Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  In the days and afterdays of his fame Leonardo was addressed in many epigrams and epigraphs, and almost without fail they throw in a pun on Vinci and vincere, to conquer. In fact the origin of the name has nothing to do with conquest: it comes precisely from an old Italian word for the osier, vinco (Latin vincus). And the Vincio river which flows past Vinci is obviously ‘the river where osiers grow’. The word derives from the Latin vinculus, a bond (the osier shoot being much used for binding), and is found in Italian literature describing metaphorical types of bonds and bindings, as in Dante’s ‘sweet bonds’ (dolci vinci) of love.38 To pursue the etymology for a moment, the Latin vincus is connected to the old Norse word for an osier, viker, from which comes the English ‘wicker’, as in wickerwork, and also ‘weak’, which has a root-meaning of pliability. Thus, curiously, the Vinci word-game that begins with the idea of vanquishing arrives at weakness and pliability.

  Leonardo took this local craft of wickerwork and made it his personal emblem, one might almost say his ‘logo’. There exists a series of engravings based on his designs, probably done in Venice shortly after 1500, which feature complex interwoven patterns, and in the middle the words ‘Academia Leonardi Vinci’. The play on vinci = osiers is undoubtedly intentional. The courtier and poet Niccolò da Correggio is known to have devised

  a ‘fantasia dei vinci’ – presumably a knot-design of some sort – for the Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, in 1492.39 Leonardo doubtless found the pun on his own name irresistible, and perhaps part of its appeal was that it also contained a memory of the osier-weavers he had seen in his childhood around Vinci. The weaving was accounted woman’s work, and it is not unlikely that Caterina practised it, and so Leonardo’s knot-patterns would retrace on paper the mesmeric movements of his mother’s hands as she plaited the soaked shoots of osier into baskets. He was already

  Interweavings. Knot-design for Leonardo’s ‘academy’ (above), and braided hair in a study for the head of Leda.

  producing this sort of design during his Florentine years, for in a list of his drawings written in about 1482 he mentions ‘molti disegni di groppi’ (‘many drawings of knots’). These were doubtless knot-patterns of the sort later exemplified by the Venice engravings: Vasari specifically uses the word groppo when talking about those engravings.40 These elaborate entwinings and intricacies are also found in decorative patterns on the dresses of the Mona Lisa and the Lady with an Ermine, in braidings of hair and purlings of water, and in the interwoven foliage of his frescos in the Sala delle Asse in Milan. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo refers to the latter when he writes, ‘In the trees we find a beautiful invention by Leonardo, who makes all the branches form into various bizarre knot-patterns.’41 Lomazzo seems to have understood the basic connection when he uses the verb canestrare to describe the creation of these knot-patterns: this means precisely ‘to weave like a basket [canestra]’.

  Thus etymologically ‘Vinci’ leads, in a characteristic Leonardian way, away from the military machismo of vincere, as symbolized by the town’s fortress of Castello Guidi, to the ambivalent, circuitous, non-achieving form of the interwoven vinci – a fantasia, a visual riddle, a question which never reaches an answer.

  SPEAKING WITH ANIMALS

  Man has great power of speech, but what he says is mostly vain and false; animals have little, but what they say is useful and true.

  Paris MS F, fol. 96V

  A dog lying asleep on an old sheepskin; a spider’s web in the vineyard; a blackbird among the thorn-bushes; an ant carrying a grain of millet; a rat ‘besieged in his little home’ by a weasel; a crow flying up to the top of a tall bell-tower with a nut in its beak – all these beautifully specific images of country life are to be found in Leonardo’s favole, or fables, written in Milan in the early 1490s. These fables embody a rich vein of country lore. They are Aesopian in character – and we know from one of his book-lists that Leonardo owned a copy of Aesop’s fables – but they seem to be original to him in their particularities and their phrasing. They are brisk narratives, some only a few lines long, in which animals and birds and insects are given a voice, and a story to tell.42 They have a connection, perhaps, with Leonardo’s dream-life, as glimpsed in that ‘prophecy’ I quoted in relation to his kite fantasy – ‘You will speak with animals of every species and they will speak with you in human language.’ The kite fantasy itself seems to belong within the animistic world of the fables – it could almost be one of the fables, except that it would have been turned the other way around and told from the kite’s point of view: ‘One day a kite looked down from the sky and spied an infant asleep in his cradle…’ One would like to know how that version of the story might have continued.

  It is not unusual for a somewhat solitary child growing up in the country to form a strong affinity with animals, and once they are part of his life he is never quite happy out of their company for long. That Leonardo ‘loved’ animals is almost a truism. Vasari says:

  He took an especial delight in animals of all sorts, which he treated with wonderful love and patience. For instance, when he was passing the places where they sold birds, he would often take them out of their cages with his hand, and having paid whatever price was asked by the vendor, he would let them fly away into the air, giving them back their lost liberty.

  His famous vegetarianism seems part of this relationship. (There is no evidence that he was a life-long vegetarian, but he certainly was in later years.) A letter of 1516 from an Italian traveller in India, Andrea Corsali, describes the Gujarati as a ‘gentle people… who do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci’.43 One of Leonardo’s closest associates, the eccentric Tommaso Masini, held similar views: ‘He would not kill a flea for any reason whatever; he preferred to dress in linen so as not to wear something dead.’44

  Leonardo’s fables and prophecies show him acutely sensitive to animal suffering, but his respect for creatures does not merge into sentimentality. The anatomical manuscripts contain many animal studies, ranging from a bear’s foot to a bovine womb: these were undoubtedly based on his own dissections. And there was that ‘odd-looking’ lizard, brought to him one day by the Pope’s gardener, which he kept in a box to ‘frighten the life out of his friends’, having first fitted it up with wings, horns and a beard ‘attached with a mixture of quicksilver’. How much the lizard enjoyed this jeu d’esprit is not recorded. This Vasarian anecdote has a touch of the childish prank about it, but is placed in Leonardo’s Roman years, when he was in his early sixties. It may or may not be apocryphal.

  Leonardo ‘always kept’ horses, Vasari says. In itself this would be unremarkable – all but the poorest in Renaissance Italy ‘kept’ a horse – so one assumes that Vasari means something more: that Leonardo was a particular connoisseur of horses. This could anyway be inferred from the many beautiful studies of horses in his sketchbooks. The earliest of these belong to the late 1470s. They are preparatory sketches for an Adoration of the Shepherds which is either lost or (more likely) never got past the planning stage. In keeping with the homely imagery of this subject, they show familiar workaday horses of the kind he would have known from the farm. The horse shown from behind, cropping grass, is bony and a bit ungainly. The same mood of unromanticized reality is in a companion sketch (the paper-type is identical) showing the ox and ass.45 A little later are the studies for the unfinished Adoration of the Magi (1481–2), which features a number of horses and horsemen in the background. These are more dynamic and romantic. One of these early studies – the horse and bareback rider, formerly in the Brown Collection in Newport, Rhode Island – is currently the world’s most expensive drawing. It was sold at Christie’s in July 2001 for $12 million, equalling the world record for a drawing set by Michelangelo’s study for a Risen Christ the previous year: the Leonardo sketch, postcard-sized, works out at a little less than $1 million per square inch.46 There are many later studies of horses – for the equestri
an statue of Francesco Sforza (c. 1488–94), for the Battle of Anghiari mural (c. 1503–6), for the funeral monument of the condottiere Giangiacomo Trivulzio (c. 1508–11) – but the early Florentine sketches are among the loveliest. These are the cart-horses and punches of his agricultural childhood, rather than the martial coursers and chargers required for those later, more militaristic, commissions.

  Drawing horses was something that Leonardo couldn’t stop himself doing – witness the drawing at Windsor of a military chariot. The point of the drawing is the fearsome machine itself, with its toothed wheels and cannon-ball flails, but he cannot resist individuating the two horses which draw the vehicle, one of which turns with ears pricked and eyes alert, as if startled by an unexpected presence. Again these are farm-horses rather than war-horses: if you cover up the chariot, this is just a team of two pulling a cart or plough.47

  In the British Museum is a wonderfully fresh and natural sketch of a dog, and I am tempted to say that it – or she, for it is demonstrably a bitch – was Leonardo’s dog. It is a small, low-built, smooth-haired terrier type still to be seen all over Italy. Its character is beautifully caught. The dog sits more from obedience than volition – the ears flattened down in an ingratiating way, the mouth almost smiling, but the eyes alert to the more interesting world beyond the temporary imperatives of its master. Other Leonardo drawings show a very similar dog, but it does not follow that they are all the same animal. A red-chalk sketch of a dog in profile is found in a pocket-book dating from the late 1490s. This is some twenty years after the

  Animal studies. Above: ox and ass, and horse and bareback rider, preparatory studies for Florentine paintings. Below: study of a sitting dog and a cat, and proportional profile study of a dog.

  obediently sitting dog in the British Museum drawing, so almost certainly shows a different individual.48

  One of my favourite moments of Leonardian light relief concerns dogs. On a page of Paris MS F, a mid-sized notebook he was using in about 1508, occurs a short text which has the look of one of his scientific ‘demonstrations’ or ‘conclusions’, but the title of the text actually reads, ‘Perche li cani oderan volentieri il culo l’uno all’altro’ – ‘Why dogs willingly sniff one another’s bottoms’. (I like that ‘willingly’.) The explanation he gives is that they are establishing how much ‘essence of meat’ (virtù di carne) can be discerned there:

  The excrement of animals always retains some essence of its origin… and dogs have such a keen sense of smell that they can discern with their nose the essence remaining in the faeces. If by means of the smell they know a dog to be well-fed, they respect him, because they judge that he has a powerful and rich master; and if they discern no such smell of that essence [i.e. of meat] they judge the dog to be of small account, and to have a poor and humble master, and therefore they bite him.49

  This is balanced between accuracy – dogs do indeed get olfactory information in this way – and humorous exaggeration of the sociological niceties involved.

  Cats feature both in early and in late drawings, and again there seems good reason to take them as cats belonging to Leonardo, or at least attached to his studio in their time-honoured capacity as rat-catchers. If his wonderful sketches for a Madonna and Child with a Cat (another lost or abandoned work of the late 1470s) 50 were done from life, as they certainly seem to have been, we might deduce that the cat who features in them is not only a real and particular cat, but also a trusted cat. The child is shown hugging, squeezing and generally mauling it around; at some stages the animal looks pretty reluctant, but it is trusted not to harm the child. Another studio cat is discernible in a brief note of c. 1494: ‘If at night you place your eye between the light and the eye of a cat, you will see that its eye seems to be on fire.’51 The famous page of cats at Windsor – or of a single cat in various positions – is one of his late drawings, probably done during his years in Rome, 1513–16. On closer inspection one of the cats turns out to be a diminutive dragon.52

  I hazard an addendum to Vasari: that Leonardo ‘always kept’ dogs and cats as well as horses; that animals were a part of his life.

  THE ‘MADONNA OF THE SNOW’

  The country boy learns the shapes and contours of the land. He knows the trails that lead in and up and around: the hilly paths and the disregarded corners. He knows ‘a certain spot, somewhat steep, where a beautiful bit of woodland ends above a rocky track’ – a location found in one of Leonardo’s fables, in which a ‘rolling stone’ laments the restlessness that caused it to leave that charming spot.53 The moral of the fable is that those who ‘leave a life of solitary contemplation to come and live in the city’ will regret it. As Leonardo sits in Milan writing these words, that image of a rocky track winding through the woods carries a touch of personal nostalgia. It sums up for him the country life which he too has left behind.

  Leonardo’s love of the countryside can be seen throughout his work – in the luminous, mysterious landscapes of his paintings; in his superbly detailed drawings of plants and trees and woodlands. It is found also in his notebooks, which display a deep knowledge – botanical, agricultural, folkloric – of the natural world. They contain references to over 100 species of plant and 40 different trees. They have something to say about puffballs and truffles, mulberries and nutmegs, nettles and thistles, wolfbane and wormwood.54 This detailed botanical knowledge adds a dimension of scientific exactitude to the poetic depiction of nature in his paintings.

  In the Trattato della pittura he stresses the importance of the painter getting out into the country, experiencing it at first hand (by no means a universal practice among Renaissance artists). It is presented like a pilgrimage: you must ‘quit your home in town, and leave your family and friends, and go over the mountains and valleys into the country’. You must ‘expose yourself to the fierce heat of the sun’. It would be easier, he says, to get everything second-hand, from other artists’ paintings or from some poetic description in a book – ‘Wouldn’t that be more convenient, and less tiring, since you can stay in a cool place without moving about and exposing yourself to illness?’ But, if you did only that, your soul could not experience, through the ‘window’ of the eye, the inspiring beauties of the countryside: ‘It could not receive the reflections of bright places; it could not see the shady valleys.’55 The proper way to experience nature, he insists, is alone. ‘While you are alone you are entirely your own; and if you have but one companion you are but half your own.’ The painter should ‘withdraw apart, the better to study the forms of natural objects’. He should ’remain solitary, especially when he is intent on studying and considering those things which

  The ‘mnemonic icon’. Left to right: detail from Leonardo’s landscape drawing, 1473; detail from his map of Tuscany, c. 1503; Monsummano viewed from near Montevettolini.

  continually appear before his eyes, and which furnish material to be carefully stored up in the memory’. This desire for solitude, Leonardo warns, will not be understood by others: ‘I tell you, you will be thought crazy.’56

  These words were written in about 1490; they are reprised on a page of the Codex Atlanticus written twenty-five years later, in a short text headed ‘Vita del pictore filosofo ne paesi’ – ‘The life of the painter-philosopher in the country’. Again he stresses that the painter should ‘deprive himself of companions’. And he gives this beautiful synopsis of the receptiveness that the artist must cultivate: ‘His brain must be changeable according to the variations of the objects that present themselves in front of it, and it must be free from all cares… Above all his mind should be like the surface of a mirror, which takes on all the diverse colours of the objects placed before it.’ 57

  As with his deep attachment to animals, I see Leonardo’s habit of solitary rambling as something embedded in his country childhood. The mind free of cares, the senses alert, the brain as receptive to impressions as the surface of a mirror – it is almost explicitly a childlike state of mental openness that the painter is striving
to recreate.

  It has been argued that part of the power of Leonardo’s painted landscapes is precisely that they contain a poetic memory of the landscapes of his childhood. According to his French biographer Serge Bramly, what we see in the backgrounds of his paintings is ‘Leonardo’s private landscape’: a recreation of the rougher, upland topography of Vinci, ‘the rocks, mountain streams and escarpments of his childhood… magnified by the double lens of art and memory’.58 Leonardo himself seems to touch on this idea in the Trattato della pittura, where he says that looking at a painted landscape can trigger off memories of other, real landscapes ‘in which you once took pleasure’. In that fictive landscape ‘you can see yourself again, a lover with your beloved, in the flowering meadows or under the soft shadows of the green trees.’ The lover and his (female) sweetheart add a decorative touch, but the core idea is of landscape encoding and evoking a memory: ‘tu possi rivedere tu’.59

  This link between landscape and memory is to be found most precisely in Leonardo’s earliest dated work, which is indeed a landscape, drawn in pen and ink, now in the Uffizi (Plate 2). It is a physically small drawing – it measures 7½ x 11 inches, just a little less than a sheet of A4 paper – but as a composition it is wonderfully dramatic and spacious. It shows a panoramic view of precipitous craggy hills and wide waterlogged flatlands stretching away to further hills on the horizon. The drawing has the look of a sketch done in situ: the penwork is rapid, suggestive, impressionistic, sometimes almost abstract – the trees on the right-hand side of the drawing, for instance – yet for all its sweep and swirl the landscape is punctuated with arresting detail: a castle bristling on a promontory, tiny boats in the wetlands, a waterfall. These in turn lead the eye on through the landscape, to what seems to be the focal point of the vista – a distant, conical, tower-topped hill rising suddenly from the haze of the plain. This feature also serves to identify the landscape: the conical hill is quite unmistakably that of Monsummano (or Monsomano, as Leonardo writes it on one of his maps).60 This lies north-west of Vinci, about 8 miles away as the crow flies, a couple of hours’ walk via the road that winds down through Lamporecchio and Larciano. We are, quite specifically, in the landscape of Leonardo’s childhood.