The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (74 page)

Leonardo seems to have luxuriated in the experimental tentativeness of his observations. And also to have enjoyed projecting numerous never-to-be-written “treatises”—on painting, anatomy, mathematics, optics, and mechanics. Yet this “greatest of great amateurs” had something to add to all the sciences. He amazes us by his reach in all directions.

Grand engineering projects also remained unfulfilled. Leonardo had commended himself to Ludovico Sforza as a military engineer and inventor of bridges, with secret plans for “an infinite number of engines of attack and
defense.” When he returned to Florence in 1503 and found his city at war with Pisa, he offered an ingenious scheme to deprive Pisa of access to the sea by diverting the river Arno. Then he planned an Arno canal to improve Florence’s own access to the sea by circumventing the stretch of the river that was not navigable. Neither of these proved feasible, but the modern highway from Florence to the sea was eventually built along the course he had charted. Back in Milan in 1506, he developed a similar grand scheme for making the Adda River navigable, providing a waterway to Lake Como and the sea. In Rome ten years later he explored the draining of the Pontine Marshes. And in his last years with Francis I he proposed a plan to drain marshes for a palace for the king’s mother. None of these projects was fulfilled in his time.

There is a monumental irony, too, in Leonardo’s sculptural projects. When Leonardo first came to Milan, Ludovico Sforza had long been planning an equestrian monument to his father, Francesco. The self-confident Leonardo about 1483 boasted to Ludovico that his sculpture and painting “will stand comparison with that of anyone else, whoever he may be. Moreover, I would undertake the work of the bronze horse, which shall endue with immortal glory and eternal honour the auspicious memory of the Prince your father and of the illustrious house of Sforza.” His notebooks for the next years showed scaffolding, lifting devices, and casting methods for the monumental horse, which was to be twenty-three feet high, twice the height of Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Colleoni, and consume two hundred thousand pounds of copper. “Tell me if ever,” he asked himself in his notebook, “anything like this was built in Rome.” But neither was anything like this to be built in Milan! Leonardo’s full-scale clay model was displayed in the city square for the marriage of Sforza’s niece to Emperor Maximilian. It was then moved to the court of the Castello. Vasari and other visitors reported that there was “never a more beautiful thing or more superb.” But when French soldiers invaded Milan they used it for target practice. Meanwhile war had taken precedence over filial piety, and the bronze set aside for the horse was sold to Ludovico’s ally the duke of Ferrara to be made into cannon. “About the horse I will say nothing,” a resigned Leonardo wrote to Ludovico of his sixteen years’ labor, “for I know the times.”

Leonardo knew the times well enough to change his loyalties and his patron as occasion required. When Gian Giacomo Trivulzio (1440?–1518) of a rival Milanese family, passionate enemy of the Sforzas, conquered Milan in 1499, Leonardo eagerly accepted the commission for
his
tomb—another monumental equestrian statue. Leonardo’s notebooks show plans for a life-size rider on a high pedestal containing the sarcophagus, along with brilliant new anatomical studies of the horse. He finally began work on the
tomb about 1511, with a novel scheme for casting the rider separately. But when, in June 1512, Milan was occupied by Spaniards, papal mercenaries, and Venetians, the city relapsed into chaos, and another Leonardesque monument went into limbo.

A catalog of Leonardo’s architecture shows the same unhappy disproportion between plan and execution. His notebooks are replete with elegant architectural projects and town plans—for Sforza residences, for churches, and the cathedral in Milan, for a Medici residence in Florence, and for gardens and a villa for the young French king at Amboise. All the while Leonardo was being acclaimed for his fantastic ephemerae, the floats, buildings, and costumes for pageants, masquerades, and festivals, which survive only in Leonardo’s notebooks or the diaries of witnesses.

Leonardo’s reputation as one of the great artists of the West rests, of course, on his painting, which was never excelled. But the remains of his painting are tantalizingly few. His energetic sixty-seven years left only seventeen surviving paintings that can be reliably attributed to him, and several of these are unfinished. The cryptic smile of the
Mona Lisa
, the most famous Western painting, still entices us. Following Vasari’s report, centuries called her
La Gioconda
, wife of the Florentine Francesco del Gioconda, and said she was painted about 1503. “After toiling over it for four years, he left it unfinished.… He made use, also of this device: Mona Lisa being very beautiful, he always employed, while he was painting her portrait, persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to the portraits they paint.” Now we know that this was one of Leonardo’s last works in Florence, after 1514, probably an idealized portrait of one of Giuliano de Medici’s mistresses.

The Last Supper
, painted for the refectory of the cloister of Dominican friars in Milan (1495–98), is commonly considered Leonardo’s masterpiece. The contemporary writer Matteo Bandello (1480?–1562) recalled:

Leonardo could not have painted the work so sporadically if it had been fresco, which would have incorporated his labors into the body of the wall. Fresco had to be painted speedily and on schedule while the plaster was still moist. Instead, Leonardo painted
The Last Supper
with oil and varnish, the wall was damp, and the paint quickly deteriorated. By 1556 Vasari reported “nothing visible except a muddle of blots.” In the following centuries the painting has been repeatedly “restored.” And Leonardo’s greatest work, despite expert modern efforts, survives only as a ghost of itself.

Leonardo secured his most important commission in Florence in 1503 through his friend Machiavelli (1469–1527), then a city official. This was to paint a monumental mural (twenty-three by fifty-six feet; twice as large as
The Last Supper
) for the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. For his subject he chose the Battle of Anghiari, where, in 1441, the Florentines had defeated the Milanese forces of the pope. Leonardo intended to depict the moment of victory when the enemy’s standard was captured. In a Florence of so many artists, to be chosen for this work was a great honor. But Leonardo’s pleasure was diluted a few months later when a commission for the other half of the wall went to his youthful archrival Michelangelo. Leonardo, who had long wanted to paint a battle, luxuriated in notebook visions of leaping horses and “the conquered and beaten pale, their brows raised and knit, and the skin about their brows furrowed with pain, the sides of the nose with wrinkles going in an arch from the nostrils to the eyes, and … the nostrils drawn up and the lips arched upwards discovering the upper teeth; and the teeth apart as with crying out and lamentations.” His many preparatory sketches of men and horses captured the fury of battle, incorporated in a cartoon of the large design that has not survived.

The Battle of Anghiari, the commission for which he was probably best known in his own time, was never painted, for Leonardo delayed this work to take on still another assignment, an urgent invitation from the governor of Milan to return there for three months “to furnish us with a certain work [perhaps the London version of
The Virgin of the Rocks
] which we have had him begin.” When the governor of Milan asked Leonardo to stay on, the Council of Florence complained that “Leonardo da Vinci … has not borne himself as he ought to have done towards this republic, in that he has received a good sum of money and has made little beginning of a great work which he is under obligation to execute, and has already comported himself as a laggard.” Leonardo returned to Florence briefly in 1507, not to fulfill his commission but to bring a lawsuit against his brothers over his father’s estate.

Although he made no effort to complete the Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo had prepared for it by putting binder on the wall. But it soon peeled off. Both Leonardo and Michelangelo drew their sketches on the palazzo wall,
and as long as these remained, Benvenuto Cellini observed, these were “the school of the world.” Posterity can judge Leonardo’s effort only from some of his own surviving sketches and from a sketch by Rubens of another artist’s engraving of a fragment.

The
Mona Lisa, The Last Supper
, and other “unfinished” paintings make up in quality what his lifework as a painter lacked in quantity. Leonardo’s early years in Florence produced his
Saint Jerome
and his large
Adoration of the Magi
, both left unfinished when at the age of thirty he went to Milan. There in Milan he produced his superb
Virgin of the Rocks
notable for its
sfumato
, the mysterious haze that became Leonardo’s hallmark. Leonardo’s scientific writings themselves were overcast by the
sfumato
that enchants his painting. For the science of art had made “the work of the painter … nobler than that of nature, its mistress.”

This “unfinished” quality of Leonardo’s work is essential to his character as an artist, the self-styled Disciple of Experience. While revelation and dogma might be sharp and clear, experience was always revising itself. Leonardo’s most characteristic works and his lifelong favorite creations were notebooks and fragmentary drawings that expressed his genius more spontaneously than his finished paintings. It is not surprising that many of his playful sketches for grand monuments were never finally frozen into bronze, for he enjoyed the first encounter more than the laborious execution.

Drawing, though it did not have the prestige or command the price of a painting, was the ideal medium for experiment and for Leonardo’s “fragmentary abundance.” A grotesque nose or ear or chin might not have merited a painting, but was perfect for a drawing. These were not caricatures but exercises of his imagination, capturing the whole spectrum of visual experience. Through this freedom of drawing he finally expressed his apocalyptic visions of the forces of nature—“Visions of the End of the World” and the “Deluge.” Few medieval drawings have survived to modern times, for the artist then would not casually consume a costly piece of paper to sketch momentary impressions. But the experimental Renaissance brought fondness and even prestige for drawings and rough sketches. The capacity for achievement, to which drawings were clues, came to be revered almost above the achievement itself.

Leonardo, who never sought eminence as a scientist, applied art to all the sciences. Unlike Galileo, he was not adept at abstracting principles from experience, but found his home in experience of the visible world. Leonardo created his own kind of scientific exposition, which he called
dimostrazione
. And so, incidentally he became the pioneer of modern scientific illustration. Whether depicting the vascular system or the vertebrae of man, or the wing structure of a bird, or a new lifting machine, Leonardo’s drawings verified
the function, the stability and motion of every part. “Let no one read me who is not a mathematician,” he wrote in the margin of an anatomical study. He valued mathematics for its visual “fruits,” and for him “Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences.”

“Occasionally,” Vasari observed of Leonardo, “in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind.” Leonardo’s life would be a dramatic competition between science and art. In the Empire of the Eye the painter was the sovereign creator. “If the painter wishes to see beauties that would enrapture him,” Leonardo said, “he is master of their production, and if he wishes to see monstrous things which might terrify or which would be buffoonish and laughable or truly pitiable, he is their lord and god.”

A legacy from the Renaissance, the belief in genius, something rarer than skill or talent, would transform the arts. It has taken us from respect for the trained talent, manipulating the experience that is out there for all to know, to awe before the uniquely inspired self. From admiration to awe, from the imitation of nature to the re-creation of nature. From the artist filling a patron’s orders, to the patron awaiting an artist’s creations. “Talent,” observed James Russell Lowell, “is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is.”

In ancient Roman religion, the “genius” (Latin: the begetter) was the ruling spirit that perpetuated a household or a family. It came to mean the guardian spirit of a guild, a place, or an individual, which a person might worship on his birthday. After Augustus the “genius” of an emperor would be worshiped. The spirit of a woman or a goddess was known and worshipped as a “Juno.”

Medieval Europe did not put a high value on originality. If it had been proved that Leonardo da Vinci had copied the items in his notebooks from other books it would only have increased respect for his learning, and would not have stirred charges of plagiarism. “Individualism”—“a novel expression
to which a novel idea has given birth”—did not enter our English vocabulary until 1835, when Tocqueville used it to describe what he found in America. But “genius,” suggesting originality, had deeper roots. Supremely embodied in Michelangelo, the unique unpredictable creator has cast a spell over the arts in modern times.