The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  When Alberti casually described the surface on which the artist painted as “an open window through which I view that which will be painted there,” he proclaimed a new power of the modern painter to capture space and impose a personal point of view in the space he created. But he also confessed a limitation when he insisted that the perspective was from only one point of view. Is there more “realism” in the modern perspective view than in the “naive” paintings of an earlier era? Or only a departure from the walk to the window?

  Earlier paintings like the well-known fresco in the Loggia del Bigallo in Florence (c. 1350) showed the buildings of the city as a person walking about would have seen or felt them. None was shown smaller because it was at a greater distance. These pre-perspective views gave a tactile sense of the huddled-together jumble of the buildings of a medieval city. This sense was lost in the homogeneous space of a perspective view. A walker’s view was more intimate. But Alberti and his followers produced a powerful persistence of the vision of an artist looking through his window. The artist’s “artificial perspective” would dominate Western art into the twentieth century. It had given a power to substitute the unique view of an artist’s self for the varied sensations of pedestrians in the landscape, and so too an uncanny power to substitute art for experience.

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  Sovereign of the Visible World

  ALBERTI’S perspective offered only the frame—“an open window through which I view that which will be painted there.” By filling that space the artist became sovereign over the whole visible world. In a story in his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) defends with relish the artist’s sovereignty. It seems that King Matthias of Hungary (1443–1490) received two gifts on his birthday. A poet brought a book of verses composed for the occasion and a painter gave him a portrait of his beloved. The king quickly closed the book and turned to the picture. “O King,” the indignant poet exclaimed, “read, but read, and you will learn matter of far weightier substance than a mute picture.” To which the king retorted, “It does not satisfy the mind of the listener or beholder like the proportions of the beautiful forms that compose the divine beauties of this face here before me, which being all joined together and reacting simultaneously give me so much pleasure with their divine proportion.” And he asked, “Which is the nearer to the actual man: the name of the man or the image of the man?” “Painting extending as it does to the works of God is nobler than poetry which only deals with fabricated stories about the deeds of men.”

  Painting, then, was rightfully one of the liberal arts because “she deals not only with the works of nature but extends over an infinite number of things which nature never created.” “The eye … the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second, which acquires dignity by hearing of the things the eye has seen.” Great painters feast their eyes on nature, but after the Roman Empire painters only imitated other painters until, Leonardo explained, Giotto the Florentine, “not content with imitating the works of Cimabue his master—being born in the mountains and in the solitude inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by nature to his art, began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats of which he was keeper.”

  “Knowing how to see” (Saper vedere) became the object of Leonardo’s life, a name for his art and his science.

  He who loses his sight loses his view of the universe, and is like one interred alive who can still move about and breathe in his grave. Do you not see that the eye encompasses the beauty of the whole world? It is the master of astronomy, it assists and directs all the arts of man. It sends men forth to all the corners of the earth. It reigns over the various departments of mathematics, and all its sciences are the most infallible. It has measured the distance and the size of the stars; has discovered the elements and the nature thereof; and from the courses of the constellations it has enabled us to predict things to come. It has created architecture and perspective, and lastly, the divine art of painting. O, thou most excellent of all God’s creations! What hymns can do justice to thy nobility; what peoples, what tongues, sufficiently describe thine achievements?

  Leonardo created his Empire of the Eye with the advantages of a rural Tuscan boyhood, a lucky apprenticeship, and a freedom from bookish prejudices. The illegitimate son of a prosperous Florentine notary, Leonardo was born on his father’s estate at Vinci in the countryside near Florence. His mother, Caterina, was probably a peasant. Leonardo’s father had children only by his wives of his third and fourth marriages. Meanwhile Leonardo was raised in his father’s house as if he had been legitimate. When a neighbor asked him to paint a dragon on a shield, Vasari recounts, he “carried into a room of his own lizards great and small, crickets, serpents, butterflies, grass-hoppers, bats” all of which he compounded into “a great ugly creature.” The young Leonardo bought caged birds in the marketplace, so he could take them home and set them free. A memory of his childhood in his notebook (the starting point of Freud’s speculations about him) was how “as I lay in my cradle a kite came down to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail between my lips. This seems to be my fate.”

  When Leonardo moved into town with his father, his education was meager and conventional—learning to read and write Tuscan Italian and acquiring the elements of arithmetic. If his father had been of a higher station or Leonardo had shown academic promise, he might have been sent to the University of Florence to be filled with Latin book learning, and prepared for a learned profession. Instead, apprenticed in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488), a famous painter and sculptor, he spent twelve years securing the practical education for which his temperament had fitted him. To Verrocchio’s studio came great artists of the day—Botticelli, Perugino, and Pollaiuolo. After Leonardo was admitted to the painters’ guild in 1472 he stayed on in the workshop.

  When the master assigned young Leonardo to paint the angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, Madonna and Child, the apprentice did it so well, according to Vasari, that “Andrea would never again touch colours, being most indignant that a boy should know more of the art than he did.” A similar legend had been told of Cimabue and his pupil Giotto, and would be told of Francia and Raphael (1483–1520). It was also told of Picasso and his teacher-father. “He is a poor pupil,” Leonardo later wrote in his notebook, “who does not surpass his master.” By 1477, Leonardo, at the age of twenty-five, with his own studio was supporting himself by commissions. Was Verrocchio, as some say, to be Leonardo’s John the Baptist? Was not Leonardo himself one of Verrocchio’s masterpieces?

  Leonardo’s combination of limited book learning and long workshop training helps account for his lifelong distrust of bookish knowledge and scholastic commentators. He felt at home among craftsmen and engineers. In 1482, when Leonardo was thirty, Lorenzo de Medici (the Magnificent) sent him to Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, to present a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head, on which Leonardo was an adept performer. There in Milan Leonardo remained for eighteen years, from age thirty to forty-eight. It is not clear why Lorenzo, a jealous patron and shrewd judge of talent, made no effort to bring him back. Perhaps Leonardo himself, the scientist-artist-engineer, preferred the enterprising spirit of Sforza’s Milan to the Neoplatonic miasma of the Medici circle in Florence. These years in Milan were among his most productive—as a painter and as a designer of court festivals and noble weddings—yet he made the time to pursue his interests in anatomy, biology, mathematics, physics, and mechanics. His anatomical studies, Leonardo himself boasted, had led him during his life to dissect some thirty corpses. He enjoyed the stirring companionship of savants and filled his notebooks with subjects for treatises he would never write, while offering plans to the Sforzas for fantastic weapons, grand schemes of military architecture and hydraulic engineering.

  When the French captured Milan in 1499 the duke was ex
iled and Leonardo left. After stopping briefly at Mantua for a portrait commission and at Venice to plan the city’s defense against the Turks, he returned to Florence. His six years there were interrupted by a tour in the service of Cesare, the prototypical Borgia (c.1475–1507), who was commanding the army of his father, Pope Alexander VI, to reconquer the papal states of Romagna and the Marches. The city of Florence enlisted Leonardo as engineer in their war against Pisa and commissioned him to paint a grand mural for the Palazzo della Signoria while he pursued his scientific experiments.

  Recalled to Milan in 1506 by its new overlord, the king of France, Leonardo spent the next seven years there on architecture, sculptural projects, engineering, anatomy, and scientific illustration, doing only a little painting. When the French were driven from Milan in 1513, he was invited to Rome and given a studio in the Belvedere of the Vatican by his Florentine patron Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of the new pope, Leo X. The papal commissions Leonardo hoped for never came, but he pursued his scientific studies, surveyed and mapped the Roman scene. After three lonely, frustrating years, in January 1517 he accepted the invitation of the twenty-three-year-old Francis I (1494–1547; reigned 1515–47) to move to France. And he lived out his last three years near the king’s summer place at Amboise on the Loire with his favorite disciple, Francesco Melzi, in a small country palace. His title was “Premier Peintre, architecte et méchanicien du Roi,” but the king called on him only for conversation and advice. There Leonardo produced little besides designs for court festivals, along with his relentless scientific studies and his last apocalyptic drawings.

  Of the many mysteries surrounding Leonardo da Vinci none is more remarkable than the disproportion between the quantity of his finished works and the grandeur of his reputation. Our awe of Leonardo is as much for what he was as for what he did, as much for his reach as for his grasp. His career was vagrant and unfocused—in fact, he never had a career. His efforts and his works were dispersed among Florence, Milan, Venice, and Rome, in a lifelong search for patrons. Unlike Dante, he had no passion for a woman. Unlike Giotto, Dante, or Brunelleschi, he seemed to have had no civic loyalty. Nor devotion to Church or Christ. He willingly accepted commissions from the Medici, the Sforzas, the Borgias, or French kings—from the popes or their enemies. He lacked the sensual worldliness of a Boccaccio or a Chaucer, the recklessness of a Rabelais, the piety of a Dante, or the religious passion of a Michelangelo.

  His vast disorderly notebooks in his own hand mystify as much as they explain. They tell us almost nothing of his personal feelings about anyone. No word of love for a woman, nor for a man! On the death of his father he gives only the barest obituary: “On Wednesday, the 9th of July, 1504 my father, Ser Piero da Vinci, Notary at the Palazzo de Podesta, died; he was eighty years old; left ten sons and two daughters.” No other artist bequeathed so copious a record of his thoughts and yet told us so little of himself. The thirty-five hundred closely written pages that have survived of his notebooks may be only a quarter of those left at his death. Whole notebooks have been lost or broken up, and single sheets now turn up around the world. Some of the nineteen existing notebooks were small enough to be carried about on Leonardo’s belt for occasional jottings, some were large folios.

  His earliest notebooks began only when he was thirty. “This will be a collection without order … hoping afterwards to arrange them … according to the subjects of which they treat,” he explains at the outset of a volume begun in 1508. “I believe that before I am at the end of this I shall have to repeat the same several times; and therefore, O reader, blame me not, because the subjects are many, and the memory cannot retain them and say ‘this I will not write because I have already written it.’ ” At his death he left his papers to his lifelong companion Francesco Melzi, who compiled them in various ways. One would become his Treatise on Painting.

  While most of his script is clear, and legible if viewed in a mirror, it is almost all in mirror writing, written “backwards.” Since Leonardo was probably left-handed, this way of writing might have come quite naturally to him. It could hardly have kept the contents secret or deceived the censors, since his texts were copiously illustrated. Perhaps Leonardo wished only to make trouble for any who dared to read his private jottings. Or were these “written monologues” another symptom of his self-sufficiency? “The painter must be solitary,” he wrote, “especially when he is intent on those speculations and considerations, which if they are kept continually before the eyes give the memory the opportunity of mastering them. For if you are alone you are completely yourself but if you are accompanied by a single companion you are only half yourself.” Leonardo never abridged himself by publishing. His copious notes are repetitive and contradictory, but often eloquent and scintillating. Kenneth Clark compares Leonardo’s notebooks to the famous Chinese examinations where the candidate was told to write down everything he knew.

  Were the ideas in Leonardo’s notes his own? Or were they only an anthology of his reading? He was not learned, and even called himself uomo senza lettera. He finally taught himself Latin in 1494 at the age of forty-two. He rarely gives sources, but scholars have found Latin passages that may have been sources for some of his most quoted ideas. Many of his “prophetic” drawings of inventions may only depict devices that he saw. But if, as the historian of science George Sarton suggests, Leonardo was “almost illiterate,” his prodigious notebooks were an even more astonishing feat. The eminent French physicist Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) produced three volumes on Leonardo’s notebooks and ten more on medieval physics that have shown Leonardo to be the grand reviser of medieval science.

  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 visito
rs 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.