Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  If the tump is Monsummano other features of the landscape are deducible: the flatlands are the Padule di Fucecchio lying south-west of Monsummano; the mountains beyond are those of the Val di Nievole; the lower rounded hills to their left suggest Montecarlo; and so on. These are ingredients in the landscape, but as soon as one tries to relate them to a map of the area – or to actual views from actual hills – the drawing promptly recedes back into mystery. The distinctive form of Monsummano is visible from many vantage-points in the Mont’ Albano, but no one has yet found the particular spot which provides this particular vista.61 My own belief, having tracked the area in search of it, is that no such spot exists. The castle or fortified village in the left foreground is a particular problem: none of the candidates suggested – Montevettolini, Larciano, Papiano – can be found in that sort of spatial relationship with Monsummano. Another difficulty is that to look across the padule to Monsummano you would have to be somewhere up in the Pisan hills, but if you were, Monsummano itself would not have the shape it has in the drawing. In short, the drawing is an imagined or idealized view of the landscape around Vinci. It incorporates real places, vividly and beautifully sketched, but is not a real view. What it shows cannot be found and photographed, though it could perhaps be re-created, loosely, by a cunning collage of photos. Or perhaps it could be re-created by flying above the land in a hang-glider (I confess I have not tried this), for the viewpoint most powerfully suggested is an aerial one. It is a bird’s-eye view: the imagination soars above the land, and this is what it sees. One recalls a phrase in the Turin Codex on the flight of birds: ‘The movement of the bird’ – in other words the ‘big bird’ or flying-machine – ‘must always be higher than the clouds, so that the wings don’t get wet, and so that one can see more of the land.’ ‘Per iscoprire più paese’: precisely what is achieved, thirty years earlier, in the high-gliding viewpoint of the Uffizi drawing.62

  In the upper left-hand corner of the drawing, in the earliest known example of his handwriting, Leonardo wrote, ‘Di di santa Maria della neve addi 5 daghossto 1473’ (‘On the day of the Madonna of the Snow, 5 August 1473’). This tells us that he made the drawing at the age of twenty-one, after he had been living and working in Florence for some years. The drawing may be connected with the landscape background of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, which was commissioned in about 1473 and which is known to contain additions by Leonardo. The precise date of the drawing also has some bearing on the landscape itself, for the Madonna of the Snow was particularly venerated at a little chapel outside the fortified village of Montevettolini. This chapel, now called the Oratorio della Madonna della Neve, stands just a mile or so from the southern foot of Monsummano. The foundations of the chapel date from the late thirteenth century: it was a modest ‘tabernacle’ or shrine, smaller than it is today, but important enough to house a rather fine fresco of the Madonna and Child flanked by four saints, whose style has been compared to the Quaranesi altarpiece (1425) by Gentile da Fabriano.

  The story of the Madonna of the Snow began as a legend about the founding of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. According to the story, the site of the church was dictated by a miraculous fall of summer snow on the hill. The church was founded in the fourth century, but the legend does not appear until the medieval period. The Madonna of the Snow was one of various cultish images of the Virgin Mary which spread through Italy at this time. They were associated with special powers, and their shrines were often, as at Montevettolini, built outside the confines of a town or village. A fifteenth-century diarist, Luca Landucci, refers to the healing powers of another image of the Madonna ‘in a tabernacle about a bow-shot from Bibbona’.63

  The festa of the Madonna of the Snow on 5 August has been celebrated at the Montevettolini chapel for centuries, and it is celebrated there still, though the old ladies sitting out in the evening sun will tell you in chorus that it is no longer what it was, when the village was thronged with visitors (invitati – guests – was their word). This diminution is blamed on the youth of today, who are sempre in giro, always out and about, and have no time for such traditions. Nothing seems to be happening at all until around sunset, when the little piazza outside the chapel suddenly begins to fill. A group of men in white short-sleeved shirts assembles: the village marching-band. An old red van extrudes an awning and becomes a snack-bar. The priest arrives with his vestments folded over his arm. The image of the Madonna – neither very old nor noticeably snow-related – is carried out into the porch of the chapel, shrouded in a curtain of pale-blue taffeta. A mass is held, and then the procession begins, winding up from the chapel on a circling route around the base of the village walls – the tump of Monsummano looming huge to the north – then in through the old Porta Barbacci. The priest intones prayers through a push-button megaphone; the image of the Madonna sways aloft, borne on her sedan chair by four thickset men. This twilight walk on a warm August evening is wonderful and slightly surreal. The lights twinkle in the lowlands below, and the andante accompaniment of the band seems, even at its most solemn, to betray traces of jauntiness.

  The landscape, the date, the once-thronged local festa to which both seem to lead: how do these all fit together?

  To arrive at some kind of answer we must first pose another question: where was Leonardo da Vinci on 5 August 1473? Taking this piece of paper at face value, the implication is that he was sitting with his sketchbook on a hillside somewhere near Vinci making this marvellous drawing. Some would argue there is further evidence of this on the reverse of the drawing. Here one sees another sketch of a landscape – unfinished, minimal – and a cryptic scribbled phrase which reads, ‘Io morando dant sono chontento.’ The word dant can be taken as a contraction of d’Antonio, but the overall meaning of the phrase is elusive. Bramly translates it to mean, ‘I, staying with Antonio, am happy.’ He further reasons that as the Antonio cannot be Leonardo’s grandfather, who had died some years previously, it must be his stepfather, Antonio Buti, a.k.a. Accattabriga. This suggests that the drawing

  Landscape with wing. Detail from Leonardo’s Annunciation, c. 1470–72.

  was done during a visit to Vinci, while staying with his mother and her family at Campo Zeppi and feeling ‘happy’. The escape from the city in August – where else would he be but back in Vinci? But this interpretation is speculative. Carlo Pedretti interprets the phrase as merely a detached doodle reproducing or rehearsing the opening words of some contract: ‘I, Morando d’Antonio, agree to…’ If this is right, the words contain no personal meaning, and offer no evidence of Leonardo’s presence at Vinci.64 He might as easily have been in Florence, in which case the keynotes of the drawing are imagination and memory: it is a Vincian vista conjured up in the mind’s eye, a memory of walking over the hills to the summer fair at Montevettolini. This is how Pedretti characterizes the drawing: as a ‘rapporto scenico’ – a visual drama, a piece of theatre – centred on the ‘mnemonic icon’ of Monsummano.65

  My search for the ‘real’ landscape of this drawing proved fruitless, but I did find one view which I think might be significant. That ‘mnemonic’ sight of Monsummano is visible not only from high points around Vinci. It can also be seen looming up straight ahead of you (though several miles distant) on the road that runs between Vinci and San Pantaleone – the road, in other words, which Leonardo would have known so well as a child walking to and from his mother’s house at Campo Zeppi. Its ‘mnemonic’ power may thus have been imprinted on Leonardo’s eye and mind very early on, perhaps in association with his mother. I also note that the iconic features of the Uffizi drawing are echoed in the landscape of Leonardo’s Annunciation, a work dating from the early 1470s and thus broadly contemporary with the drawing. The same conical hill with nipple-like protuberance can be discerned (more clearly since the restoration of 1999). It is on the horizon immediately to the left of the announcing angel; on the picture surface it lies within the crook of the angel’s wing. Closer to us, again
echoing the drawing, is a tall cluster of rocks whose sheer verticals counterpoint the feminine curves of the tump; and beyond stretch those long hazy expanses of commingled land and water suggestive of the marshy padule below Vinci. The repetition of this motif adds to one’s sense of its rootedness in Leonardo’s psyche, and the apposition of the breast-shaped hill and the bird-like wing takes us back once more to that ‘first memory’ of the kite, which Freud interprets as a memory of feeding at his mother’s breast.

  EDUCATION

  All our knowledge has its foundation in our senses…

  Trivulzio Codex, fol. 20v

  I have tried to piece together some fragments of Leonardo’s experience as a boy growing up in and around Vinci. There are the emotional currents whose patterns one can only guess at – the broken family, the absent father, the troubling dreams, the mother on whose love everything is staked – and there is the daily reality of the Tuscan countryside with which these emotions become somehow entwined, so that years later some hard-to-grasp meaning remains encoded in the flight-patterns of a kite, in the smell of freshly pressed oil, in the weave of a wicker basket, in the shapes of the landscape. These are the few recoverable parts of Leonardo’s sentimental education: things which ‘seem to be his destiny’, and which echo on through his adult life as a ‘painter-philosopher’.

  Of his more formal education – or lack of it – we know very little. Vasari is the only early biographer to touch on the subject, and his comments are brief and circumstantial. He describes Leonardo as a brilliant but unpredictable pupil:

  He would have been very proficient at his early lessons if he had not been so volatile and unstable. He set himself to learn many things only to abandon them almost immediately. When he began to learn arithmetic, in a few months he made such progress that he bombarded the master who was teaching him with questions and problems, and very often outwitted him.

  Vasari also mentions that Leonardo studied music, and that, whatever else he was doing, ‘he never left off drawing and sculpting, which suited his imagination better than anything.’ Nothing in this suggests any specific knowledge on Vasari’s part: it conforms to a general idea of Leonardo’s personality and accomplishments. Vasari assumes that Leonardo had a teacher, but the word maestro does not convey whether this was a schoolmaster or a private tutor. There was probably a scuola dell’abaco (an ‘abacus school’) in Vinci; the conventional age to attend was around ten or eleven.

  Leonardo famously described himself as ‘omo sanza lettere’, an ‘unlettered man’.66 He means, of course, not that he was illiterate, but that he had not been educated in the scholarly language of Latin. He had not received the kind of schooling or tuition which led to university, and so to the study of the seven ‘liberal arts’ (so-called precisely because they were not tied to the necessity of learning a trade) – grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. He had followed instead the course of practical apprenticeship. This was certainly an education, though it took place in a workshop rather than an ancient university, it taught skills rather than intellectual accomplishments, and it was conducted in Italian rather than Latin.67 Leonardo later embarked on a crash course in Latin – a notebook filled with Latin vocabulary dates from the late 1480s – but he remained wedded to the vernacular as a means of discourse no matter what the subject. Late in life he wrote, ‘I have so many words in my mother tongue that I should rather complain of not understanding things well than of lacking words with which to express the ideas of my mind.’68 Though he makes some excursions into consciously literary modes, the overall tone of his style, as preserved in his notebooks, is spare, practical, colloquial, laconic. In his paintings he is a master of nuance, but as a writer he tends towards the flat and colourless. He is (to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s) a ‘carpenter of words’.

  This distinction between university education and artisan training should not be taken too rigidly. The whole trend of Renaissance art was to narrow the gap, to stress that the artist could and should belong to the ranks of scholars, philosophers and scientists. An early advocate of this was Lorenzo Ghiberti, the master of the Florentine Baptistery doors, who writes in his Commentaries (1450), ‘It is fitting that the sculptor and painter have a solid knowledge of the following liberal arts – grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory, design, and arithmetic.’ Leon Battista Alberti draws up a similar list of desirable accomplishments in his De re aedificatoria. Both writers are echoing the precepts of the great Roman architect Vitruvius.69 All these subjects, and more, became Leonardo’s province – he is the epitome of the multi-disciplinary ‘Renaissance man’.

  When Leonardo styles himself an omo sanza lettere he is being sardonic about his lack of formal education, but he is not devaluing himself. On the contrary, he is stating his independence. He is proud of his unletteredness: he has achieved his knowledge by observation and experience rather than receiving it from others as a pre-existent opinion. Leonardo is a ‘disciple of experience’, a collector of evidence – ‘better a small certainty than a big lie’.70 He cannot quote the learned experts, the retailers of ipse dixit wisdom, ‘but I will quote something far greater and more worthy: experience, the mistress of their masters’. Those who merely ‘quote’ – in the sense of follow or imitate as well as cite – are ‘gente gonfiata’: they are, literally, puffed or pumped up by second-hand information; they are ‘trumpeters and reciters of the works of others’.71

  Against the second-hand he opposes ‘Nature’, which in this context means both the physical phenomena of the material world and the innate powers and principles which lie behind them: all that is studied in ‘natural philosophy’. ‘Those who take for their standard anything but Nature, the mistress of all masters, weary themselves in vain.’ The trope of Nature as female mistress, or maestra, is conventional but seems to have had a particular allure for Leonardo, who repeats it throughout the notebooks. ‘She’ has a power greater than the masculine greatness of reasoning and learning. In painting too, he says, the painter should never imitate another’s manner, because if he does he will be ‘a grandson rather than a son of Nature’.72 He commends Giotto as the classic self-taught artist: ‘Giotto the Florentine… was not content with imitating the works of Cimabue, his master. Born in mountain solitudes inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by Nature to his art, he began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats which he was tending.’73 This passage – one of the few in which Leonardo refers admiringly to an earlier artist – has resonances with his own lack of formal education.

  Thus ‘unlettered’, for Leonardo, means also ‘uncluttered’: the mind is not filled with the lumber of precepts. It belongs with a crucial Leonardian idea of clarity: of seeing the visual evidence of the world before him with an accuracy and insight that lead into the heart of things. For Leonardo the key organ in understanding the world is not the brain but the eye: ‘The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding may most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature,’74 he writes in one of his many paragoni, or comparisons, designed to show the superiority of painting over those supposedly more gentlemanly arts like poetry. His thousands of pages of manuscript are written in despite of his distrust of language as something that interposes and equivocates, something that can often obscure the messages which Nature imparts. A telling comment is found in the Codex Atlanticus, discussing the design of machinery: ‘When you want to achieve a certain purpose in a mechanism, do not involve yourself in the confusion of many different parts, but search for the most concise method: do not behave like those who, not knowing how to express something in the appropriate vocabulary, approach it by a roundabout route of confused long-windedness.’75 Here language itself is associated with confusion and lack of clarity: words tangle things up, they are an over-elaborate mechanism. It is possible that this carries a social overtone of Leonardo as a man who
lacks conversational facility, a man prone to gnomic utterances and discomfiting, abstracted silences. This would run counter to the early biographers, who make him a charming conversationalist, but I wonder if that was more a performance than a natural proclivity.

  Vasari gives us a picture of a boy whose deep interest in art underlay his more fitful studies in subjects like mathematics: ‘He never left off drawing and sculpting, which suited his imagination.’ Again one wants to resist the idea of the genius in a vacuum, and ask what kind of artistic education he had. We have no idea of any tuition he had before his apprenticeship in Florence, though there is an interesting speculation that his grandmother Lucia may have contributed. As mentioned, her family owned a pottery at Toia di Bacchereto, near Carmignano, a few miles east of Vinci: the kiln was later inherited by Leonardo’s father. The maiolica ceramics they produced were well known in Florence; one presumes a high quality of workmanship. Some geometric patterns of Leonardo’s recall the tracery designs used in ceramics, and may hint at an early interest awoken by visits to his grandmother’s family.76