Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  Chapter 2

  Medicis/Popes

  When besieged by ambitious tyrants I find a means of offense and defense in order to preserve the chief gift of nature, which is liberty. . . . Death rather than loss of liberty. The goldfinch brings spurge [a poisonous plant] to its young when they are imprisoned in a cage. It is better to die than to lose one’s freedom.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  Leonardo created a kind of space that had never been seen in Europe before, one that not merely was a location for the figures but drew characters and spectators together, as time does, plunging into immensity.

  —André Malraux

  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

  —Marcel Proust

  Brains organize themselves according to two factors: nature and nurture. Of all the organs of the human body, the brain is the most plastic. Events occurring in the womb, during birth, and in the first few years of life play an enormous role in shaping the brain and the occupant of the body attached. For example, toxic influences—such as a pregnant woman smoking—can have a deleterious effect on how the brain develops. Birth trauma, such as a prolonged period of oxygen deprivation that may last for only minutes, can alter subsequent brain function for a lifetime.

  We have the maximum number of neurons in our brain at the age of eight months. It is as if Natural Selection provides each of us with an overabundant supply of neurons and then propels us into the world with the admonition, “Now, go and learn something.” Over the next ten years a dramatic pruning occurs, and we lose approximately 40 percent of the neuronal pathways that were present when we peaked at eight months. The determining factor that influences which neurons survive and which neurons wither is what we learn. The current mantra in neurocognitive research is: Neurons that wire together, fire together; neurons that fail to link, fail to sync. What a child is exposed to in those formative years configures the strength and shape of many of the neural networks devoted to various neurological functions. Because of the importance of the first few years of his life, I will dwell at some length on those of Leonardo’s.

  Of his sixty-nine years, Leonardo’s formative ones remain the most opaque. Yet, enough information gleaned from both the Vinci and Florentine tax rolls exists to warrant a series of speculations. As Tolstoy once remarked, “From the child of five years to myself is but a step. But from a newborn baby to a child of five is an awesome distance.” Enumerating the many and significant obstacles Leonardo had to overcome makes his triumphs even more wondrous. Also, understanding his childhood tribulations may help to explain the man and his psychology more fully. What is certain is that the tumult of Leonardo’s early childhood played an important part in how he came to view the world as an adult.

  Leonardo was born of an illicit liaison between a rich city boy, Ser Piero da Vinci, and a poor peasant girl from Vinci, one of the picturesque, small Tuscan hill towns several days’ walk from the center of Florence. That the town bears Piero’s family name and that he had the privilege of using the prefix Ser orients us to Leonardo’s father’s social stratum.

  History does not record the last name of the young woman, known only to us as Caterina, and this omission also helps us locate her in the town’s social hierarchy. Leonardo’s father was an ambitious notary who preferred to spend his time in bustling Florence. In the mid-fifteenth century, this city-state was the very epicenter of the power, wealth, creativity, and sophistication that has come to characterize the Italian Renaissance. One can safely assume that Piero was not overjoyed when he learned that his dalliance with one of the local girls had resulted in her belly swelling. The notary business was a sober one. Practitioners composed and witnessed wills, deeds, and contracts. The vast gulf between their social stations presents historians with a plausible explanation for why Piero did not marry Caterina upon learning that she was pregnant with his child.

  Perhaps Leonardo provided an insight into his parents’ relationship when he departed from the usual impersonal authorial tone he used in his notebooks and let slip an uncharacteristic observation concerning the role of love in baby making. He muses:

  The man who has intercourse aggressively and uneasily will produce children who are irritable and untrustworthy; but if the intercourse is done with great love and desire on both sides, then the child will be of great intellect, and witty, lively and lovable.

  Might this comment be self-referential? In other places in his notebooks, Leonardo often wrote that he was a happy and contented man.

  During this time, Leonardo seems to have been raised solely by his mother in the country. His father was not, however, totally disengaged. He, or someone in the Vinci family, arranged to have Caterina marry another man. Leonardo accompanied his mother when she went to live with her new husband.

  When Leonardo was somewhere around the age of five, his father married a sixteen-year-old close to his own social class, and the young boy came to live in his father’s household, which included Ser Piero and his new bride. Leonardo’s young stepmother, herself still a girl, was trying unsuccessfully to give Ser Piero a legitimate male heir. In fifteenth-­century Italy, a son was the single most important item a wife was expected to produce. The constant presence of her healthy stepson would most likely have served as a reproachful reminder of her continuing barrenness. Soon afterward Leonardo moved once again, this time to the family farm at Vinci. There, Leonardo spent his time in the company of his grandfather, Antonio, and his uncle, Piero’s brother, Francesco. Piero’s wife did finally become pregnant, but she died along with her baby, during labor. Piero immediately married again and eventually fathered ten more children, with three different wives.

  Leonardo’s love of all living things and the beauty surrounding him was undoubtedly nurtured by this kindly uncle. Leonardo’s references in his notebooks to Francesco are among the few times that he displays true tenderness.

  A tantalizing clue about Leonardo’s early life appears in his notebooks. One of the very few women he mentions, when he is in his forties, is a certain Caterina. Although it could have been the name of his housekeeper, there are compelling reasons to suspect that Leonardo invited his aged mother to come to live with him in Milan. An entry in his own hand states that he paid for Caterina’s funeral after she died. This and other hints in his notebooks suggest that Leonardo remained in contact with his mother throughout his life.

  Despite the warm relationship Leonardo developed with Francesco, the first and most important setback in his young life was likely his separation from his mother. Absent the most extreme circumstances, contemporary psychologists and family law experts universally agree that very young children should not be taken from their mothers. The disappointment and anxiety they experience as a result of this tends to cripple them psychically. As adults, they can become emotionally distant, distrustful of close commitments, and can remain averse to letting others get too close for fear of being hurt or disappointed again.

  Leonardo’s aloofness and remoteness, despite his apparent bonhomie, is a feature of his psychological makeup to which his biographers repeatedly allude. One does not have to look much further than the details of his childhood for a plausible explanation as to why this giant of intellect lived such an emotionally arid life.

  Leonardo’s illegitimacy would severely limit his options. The Church decreed that any child born of unwed parents was to be barred from enrollment in the cathedral schools associated with the major churches. Outside of the prohibitively expensive alternative of private tutors, admission to one of these schools was the only means to learning the secret code that opened the doors of opportunity.

  The word renaissance means “rebirth.” The rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman wisdom reawakened in the intelligentsia an insatiable desire to study the writings of the ancients. Because there were few if any accurate translations into Italian of the works of Aristotle and Plato, knowledge of Latin and Greek was essential to participate
in the frisson of the age. The secret code the boys learned in the cathedral schools was nothing less than how to read and write classical Greek and Latin, especially the latter. After all, this was Italy, the same soil from which the glory that was Rome arose. Opportunities to study the law, medicine, and banking, to control the levers of civil administration, or to climb the ecclesiastical hierarchy—all depended on knowledge of Latin. A dead language allowed the living to concentrate power in the hands of the few. Their prejudices were evident in their attitudes toward Leonardo.

  Leonardo’s response to these men who ignored his discoveries was harsh:

  They will say that because of my lack of book learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to treat of. Do they not know that my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others? And since experience has been the mistress, and to her in all points make my appeal.

  These noblemen wanted to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, but because of the rise of trade in Florence, this distinction was fast disappearing. Sumptuary laws decreed what various classes could wear, even down to the color, fabric, and type of fur lining. Knowledge of Latin remained the best and most effective means of keeping the riffraff and nouveau riche in their place..

  By the fourteenth century, all of the major countries of Europe had refined vernaculars. Inhabitants of Spain, Britain, France, Portugal, German lands, and the Italian peninsula had spent the previous three centuries ironing out the grammar, spelling, and fluency of their respective languages. These expressive new vernaculars needed only a means to cheaply and easily distribute their written text among the people. Johannes Gutenberg’s introduction of movable type into Europe, which took place around 1450, supplied the critical invention that would make duplication and translation of key works affordable.

  If we could tune into a parallel universe, it would be fascinating to follow Leonardo’s career had he not been born illegitimate and had been schooled in Latin. Would a university education have led to a lectern from which his pronouncements would have been greeted with respect? What would have been the overall effect on science if he had had an army of enthusiastic students to whom he could have assigned a task so that he would not have had to do everything by himself, alone and in secret? Might the world have learned of his prophetic visions much earlier, and might human progress, both in the arts and sciences, have accelerated the coming of the Enlightenment?

  How many more finished paintings would the world have had from the hand of this master if he would have been able to command the respect, monies, resources, and recognition of one who claims noble blood, a university position, and powerful friends in high places? Would he have been given a large studio where eager apprentices would have paid hefty sums to work with a recognized master? What other ingenious discoveries would this overworked, penurious genius have been able to accomplish if he had been freed from the onerous task of arranging supercilious entertainments for an ostentatious patron? If he had unhindered access to the wisdom of Eratosthenes, Euclid, Archimedes, and Aristotle, how many wheels would he not have had to reinvent himself?

  However, a strong counterargument can also be put forth that it was precisely his lack of indoctrination into the reigning dogma taught in these institutions that liberated him from mental restraints. Unimpeded by the accretion of misconceptions that had fogged the lens of the educated, Leonardo was able to ask key questions and seek fresh answers. Although he could not quote learned books, he promised, “I will quote something far greater and more worthy: experience, the mistress of their masters.” He disdained “trumpets and reciters of the works of others,” and tried to live by his own dictum: “Better a small certainty, than a big lie.” He referred to himself as omo sanza lettere—an “unlettered man”—because he had not received the kind of liberal arts schooling that led to the university. Somewhere in his late thirties and early forties, Leonardo made a concerted effort to teach himself Latin. Long lists of vocabulary words appear in his notebooks. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language in adulthood knows how difficult the task can be.

  Leonardo surely must have been disappointed that Ser Piero was not willing to make the extra effort to eliminate what he must have known would persist as a lifelong obstacle to Leonardo’s career. Had Ser Piero desired it, there were many subterfuges a well-connected father could use to transform his illegitimate child into a legitimate one. Renaissance history is replete with instances whereby a father bought his child’s respectability by petitioning the right person, doing a favor for someone in a position to help, or exchanging gold for the right papers. For reasons known only to Ser Piero, he did none of these.

  The Renaissance produced so many remarkable artists that it occurred to one man that future generations might be interested in the extraordinary lives of the artists that gave shape to this Golden Age. Giorgio Vasari, an artist of minor repute, influenced the course of art history by writing the first book on the subject. Unfortunately, Vasari wrote his The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) after many of the principals were dead, so he had to rely on secondhand sources rather than personal knowledge. He surmounted this obstacle by gathering stories that were still being told about this constellation of individuals.

  Vasari recounts a story about Leonardo’s artistic potential when he was still a teenager. A peasant approached his father, Piero, and requested that he hire an artist to decorate a shield. Piero gave Leonardo the task. Leonardo took the project to heart and worked diligently, creating a very realistic-looking monster to adorn the front of the shield. He placed the finished work in a shed in a strategic location so that when the door was opened, the shield could be seen only in a “soft light,” near the entrance. So realistic was Leonardo’s creation that when Piero opened the door and dimly caught a glimpse of the monster seemingly lying in wait for him, he instinctively recoiled in fear. After he had regained his composure, Piero carefully examined the shield’s exquisite workmanship. Surreptitiously, he substituted another shield he had bought at the market to present to the man who had ordered it so that he might sell Leonardo’s fantastic creation at a much higher price in Florence.

  Convinced his son should pursue a career in an artisanal guild, Piero sought out Andrea del Verrocchio, an artisan who headed one of the busiest workshops in Florence. Papers were signed, and Verrocchio agreed to take Leonardo under his wing at the age of fourteen and teach him the intricacies of his trade. Leonardo would prove to be a diligent student, learning from Verrocchio the wide-ranging skills necessary to cast bronze statuary, mix varnish for finished paintings, raise bells for belfries, and many other practical maneuvers.

  Artistically, Leonardo came into his own under the tutelage of Verrocchio. In his first known serious endeavor, Leonardo painted one of the angels in the lower right-hand corner of a larger work principally done by Verrocchio, The Baptism of Christ (1472–75). Leonardo’s angel was so obviously superior to anything else in the composition that Verrocchio decided to abandon painting and devote himself to other arts. Soon after, Leonardo painted his first commissioned work The Annunciation of the Virgin (1472), followed by the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1476). He also finished The Benois Madonna (1479–81).

  During the time of Leonardo’s apprenticeship, Florence was the epicenter of the rising culture that has come to characterize the Renaissance. Ruled by an enlightened family dynasty, the de Medicis, with Lorenzo (The Magnificent) as its head, Florence was the Italian peninsula’s most prominent city-state. The invention of double-entry bookkeeping expedited the city’s banking and commerce. Florence also had a reputation for fostering all the arts and was home to many literary and intellectual giants.

  Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy (c. 1320), and Giovanni Boccaccio, author of Decameron (1467), were both Florentines, as was the mapmaker Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli. In 1474, eighteen years before Columbus’s famous voyage, Toscanelli sent the Genoese mariner a global
map that explained how he could reach the Far East by traveling west. Master architect Filippo Brunelleschi had accomplished what most considered impossible: In 1436, he placed a dome atop Florence’s massive cathedral. Another Florentine, Leon Batista Alberti, had refined Brunelleschi’s earlier discovery of perspective in art and published a treatise on the subject in 1435, an act that would teach legions of artists how to realistically represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas.

  Besides being born illegitimate, Leonardo possessed another trait that also hindered his advancement. He likely practiced homosexuality at a time when it was dangerous to do so. The Signora of Florence (the city-state’s highest legislative body) had decreed that homosexuality was a crime punishable by death, a law fostered by the Church. The law, however, was observed more in its breach than in its application. Giovanni Lomazzo, one of the first contemporaries who identified Leonardo as gay, notes that “homosexuality” was widespread in Florence. In fact, the Germans used the word Florenzer (Florentine) to describe a sodomite. Homosexuality was routinely denounced from the pulpit, although not all preachers went as far as San Bernardino da Siena, who exhorted the faithful to spit on the floor of Santa Croce and shout, “To the fire! Burn all sodomites!” “Things got worse in 1484,” Charles Nicholl writes, “when a papal bull effectively stigmatized homosexuals as diabolical: Their ‘heretical perversions’ were on a par with having ‘carnal knowledge with demons,’ as witches were said to do.”