Leonardo Da Vinci (8 page)

In 1509, Leonardo’s great friend Luca Pacioli died. From 1513 to 1516, Leonardo lived in Rome with the pope for a patron. Pope Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, installed him in a comfortable suite of rooms in the Belvedere Palace inside the Vatican. Leonardo’s duties were minimal, so he gladly occupied himself with science. The Vatican had exotic gardens that were perfect for his botanical studies.

Best of all, he was able to use his position to get church permission to do autopsies at San Spirito Hospital. He said they were necessary in the cause of improving his art. He continued doing dissections until an appalled assistant assigned by the pope accused him of conjuring spirits of the dead for evil purposes. Not wanting bad publicity, the pope banned Leonardo from the hospital.

Leonardo was bitter. By this time his eyesight was fading, he wore glasses (of his own design), and he suffered from arthritis in at least one of his hands. There may have been other, unnamed ailments. He probably was treating himself; doctors knew so little that Leonardo always advised people to stay healthy and avoid these “destroyers of lives.”

The newest pages in his notebooks were different. Now he was drawing violent end-of-the-world scenarios: huge uncontrollable surges of water, full of corpses and uprooted trees. The nightmarish images were perhaps his way of confronting his own death, his own doomed race against time.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I Will Continue”

IN 1517, LEONARDO made his last journey. To France.

King Francis I of France was obsessed with Italian Renaissance culture and art, and with Leonardo as well. The twenty-year-old new king had met the scientist-artist in 1515 when Leonardo had created a marvelous mechanical lion that actually walked a few steps. It may have been the world’s first robot.

In France, Leonardo’s pleasant new title was Premier Painter, Engineer, and Architect of the King. His chief duty was to chat with the king. It was a cushy job, including a generous salary as well as an elegant manor house called Clos Lucé near the king’s summer palace in Amboise, about a hundred miles outside Paris. On the property were gardens, a fishing stream, vineyards, and a little house just for pigeons. Against the wall of his fully equipped studio, the
Mona Lisa
stayed propped.

Francis, a great supporter of the arts, considered Leonardo the smartest man alive and gave him the respect due a wise old grandfather. An underground tunnel connected his residence to Leonardo’s, and Francis would drop in often, for long nights of stimulating conversation.

Here was the perfect patron—at last.

By this time, Leonardo’s beard was long and white, and all his teeth were lost. His right hand seems to have gone numb, perhaps from a stroke. But he did not slow down. “I will continue,” he wrote at age sixty-six.

He spent little time on painting or designing contraptions for warfare. He poured all his energy into science, trying to show how the universe operated under orderly laws. The world was rational, not magical; it could be understood.

“That science is the most useful whose results can be communicated,” he reminded himself. He seemed aware that by keeping his work under wraps, he was failing to provide “shoulders” for others to stand on. But he could see that the task of sorting through thirty years of scientific notes was hopeless.

He decided to give it his best shot—to focus on organizing the information on water, painting, optics, and anatomy.

He worked in between visits from distinguished figures. One of his last visitors got a privileged viewing of presentable parts of the notebooks. The pages had to be turned for Leonardo, since his arm was now paralyzed. The visitor raved, “All these books . . . will be a source of pleasure and profit when they appear,” even though, unfortunately, they were written in that “vulgar” tongue, Italian.

Leonardo listed chapter titles—some 120 just for anatomy alone—and gave himself deadlines. He scolded himself for not sticking to the task at hand: “The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.”

At the same time, he was thinking more about his faith. Certain church practices had bothered him, especially the selling of indulgences—a way to receive pardon for one’s sins in return for giving the church money. In 1517, the year Leonardo moved to France, Martin Luther condemned this same practice in Germany. Thus began the Protestant Reformation—and more than a century of violent wars over which religion would get a person to heaven.

Leonardo died at the very beginning of the movement. He never wrote about heaven. But before he died, he dictated that his last rites and burial be carried out according to Christian practice.

The end came in 1519, at age sixty-seven. As Melzi, his most loyal friend, nursed him, Leonardo died, no doubt while describing his symptoms and diagnosing his condition.

His will gave half of a vineyard to Salai, a fur coat to his housekeeper, and Uncle Francesco’s property to his half brothers. Leonardo left everything else to Melzi—including the notebooks.

CHAPTER TWELVE

What Happened Next?

THE FATE OF the notebooks is not a happy tory.

Francesco Melzi dutifully brought the thousands of notebook pages back to Italy. But as much as Melzi idolized his friend, he didn’t fully comprehend the meaning of all that he’d inherited. He did hire two assistants to assemble Leonardo’s theories on painting. However, the book of theories was not published until 1651.

Melzi tried to organize the rest of the notebooks for publication, but with little to show for it. Instead, he set aside a special room at his family’s villa just for the notebooks, where invited visitors could view them. The visitors sometimes took pages with them as souvenirs—and so it began.

The notebooks gradually . . . disappeared.

After Melzi’s death in 1570, it got worse. Having no idea of their importance, or not caring, his son Orazio stashed Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts randomly in chests in the attic. The Melzi family tutor made off with thirteen books for himself. Word spread that the family was giving sheets away or selling them cheaply. Strangers showed up at the Melzi front door. They weren’t seeking scientific information. They were savvy art collectors, coveting the exquisite drawings.

Just as no one had valued Leonardo enough as a child to educate him, now no one valued his manuscripts enough to protect them. That tricky backward writing didn’t help, either.

Nor did any biographer bother to do research on Leonardo’s life until years after he had died. This explains why we have so few details about his life, especially his childhood—why there are so many
maybes
in this story.

Notebook pages were scattered in libraries and monasteries and private collections across Europe. One chunk ended up in Spain at the court of the king. In 1630, a sculptor named Pompeo Leoni decided he was up to the task of organizing Leonardo’s work. First he wanted to pull out all the lessons on how to draw, and separate them from pages on science. So what he did was
cut and paste
Leonardo’s pages to create two separate collections. Parts of both collections journeyed to Italy, then to France. Some science pages remained undiscovered until 1966, when they were found—accidentally—in Madrid.

Until 1883, when notebook extracts were finally published as a book, much of Leonardo’s scientific work was unknown to the public. The book, however, had the misleading title of
The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci
—as if no one knew quite what to make of the material. In fact, the word
scientist
had been coined in 1834 in part to explain thinkers like Leonardo. The first exhibitions of Leonardo’s scientific and technological work took place in the 1890s.

By the early twentieth century, people such as the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were hailing Leonardo as “the first modern natural philosopher . . . to investigate the secrets of nature, relying entirely on his observation and his own judgment.”

Finally, official commissions were established to try to reconstruct the original arrangement of the manuscripts. Scholars sorted the notebook pages into ten books of what were called codices, now hungrily collected by museums. One codex, all about water, the only one in private hands, belongs to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and fan of Leonardo.

Much was lost, probably forever, due to carelessness, fires, floods, and wars. It is estimated that about half of the notes have surfaced (so far).

After Leonardo, discoveries about the natural world picked up speed. Big names were about to be emblazoned: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. Many historians mark 1543—twenty-four years after Leonardo’s death—as the start of the Scientific Revolution. The study of anatomy gradually became more respectable. Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish doctor, published
On the Structure of the Human Body
in 1543. For writing the first accurate book on anatomy, he is considered the father of modern medicine and biology.

That same year, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his earth-shaking book,
On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies.
The sun, not the earth, is the center around which planets revolve, declared Copernicus. Modern astronomy was on its way.

A hundred years before English doctor William Harvey published his discovery of the circulation of the blood in 1628, Leonardo had been investigating the body as a system of tubes, ducts, and valves, understanding that the heart moves blood.

Two hundred years before English scientist Isaac Newton published his famous Three Laws of Motion in 1687—his explanation for the scheme of the universe—Leonardo was exploring the reasons why objects fall and move the way they do. In his studies on flight, he observed how air resistance works. Newton said, “Objects at rest tend to remain at rest.” Leonardo wrote, “Nothing moves, unless it is moved upon.”

As for why the sky is blue, Leonardo understood that particles in the air somehow interact with light waves. In 1871, the English Lord Rayleigh worked out the exact reasons and got all the credit for the discovery.

Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, in the mid-1800s, came to some of the same conclusions as Leonardo. Both of them theorized that Earth’s characteristics—such as mountains and valleys—are the result of processes that took place over enormously long periods of time.

Four hundred fifty years before the Wright brothers flew in 1903, Leonardo was designing flying machines in every form he could conceive of, with the certainty that one day human beings would take to the air.

And so on, and so on, in and out of the centuries. It is an amusing game, with the advantage of hindsight, to find Leonardo everywhere.

It is possible to exaggerate his discoveries, or to regard him as an isolated miracle man. But he wasn’t that isolated. Leonardo was able to draw from thinkers he admired. Sometimes all he did was point out the errors of his contemporaries. Sometimes he was wrong. And sometimes he leaped ahead in still mysterious ways as only geniuses are able to do. He was free to think what he pleased, with no university or school of thought stamped on his brain. But just the fact that he was delving into all these sciences is, for a man living in that long-ago world, stunning.

The big question is whether later scientists saw Leonardo’s work and thus were able, as Newton said, to “see further.” Because so much remained hidden away for so long, scientists after Leonardo carried on without his insights, unable to plant themselves atop his mighty shoulders and “see further.”

Still, it is possible that Galileo, for example, was familiar with some of Leonardo’s manuscripts. Also, we know that a later Dutch physicist had a brother who bought some Leonardo pages in London. In 1690, this physicist, named Christiaan Huygens, published his theory of the wavelike nature of light. Had he read about Leonardo’s earlier work on the same theory? No way to tell.

In any case, other scientists after Leonardo, who arrived at similar conclusions, received the credit.

Leaving a paper trail—sharing knowledge with others—is a critical part of science. Leonardo himself wrote, “Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.” But for many reasons, he never submitted his work for judgment by the outside world.

Still, it is hard to argue with the notion that, had the notebooks been published earlier, the history of science would have been completely different. Anyone, not just hardcore scientists, who sees pages of a Leonardo notebook is spellbound. People want to run out and do an experiment or draw something from nature. Even today, scholars studying the notebooks are unveiling more and more connections between Leonardo’s thoughts and current science. One historian called him “a man who wakes too early, while it is still dark and all around are sleeping.”

Okay, he was a genius; this much is obvious. But does that explain Leonardo da Vinci? No. Someone so phenomenally gifted will always evade rational explanation.

True, he was like a surfer on a huge wave—the spirit of intellectual tolerance fostered by the Renaissance, the empowering access to information supplied by the new printing presses. Yet he always remained out of step: a left-handed, illegitimate, homosexual, antiwar vegetarian with extraordinary artistic talent. His outsider status took him on paths others couldn’t even see.

So many tantalizing questions remain. If he had lived a century later, would he have been less of an outsider, more influential as part of the scientific mainstream? Would he
ever
have shared? Submitted his theories for review by peers? Published his work in a scientific journal?

In the final analysis, Leonardo can be credited not so much for specific discoveries as for a way of thinking. His devotion to scientific methods—investigating, observing, experimenting, and then forming conclusions—was revolutionary. He was open-minded, willing to toss out long-standing theories if he could disprove them.

Most intriguing of all is the question: What would Leonardo be doing if he were alive today?