Leonardo and the Last Supper (30 page)

Elsewhere Leonardo described—again with no undue explanation—the relative positions of the sun and the earth: “The earth is not in the centre of the sun’s orbit nor at the centre of the universe.”
³²
Once again Pedretti is skeptical. He points out that Leonardo is actually implying that the earth is not in the center of the sun’s orbit because it is not the only planet in the solar system.
³³
Likewise, an expert on Leonardo’s scientific thought, Martin Kemp, believes the comment is not a statement of heliocentrism but rather is best understood in terms of his discussion of the centers of gravity of the earth and its sphere of water.
³⁴

Leonardo’s interest in astronomy seems to have been limited to physical observations rather than mathematical calculations. Nothing in his own writings indicates that he attempted—as Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton later did—to measure the orbital motions of heavenly bodies in order to reach conclusions about planetary behavior. Furthermore, his drawings in the
Codex Leicester
, done in about 1508, reveal that he held entirely traditional views about the structure of the universe.

Vasari ultimately revised his story about Leonardo’s heretical leanings. Eighteen years later, in his second edition of
The Lives of the Artists
, he not only dropped all mention of heretical speculations but also stated that Leonardo,
as he neared death, “earnestly resolved to learn about the doctrines of the Catholic faith and of the good and holy Christian religion.”
³⁵
The reason for this dramatic
volte face
in Vasari’s account was that in 1566 he met Francesco Melzi, and the faithful Melzi, Leonardo’s longtime companion, presumably both disabused and enlightened him.

Melzi may have exaggerated Leonardo’s devotion. However, a leading Leonardo scholar has asserted that his Christian beliefs were “basically orthodox.”
³⁶
Indeed, Leonardo’s scientific studies, far from raising doubt and skepticism, appear to have deepened his religious beliefs. His anatomical investigations in particular were responsible for his belief in a divine maker. Sectioning cadavers prompted him to describe the human body as a “wondrous instrument invented by the consummate master,” and his anatomical writings urge us to “praise the first builder of such a machine.” No matter how marvelous the human body, “it is as nothing compared to the soul which resides in this dwelling.”
³⁷

Leonardo did not believe that the soul could be anatomized like the corpse, nor could events such as miracles be understood through human reason. Martin Kemp has argued that for Leonardo a sharp distinction needed to be drawn between faith and reason. For Leonardo, God and the soul cannot be comprehended by reason or experiment, but that does not mean that he rejected them: he simply regarded them, Kemp argues, as “rationally indefinable.”
³⁸
God was best approached and understood, Leonardo believed, through a study and appreciation of his works. He once wrote, in a defense of painters who worked on religious holidays, that “a true understanding of all the forms found in the works of Nature...is the way to understanding the maker of so many wonderful things and the way to love so great an inventor.”
³⁹
Peering into the secrets of nature was therefore an act of worship rather than one of heresy.

Leonardo’s writings do, however, show an undeniable strain of anticlericalism: an opposition to some aspects of organized religion, friars in particular. He took a dubious view of the religious orders, with one of his notes reading, simply: “Pharisees—that is to say, friars.”
⁴⁰
He called them, in effect, self-righteous hypocrites. This hypocrisy is elaborated in one of his notes, a riddle in which he asked: who gives up labor and poverty to live in
great wealth in splendid buildings, “declaring that this is the way to make themselves acceptable to God?”
⁴¹
His riddle voices the anticlericalism that runs from Dante, who placed Pope Nicholas III upside-down in a pit in the eighth circle of hell, through Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner with his bag of fake relics, to the numerous complaints in the fifteenth century about indulgence hawkers and other unscrupulous clerics “who pay little attention to the spirit but a great deal to the money.”
⁴²

Beyond Vasari’s story about Vincenzo Bandello, nothing attests to any dispute between Leonardo and the friars, and so it is impossible to say whether the experience of working among the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie was responsible for any of these sentiments. Leonardo’s anticlerical views, however, had their limits, and he could regard friars with affection and, in one special case, with great admiration. A more charitable attitude toward monks appears in one of his jokes. Leonardo loved jokes and humorous stories. He owned several books of funny (and often indecent) stories, such as an edition of Poggio Bracciolini’s
Facezie
(Jests). He evidently planned to produce his own book of funny stories, because around the time he worked on
The Last Supper
he wrote out a series of fables, jokes, and riddles—funny stories and intellectual puzzles with which he diverted Lodovico’s bored courtiers.
⁴³

One of Leonardo’s best jokes concerns two monks and a traveling salesman. Priests and nuns were figures of ridicule and derision in Sacchetti’s
Trecentonovelle
and Boccaccio’s
Decameron
, which contain numerous tales about corrupt and lascivious priests. Indeed, most writers of these funny stories were unabashedly anticlerical: they depicted convents as hotbeds of vice and corruption, and monks as greedy and licentious hypocrites. However, Leonardo’s story is unusual in that it portrays monks in a more favorable and sympathetic light.

His joke is actually a very funny one. Two Franciscan friars are journeying through Italy when they stop at an inn. Here they meet a merchant, also traveling on business. As the inn is a poor one, the food is meager: nothing appears at dinnertime but a small roast chicken. The merchant craftily points out that due to the time of the season and the rules of their order, the friars must not eat any meat—and so he greedily eats the whole chicken himself while the famished friars make do with scantier rations. They exact their revenge the following day when, leaving the inn and traveling together, one of them agrees to carry the merchant across a river on his shoulders. In
midstream the friar asks his passenger if he has any money on his person. “You know I have,” replies the merchant. “How do you suppose that a merchant like me should go about otherwise?” The friar informs him that the rules of his order forbid him from carrying money—at which point he drops the merchant into the river. The story ends happily, with the merchant, smiling and blushing with shame, peaceably enduring the friars’ revenge.
⁴⁴

CHAPTER 11
A Sense of Proportion

Leonardo enjoyed making lists. His notebooks include many catalogs and inventories evidently made on the occasions he packed up his belongings for a trip or a move. He also composed lists of things he hoped to learn or acquire. Quite often the two lists got jumbled together, making for some strange juxtapositions. In one such list he made himself a note to get Avicenna’s work on “useful inventions” translated, before going on to itemize such artistic necessities as charcoal, chalk, pens, and wax. Then he abruptly added, “Get a skull.” The list rounds off with mustard, boots, gloves, combs, towels, and shirts. Another list combines his ambition to learn the multiplication of square roots with a reminder to pack his socks.
¹

If these possessions and ambitions were haphazardly itemized, Leonardo took much greater care when listing his books. He once declared that he was not “a literary man,” but in fact he was well-read and owned a well-stocked library. Lacking much in the way of a formal education, he was one of history’s great autodidacts. By the time he started moving in courtly circles
in Milan, he evidently felt the need to burnish his learning. In the late 1480s he began copying out in a small notebook the longest of all his lists, a lexicon of words—some foreign, some Latin, some technical—intended to boost his vocabulary. His list is more than fifty pages long, running to some nine thousand words and allowing him to impress Lodovico’s courtiers with words the likes of “archimandrite” (leader of a group).
²

Leonardo admitted that “presumptuous persons” could be justified in saying he was not a man of letters. “My subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words,” he asserted in his defense.
³
And yet his notebooks quote or mention an astonishing array of authors: not only ancient writers such as Plato, Pliny, Virgil, Lucretius, Livy, Quintilian, and Plutarch—among numerous others—but also the medieval Islamic mathematician Thabit ibn Qurra, the physicists Richard Swineshead and Biagio Pelacani, the Franciscan John Peckham, and Leon Battista Alberti. Once again there is a gulf between what Leonardo said and what he did. He was every bit as interested in book learning as he was in firsthand experience. However, he aspired to take nothing on the authority of others. Even the Bible was not spared his forensic scrutiny.

Leonardo eagerly hunted down copies of books he wished to purchase or read, frequently recording where they could be found or from whom they might be borrowed. “A book, treating of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the last stationer’s on the way to Corduso,” reads one of his notes. Another book he hoped to borrow from a local doctor: “Maestro Stefano Caponi, a physician, lives at the Piscina, and has Euclid
De Ponderibus
.” His notebooks are peppered with these memoranda as he tracked down one volume after another. “The heirs of Maestro Giovanni Ghiringallo,” he noted, “have the works of Pelacano.” Another promising lead he follows was Vincenzio Aliprando, “who lives near the Inn of the Bear,” and who owned a book on Roman architecture. Leonardo also sourced his books from libraries: “Try to get Vitolone which is in the library at Pavia and which treats of mathematics.” On the same page he added, “A grandson of Gian Angelo’s, the painter, has a book on water which was his father’s.”
⁴

Leonardo set about collecting books after his move to Milan, and in about 1495 he meticulously copied down the titles of forty books in his possession. This list encompassed works of a very wide variety. His library was stocked with treatises on surgery, agriculture, and warfare—such works as we might expect to find on his shelves—but also with books by ancient Roman
authors such as Pliny, Livy, and Ovid. These works shared space with volumes of a more whimsical nature. Indeed, his library appears to have been divided equally between serious scientific volumes and more humorous or lighthearted offerings. One of the books he owned was Luigi Pulci’s
Il Morgante maggiore
, a burlesque poem (part of which was later translated by Lord Byron) about a giant who eats camels and picks his teeth with a pine tree. He also had a copy of the fanciful travel stories of Sir John Mandeville (who describes an island of sixty-foot giants and a bird that can carry an elephant in its talons) and a collection of Aesop’s fables.
⁵
Another list made a decade later shows that by then his collection had swollen to 116 volumes, meaning he must have purchased, on average, seven or eight books each year.
⁶

Perhaps the most fortuitous of all Leonardo’s book purchases was made around the time he received the commission for
The Last Supper
. At the end of 1494 or beginning of 1495 he bought a copy of Fra Luca Pacioli’s
Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità
(
Summary of arithmetic, geometry, proportions and proportionality
). He paid 119 soldi for the work, almost double what he paid at the same time for his Malermi Bible.
⁷
The book was hot off the press in Venice: clearly Leonardo was not willing to waste time searching for the volume in libraries or borrowing secondhand copies from local doctors. The book did not disappoint, and within a year he had convinced Lodovico Sforza to bring the friar to Milan as yet another dazzling adornment for the court.
⁸

The Franciscan Order had produced a number of great philosophers and scientists. Most notable was Roger Bacon, who anatomized the brain and called himself a “master of experiment.”
⁹
Fra Luca Pacioli was the latest of these intellectual luminaries. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, he was one of the great wonders of the world. “How many excellent qualities are in the man,” exulted one writer, “how much genius, how great a memory, what an abundance of material and profound appreciation of learning.” He was compared to Aristotle and Homer, and celebrated as “a man of the rarest pattern and almost unique... It is not possible to recount the many glories of the man’s learning.” For another admirer, Pacioli was simply “a wonder of our times.”
¹⁰
History remembers him with a more unassuming moniker: the “Father of Accounting.”