Fritjof Capra Read online

  The young Leonardo was already familiar with the dissection of muscles; close to Verrocchio’s workshop was the bottega of the brothers Pollaiolo, whose paintings were known for their vivid rendering of muscular bodies. They had derived their knowledge of muscles from frequent dissections, which Leonardo must have watched closely during his apprenticeship. A few years later, he used his acute knowledge of the musculature of the neck and shoulder to give the figure of the ascetic Saint Jerome a powerful expression of pain and sorrow.

  After his acceptance into the painters’ guild, Leonardo remained in Verrocchio’s workshop for another five years, but he was now employed as a collaborator of the master rather than an assistant. This was not unusual; the large number of commissions received by Verrocchio encouraged his apprentices to continue working with him after they had become masters.

  There was probably another good reason for Leonardo to stay on. During his apprenticeship, he had become familiar with a wide variety of mechanical and optical devices, and he was now increasingly experimenting with improvements of existing machines as well as the invention of new ones. In the bottega, his curious and creative mind would have found endless challenges as new commissions kept coming in. He also had at his disposal all the necessary instruments, equipment, and raw materials for his mechanical and optical experiments. As he embarked on his dual career of painter and inventor, Verrocchio’s bottega continued to be an ideal working environment.

  In addition to his designs of concave mirrors, Leonardo’s early optical inventions included new ways of controlling light, most likely in connection with stage design. “How to make a great light,” he writes next to a sketch of light going through a convex lens; elsewhere he draws “a lamp that makes a beautiful and great light” (a candle in a box equipped with a lens).19 On a sheet of the Codex Atlanticus from that period there is a sketch of a machine “for generating a big voice,” and on other sheets drawings of various lanterns, one of them with the notation “put above the stars”—all of them evidently meant for theatrical settings.20

  Other inventions he created from that time involved fire and hot air.21 In addition to the self-regulating spit mentioned earlier, Leonardo invented a method of creating a vacuum to raise water by means of a fire burning in a closed bucket, based on the observation that a burning flame consumes air. During these early years he also developed his first versions of a diving apparatus. During a visit to Vinci he designed an olive press with more efficient leverage than the presses used at the time. While he was engaged in these multiple projects of invention, design, and engineering, Leonardo also painted his Annunciation, two Madonnas, and the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci.

  In 1477, Leonardo left Verrocchio’s workshop to establish himself as an independent artist. But he did not seem to devote much energy to this enterprise. A few months later, perhaps through the influence of his father, he received a prestigious commission for an altarpiece in the chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo Vecchio.22 He was paid a sizable advance but never delivered a finished painting. Around this time, he wrote in his Notebook, “Have begun two Virgin Marys” without giving any further details.23

  In fact, very little is known about Leonardo’s activities between the years 1477 and 1481. Some historians assume that, after many years of rigid discipline in the bottega, Leonardo—now a dashing, athletic young man of twenty-five—simply joined the extravagant life of the well-to-do Florentine youth. “Presumably,” writes art historian and critic Kenneth Clark, “Leonardo, like other young men with great gifts, spent a large part of his youth…dressing up, taming horses, learning the lute [and] enjoying the hors d’oeuvres of life.”24

  If true, it was not a time without frustrations, however. For unknown reasons, the Medici never extended to Leonardo their vast patronage of the arts. Although Verrocchio was on excellent terms with the family, enjoyed their support, and would not have failed to recommend Leonardo to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lorenzo did not offer Leonardo a single full-scale commission.25

  A family of bankers and merchants, the Medici were the undisputed rulers of Florence for two centuries, despite the fact that they never held public office. With their enormous wealth and their passionate patronage of the arts, literature, and learning, they influenced every facet of Tuscan public life and culture. They also counted among their family members several cardinals, three popes, and two queens of France. In the words of Serge Bramly, “The Medici behaved less and less like businessmen and more and more like princes, becoming the avowed masters of a city that remained a republic in name only.”26

  Lorenzo de’ Medici, also known as il Magnifico, at the young age of twenty followed in the footsteps of his father as the ruler of Florence. Lorenzo was just three years older than Leonardo, and the two had much in common, including a love for horses, music, and learning. However, there was also much in their characters and tastes that kept them apart.27 Lorenzo was not a handsome man and dressed with deliberate simplicity. Leonardo, on the other hand, was strikingly beautiful and flamboyant in his gestures and behavior. Lorenzo had received a classical education and had a genuine love for formal learning. He surrounded himself with writers. Leonardo, by contrast, was self-taught; he knew no Latin or Greek and despised what he must have perceived as literary pretension at the Medici “court.” These contrasts were apparently so strong that they stood in the way of any mutual sympathy forming between them. Nevertheless, Lorenzo’s low esteem of Leonardo as an artist is surprising.

  Prudent and cunning, Lorenzo de’ Medici could be brutal as well as magnanimous. When he came to power, he consolidated his control of the government, restructured the family banks and trading houses, made new alliances, and dissolved old ones. He also inaugurated lavish festivals and spectacles for the city to assure his popularity.

  However, Lorenzo’s political maneuvers inevitably generated opposition.28 He had allied himself with the city-state of Venice against Rome and Naples, whereupon Pope Sixtus IV transferred the management of Vatican finances from the Medici to the rival Pazzi family. Lorenzo quickly retaliated by accusing one of the Pazzi of treason, and arresting him. The Pazzi family, in turn, planned revenge with the support of the pope, and in April of 1478, Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano were attacked while attending mass in the cathedral. Giuliano was killed; Lorenzo was seriously wounded but managed to escape. But the Pazzi conspiracy did not succeed in triggering a revolt against the Medici, as the pope had intended. Because of Lorenzo’s popularity, the citizens of Florence soon hunted down the criminals, including a member of the Pazzi family, an archbishop, and several priests. All were hanged within hours of the attempted uprising.

  The turbulent time of the Pazzi conspiracy brought a sudden end to the city’s extravagant festivals, and perhaps this helped Leonardo to concentrate again on his work. The year 1478 is the date of his earliest drawings of machines in the Codex Atlanticus, most of them renderings of devices invented by Brunelleschi for the construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.29 The Pazzi conspiracy may also have turned Leonardo’s mind to the science and engineering of war. In the following years he recorded numerous military inventions, including multibarreled guns, assault bridges for attacking ramparts, and mechanisms for overturning ladders used for scaling fortified walls. Many of these creations were derived from the work of previous inventors, although they were invariably modified, and significantly improved.30

  When the Vatican’s support of the Pazzi conspiracy became apparent, Florence declared war on the pope. But Lorenzo resolved the crisis with a daring move. He traveled to Naples and negotiated a peace agreement with King Ferrante, thus depriving the pope of his strongest ally. Shortly thereafter, Florence and Rome were reconciled again, and in 1481—three years after conspiring to kill him—Pope Sixtus IV asked Lorenzo to lend him his best painters to decorate the Sistine Chapel, which he had just built and which had been named after him. It was a tremendous opportunity for Florentine painters, and Leonardo must have been very keen t
o participate. Once again, however, he was conspicuously ignored by Lorenzo, who sent several of Leonardo’s former companions to Rome, including Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino.

  The humiliation may have been the lowest point in Leonardo’s career. Over the years, he had been repeatedly snubbed by the Medici and passed over in favor of lesser artists. Now he was deprived of the chance to seek glory in Rome, which he certainly deserved. But Leonardo put aside his feelings of disappointment and despair, and marshaled his powers of concentration to paint his first masterpiece.

  In March 1481 the monks of the Augustinian monastery of San Donato (whose legal affairs were handled by Ser Piero) commissioned Leonardo to create a large altarpiece representing the Adoration of the Magi. The artist made numerous preparatory drawings and worked on the project intensely for a year.31 His first approach was a masterful exercise in linear perspective, showing a courtyard with two flights of stairs and elaborate arcades. “This carefully measured courtyard,” writes Kenneth Clark, “has been invaded by an extraordinary retinue of ghosts; wild horses rear and toss their heads, agitated figures dart up the staircase and in and out of the arcades; and a camel, appearing for the first and last time in Leonardo’s work, adds its exotic bulk to the dreamlike confusion of forms.”32

  In the final painting, Leonardo abandoned the use of perspective in favor of a dynamic configuration created by the highly emotional gestures of an agitated throng of figures surrounding the Virgin and Child. In the background of the painting, a group of clashing horsemen represents the moral blindness of violence, in contrast to the Epiphany’s glorious message of peace on earth, foreshadowing Leonardo’s forceful condemnation of war in The Battle of Anghiari two decades later.33 Indeed, the entire painting is full of visual themes that would recur in the artist’s later work.34 Art historian Jane Roberts describes Leonardo’s Adoration as “the first mature and independent statement of his genius.”35 At the same time, it is a radical departure from traditional representations of the subject as a calm ceremonial gathering. As Daniel Arasse explains, “To paint the moment when the presence of the Son of God was publicly recognized as such, [Leonardo] depicted the tumult of a universal dazzlement—reflecting in this the meaning that Saint Augustine and the monks of his order who had commissioned the painting gave to the Epiphany.”36

  Early in the following year, while Leonardo was still working on his Adoration of the Magi, Lorenzo de’ Medici decided to make a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza, his most powerful ally, in the form of a gift. As the Anonimo Gaddiano reports, “It is said that when Leonardo was thirty years old, the Magnifico sent him to present a lyre to the Duke of Milan, with a certain Atalante Migliorotti, for he played upon this instrument exceptionally well.”37 Sending Leonardo to the Sforza court in Milan as a musician rather than as a painter may have seemed like another indignity. However, Leonardo did not hesitate. He must have felt that it was time for a fresh start; without Lorenzo’s support, his avenues to further commissions were limited in Florence. So he put down his brushes, packed his belongings, and, with his masterpiece unfinished, left the city that had nurtured his art.

  MILAN

  Milan in the 1480s was a vibrant trading center of tremendous wealth that exported armaments, wool, and silk. It was comparable to Florence in size, but very different in its architecture and culture. Its Latin name, Mediolanum, was probably derived from its location in the middle of the Plain of Lombardy (in medio plano). It was definitely a northern city. Most of its palaces and churches were built in the Romanesque or Gothic style. Unlike Florence, Milan had no elegant town plan. The city’s medieval houses huddled together, creating a labyrinth of narrow, bustling streets.

  The duchy of Milan had been ruled by the Sforza family since 1450. Like the Medici, the Sforzas were cunning and ruthless, but their family tended to be full of warriors rather than bankers. Ludovico Sforza, only a few months older than Leonardo, was one of the wealthiest and most powerful Renaissance princes.38 Nicknamed il Moro (“the Moor”) because of his dark hair and skin, he was also a subtle diplomat whose alliance with the king of France was a potent ingredient in the volatile mixture of Italian politics. With his wife, Beatrice d’Este, Ludovico held an elegant court and spent immense sums of money to further the arts and sciences.

  When Leonardo arrived in Milan, the city had no renowned painters or sculptors, although the Sforza court was filled with doctors, mathematicians, and engineers. Its culture was linked to that of the great universities of northern Italy, whose emphasis was on the study of the physical world rather than on moral philosophy, as had been the case in Florence.39 While the Medici spent their time composing verses in Tuscan and Latin,40 Ludovico organized scientific debates among learned professors. In this stimulating intellectual environment, Leonardo soon transcended his Florentine workshop culture and turned toward a more analytic and theoretical approach to the understanding of nature.

  Because he arrived at the Sforza court as a musician, he and Atalante (who was his student on the lira, according to the Anonimo Gaddiano) probably played frequently to entertain the court. But Leonardo had no intention of pursuing a musical career. Realizing that the power of the Sforzas came from their military might, and that Milan’s dominant position in trade required a well-functioning city infrastructure, he wrote a carefully composed letter to the Moor, in which he offered his services as a military and civil engineer, and also mentioned his skills as an architect, sculptor, and painter. Leonardo began his letter with a telling reference to his “secrets,” revealing a taste for secrecy that became a characteristic trait of his personality as he became older.41 “Most illustrious Lord,” he wrote, “having now sufficiently seen and considered the works of all those who claim to be masters and artificers of instruments of war…I shall endeavor, without prejudice to anyone else, to reveal my secrets to your Excellency, and then offer to execute, at your pleasure and at the appropriate time, all the items briefly noted below.”

  He then proceeded to list under nine headings the different instruments of war he had designed and was prepared to build: “I have models for strong but very light bridges, extremely easy to carry…an endless variety of battering rams and scaling ladders…methods of destroying any citadel or fortress that is not built of rock…mortars that are very practical and easy to transport, with which I can fling showers of small stones, and their smoke will cause great terror to the enemy…secret winding underground passages, dug without noise…covered wagons, safe and unassailable, which will penetrate enemy ranks with their artillery…bombards, mortars, and light artillery of beautiful and practical forms…engines to hurl large rocks, fire-throwing catapults, and other unusual instruments of marvelous efficiency.”

  “In short,” he concluded his list, “whatever the situation, I can invent an infinite variety of machines for both attack and defense.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “In peacetime, I think I can give perfect satisfaction and be the equal of any man in architecture, in the design of public and private buildings, and in conducting water from one place to another. Furthermore, I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay; and likewise in painting I can do any kind of work as well as any man….” And finally, he ended with an enticing prospect: “Moreover, the bronze horse could be made that will be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the Prince your father of blessed memory, and the illustrious house of Sforza.”42

  This astonishing letter, in which Leonardo refers to himself as an artist in only six out of thirty-four lines, shows how quickly he was able to assimilate the spirit of this northern city, presenting his many talents in the order in which he thought they would be most valued by Ludovico. The letter may sound boastful, but all of Leonardo’s offers were serious and well thought out. He had undoubtedly studied the work of the leading military engineers of his time, as he said in the letter; there are about twenty-five sheets of drawings of military machines, dating from his time in Florence, in the Codex Atlanticus; and
there are over forty in a slightly later style.43 By juxtaposing this letter, item by item, with existing drawings, Leonardo scholar Kenneth Keele has demonstrated the validity of every claim Leonardo made.44 Indeed, in his later life, Leonardo was employed in all the capacities he laid out in the letter to il Moro.

  He did not receive an immediate response to his letter from the court, let alone an offer of employment. So Leonardo turned once more to painting—the profession in which he was an accomplished and acknowledged master. He began a collaboration with the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista Predis, the former a successful portrait painter and the latter a woodcarver.45 The Predis brothers were clearly the lesser artists, but they were well connected in Milan and gladly welcomed Leonardo to their bottega. Indeed, Ambrogio was soon able to negotiate a lucrative contract for the three of them.

  In April 1483, the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception commissioned Leonardo and the Predis brothers to paint and decorate a large altarpiece in the church of San Francesco Grande with the central panel “to be painted in oil by Master Leonardo, the Florentine.” The contract specified not only the size and composition of the painting (the Virgin Mary flanked by two prophets, with God the Father appearing overhead, surrounded by angels), but also the traditional colors of gold, blue, and green, the angels’ golden halos, and so on.

  Leonardo worked on the painting for about three years. The result was his second masterpiece, the Virgin of the Rocks, now in the Louvre (see Fig. 2-4 on Chapter 2). The finished work bore little resemblance to what the confraternity had ordered.46 In fact, the priors were so upset that they brought a lawsuit before the duke, which dragged on for over twenty years.47 Leonardo eventually painted a second version, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London. This could not have pleased the priors much better, as he made only minor changes in the painting’s composition.