists wouldn’t give these abstract schemes a specifically human form for a few centuries, but when at last they did, in the twelfth century, what they drew soon insinuated itself directly into the visions of Hildegard of Bingen.

H
ILDEGARD RECORDED HER
visions of the microcosm in the
Book of Divine Works
, her most ambitious work. Describing one of her visions, she wrote,
“A wheel of marvelous appearance
became visible. … In the middle of the giant wheel appeared a human figure. The crown of its head projected upward, while the soles of its feet extended downward as far as the sphere of sheer white and luminous air. The fingertips of the right hand were stretched to the right, and those of the left hand were stretched to the left, forming a cross extending to the circumference of the circle.” The wheel contained a human figure who at its center embodied Adam and Christ, and at its circumference embodied the Holy Spirit, whose arms enfolded the whole of the cosmos in an open embrace. Presiding over the scene outside the limits of both time and space was the Godhead.