Leonardo's Brain

by Leonard Shlain

  Citizens of Florence considered someone who too openly flaunted his proclivities as a stain on the reputation of their virile city. Yet, historians have argued that Verrocchio, Michelangelo, Donatello, the poet Poliziano, and banker Filippo Strozzi were also practicing homosexuals. Because of the draconian laws, most gays were discreet. Some, however, especially the young, openly flaunted their sexual orientation. We know from Anonimo Gaddiano, another contemporary of Leonardo’s, how he looked: “He wore a rose coloured tunic, short to the knee, although long garments were then in fashion. He had, reaching down to the middle of his breats, a fine beard, curled and well kept.” From the available evidence it appears that the youthful Leonardo fell into this flamboyant set.

  In 1476, when Leonardo was twenty-four, someone anonymously accused a group of five youths, Leonardo among them, as having committed the crime of sodomy. The authorities did not pursue the charges against Leonardo, but neither was the young artist’s name entirely cleared.

  Another trait that set Leonardo apart was that he had a clear empathy for animals and a philosophical aversion to eating them; some have argued that he was a practicing vegetarian. This dietary anomaly would have been exceedingly rare in a time of heavy meat consumption. He noted that other animals suffered pain just as he did, and he did not want to do anything to contribute to their discomfort. Such was Leonardo’s antipathy to the maltreatment of animals that he even extended it to what he wore. One of Leonardo’s closest associates, the eccentric Tommaso Masini, described his friend in wonderment: “He would not kill a flea for any reason whatever; he preferred to dress in linen so as not to wear something dead.”

  Vasari recounts the story of how Leonardo could not stand to see wild animals in captivity. “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.”

  Politically, the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century was highly unstable. An almost constant fission-fusion among the principal city-states produced hasty alliances, deadly skirmishes, treasonous acts, and seditious conspiracies. Individuals, groups, and entire city-states vied in constant competition for dominance and/or protection. The prospect of economic or military defeat at the hands of one’s enemies was a constant threat. This factor alone could account for much of Leonardo’s interest in the machines designed to tear, rend, and grind the flesh from the bones of enemy soldiers. But another aspect to consider was his brush with the law. Leonardo fiercely cherished his personal freedom, and it became his paramount goal to defend against anyone who would try to take that away from him. He believed that this should be the highest priority for any free man.

  Chapter 3

  Milan/Vatican

  If the painter wants to see beauties with which he will fall in love, he is a lord who can generate them, and if he wants to see monstrous things which may terrify or be buffoonish—and be laughable or truly arouse compassion, he is their lord and God.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.

  —Galileo Galilei

  Of all the great hybrid unions that breed furious release of energy and change, there is none to surpass the meeting of literate and oral cultures. The giving to man of an eye for an ear by phonetic literacy is, socially and politically, probably the most radical explosion that can occur in any social structure.

  —Marshall McLuhan

  In 1481, Pope Sixtus VI summoned many of Florence’s most ­outstanding artists to Rome. He let it be known that it was his intention to lavish commissions on the chosen artists for the purpose of glorifying Rome. Lorenzo de Medici assisted in compiling the list of artists the Pope should invite. On the list of those selected were Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and many other Florentine artists. In what must have been a stinging rebuke, Leonardo was not included. Disappointed by his failure to obtain an ongoing stream of meaty commissions that he believed were his due, Leonardo increasingly longed for a fresh start in a city other than Florence.

  Paolo Giovio, who had known Leonardo personally, wrote, “He was by nature very courteous, cultivated and generous, and his face was extraordinarily beautiful.” Anonimo Gaddiano described him similarly: “He was very attractive, well-proportioned, graceful and handsome, with beautiful hair, arranged in ringlets, falling down to the middle of his chest.” Further suggesting he was a dandy in both his habits and his dress, Leonardo recommended, “Take fresh rosewater and moisten your hands with it, then take flower of lavender and rub it between your hands, and it will be good.” Leonardo was also athletic, an excellent equestrian, and exceptionally strong; one story recounted how he was able to bend a horseshoe with one hand.

  Another trait that contemporaries marveled about was his superb singing voice. Somewhere along the way, Leonardo had learned musical notation, and there is strong evidence that he composed music. The ancients did not use chords in the sense of simultaneous production of sounds, but composed melodies of a single line. Later, the polyphonists of the eleventh century added counterpoint, which represented a second musical line. What Leonardo was excited about was the prospect of introducing a third dimension into music—chords.

  He played many musical instruments so that he could accompany himself when he sang. What is surely one of the great losses for posterity is that not a single piece of his music has surfaced thus far. His love of music and his proficiency in it can be inferred from his strong interest in the design and crafting of musical instruments. One particular lute fashioned in the form of a horse’s head and crafted from silver played a role in the next important chapter in Leonardo’s life.

  In 1482, Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, solicited other rulers for a court sculptor capable of casting a large equestrian statue. Sforza’s claim to ruling Milan was tenuous, and he wanted to immortalize his father to remind the citizens of the city-state of the importance of his family in its history. Upon hearing of the commission, Leonardo leaped at the chance. He wrote the Duke a lengthy letter of introduction, extolling his own many talents and virtues. Most telling was his emphasis on his skills as an architect, military engineer, and musician. The last thing he mentioned, almost added as an afterthought, was that he was also a painter.

  The Duke offered the position to Leonardo. In 1482, the thirty-year-old artist left the city in which he had come of age and embarked on an entirely new venture. He could not have known then that he was destined to spend the next eighteen years of his life in Milan, under the rule of a man who was his complete opposite.

  Fifteenth-century Milan was renowned as the Italian peninsula’s armorer. The prosperous city-state occupied a position similar to that of Detroit in mid-twentieth-century America. Metal workshops turned out finely wrought instruments of battle. On the finer streets and piazzas, the many newly rich strolled in the comfort of knowing they were living in a prosperous and well-fortified city-state.

  The Sforza family, from which the Duke was descended, did not have the cultural, intellectual, or aesthetic heft of the Medicis. The Duke was known as “Il Moro” for his dark coloring, and his many enemies considered him a usurper. He had a known appetite for war, sex, food, intrigue, and elaborate parties. He continually plotted foreign wars, and used marriage as a political tool to cement alliances.

  An outbreak of the bubonic plague struck Milan several times between 1484 and 1485, killing over fifty thousand citizens. It was amid this tumult that Leonardo began his initiation as the Duke’s court artist.
/>
  In this phase of the Renaissance, art emerged as the coin of prestige. Each city-state prized its artists. Rulers adorned their piazzas and loggias with sculptures and the inner rooms of their palaces with expensive tapestries and paintings. The prevailing attitude was clear: If, after ­spending treasure on an army of mercenaries and constructing imposing fortifications, there remained enough money and talent to beautify the city, then this extravagance would impress rivals. A healthy competition arose between the heads of these fiefdoms; unwittingly, they greatly benefited future lovers of art.

  Unfortunately for Leonardo, the Duke of Sforza never completely grasped his court artist’s extraordinary talents. Although Sforza gave Leonardo an apartment close to the court, he kept him on a tight financial rein. His erratic payments resulted in Leonardo having to beseech the Duke on numerous occasions to pay him the money he was owed.

  Among those he added to his retinue was a beautiful ten-year-old boy named Giacomo, the son of a certain Giovanni Pietro Caprotti of Oreno. In 1490, he negotiated with the boy’s father to let the boy come and live with him. In return, Leonardo told him that he would train the youngster as an artist. There is no indication that the boy had any natural talent, and he developed into a mediocre painter.

  Leonardo renamed him Salai, which means “little devil”; the relationship with the boy proved to be a very frustrating one for Leonardo. Salai stole, lied, and created mischief on a regular basis. The most emotional entries in Leonardo’s notebooks refer to the difficulties he experienced with Salai. Nevertheless, Salai remained with Leonardo for all but the last years of his life, and then perished in a duel resulting from a petty dispute.

  Another youth whom Leonardo engaged as an apprentice was fourteen-­year-old Francesco Melzi. Melzi, in contrast with Salai, came from a noble family, and had actually applied for the position because he truly desired to become an accomplished artist. He would become Leonardo’s closest confidant and the heir to whom Leonardo would entrust most of his paintings and valuable notebooks. On the occasion of his mentor’s death, Melzi wrote a touching and heartfelt encomium to Leonardo, claiming that he was like a kind father to him.

  As Leonardo’s household grew, so too did his problems working for the erratic duke. His patron might require him to paint one of his mistresses, or, alternatively, supervise the festivities necessary for a wedding or some other celebration. Leonardo was expected to design costumes and sets, provide decorations, and plan entertainments for the many lavish parties the Duke threw. On several occasions these superficial duties led Leonardo to complain to the Duke: “It vexes me greatly that you should have found me in need, and . . . that my having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to lesser matters instead of following up the work which your Lordship entrusted to me.”

  Despite the demands of the court on his time and the hours he devoted to his scientific studies, Leonardo’s sojourn in Milan witnessed the full flowering of his artistic genius. Leonardo initiated his career as the Duke’s court painter by portraying Cecilia Gallerani, the Duke’s sixteen-­year-old mistress, in a manner most unusual (Lady with an Ermine, c. 1490–91). He followed this with a stunning grouping of the Holy Family in his first version of Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1483–86). These works were but a prelude to arguably the most complex masterpiece ever created by an artist. The Duke commissioned Leonardo to paint a mural high on the wall of a monastery at the request of its clerics. The wall chosen was in the refectory hall where monks regularly gathered to eat their supper. Depicted by hundreds of past artists, Leonardo’s version of Jesus’s Passover dinner with his disciples was unlike anything the world had ever seen. It has kept a veritable army of art historians busy for centuries, analyzing its many subtleties and innovations.

  The Last Supper began to deteriorate immediately, because Leonardo had used an experimental method to apply the paint to the refectory wall. The mixture proved a poor choice, and the sharp details of the work soon began to fade and flake. Word of Leonardo’s masterpiece spread throughout Europe, and many contemporary artists made a pilgrimage to see it. Fortunately for posterity, they copied it. From these reproductions, art historians have been able to piece together a fairly accurate rendering of Leonardo’s original creation.

  During the period that he completed these exceptional paintings, Leonardo also worked on diverse projects in architecture and public hygiene and performed extensive scientific investigations. There are suggestions from his notebooks that one of his lifelong ambitions was to become the first human to fly, although he never accomplished it. None of his writings was ever published. His output of paintings was limited, and most were either unfinished or suffered the ravages of time. But the bitterest disappointment during his sixteen years in Milan was the fate of his most ambitious project, the statue memorializing Sforza’s father.

  From the moment he arrived, Leonardo was consumed by his plans for the design and technical details of casting the largest equestrian bronze ever attempted. Leonardo studied equine anatomy and made the most detailed drawings ever created of this subject. When he finally completed a clay model of the horse made to scale, he unveiled it in the piazza. People came from far and wide to gaze on the magnificent work of art.

  The equestrian monument would have been enough to occupy the full energies of an ordinary man, but during his time in Milan, Leonardo also made occasional visits to surrounding towns. As a result of these visits, he made the acquaintance of several intellectual leaders. Through his association with the mathematician Luca Pacioli, Leonardo became intrigued with the clarity of mathematics, and contributed exquisite drawings for Pacioli’s book of geometrical figures. Leonardo also became fascinated with all matters related to engineering. His notebooks are filled with some of the finest cog and gear machines ever to be illustrated by the human hand.

  Engineering, architecture, and mathematics were not his only interests during his Milan years. He also studied geology, hydrology, botany, and comparative anatomy, to name a few. He made observations concerning the flight of birds in greater detail than had any previous investigator. He made studies of optics and the effects of light and shadow. And he became the most curious anatomist in an age that had not yet discovered the preserving benefits of formaldehyde. In a cramped, closed room, he had to work quickly to dissect the cadavers before they began to rot.

  On top of these endeavors, each of which was enough to consume one lifetime, he wrote a treatise on painting, a book of proverbs, one on fables, another one of riddles, and another of word games. He composed a short pamphlet of prophesies. He also wrote travelogues about places he had never visited.

  Despite his extraordinary achievements, his destiny was intimately entwined with a double-dealing ruler, which proved disastrous to Leonardo’s career. The Duke, having engaged in belligerent machinations toward Florence, Naples, and the Papal States, found himself in a precarious situation. He schemed to invite the French king Louis XII to come to his assistance. During the monarch’s visit, the king could not help but notice the riches apparent in the city. When he returned to Paris, he conveniently remembered that the French had an ancestral claim on Milan and the surrounding countryside of Lombardy. The Duke’s scheme backfired on him, and in 1499, the French returned to Milan, this time with hostile intent. They conquered the city, deposed the Duke, and imprisoned him in a dungeon in France where he died years later.

  As the overwhelming French force approached Milan, the Duke’s army melted away. The townspeople fled. When the French mercenaries arrived, they destroyed Leonardo’s clay model. Leonardo realized that he could no longer stay in the city in which he had invested so much of his time and energy. After leaving Milan, he traveled to Mantua and then Venice. At the time Venice was engaged in a mortal struggle with its archenemy, the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan had previously conquered Constantinople in 1453, and his armies were on the move, advancing up the Western Adriatic coast directly opposite the Italian peninsula. When Leonardo v
isited Venice, they were concerned about the Turkish threat.

  Such was Leonardo’s reputation as a military strategist that the Venetians let him present an idea to keep the Turks at bay to the Venetian Senate. He devised an audacious scheme: Build dams to protect the land routes to the city. Leonardo told the city fathers that the water behind the dams could be released when an invading army attempted to attack Venice from the land, thus drowning them. While exceedingly ingenious in its scope, the plan was too impractical for the Venetians to put into use.

  After leaving Venice, Leonardo stayed for a time at the Melzi estate south of Milan while he contemplated his next move. It must have been a dark period for him. He was without a patron, home, or income, and he was still responsible for the retinue of people that depended on him for their livelihood. Reluctantly, he decided to return to Florence. The year was 1500.

  The city of his youth was hardly recognizable. The Medicis were no longer in power, and a weak, contentious public had replaced their strong leadership. During the years Leonardo had been absent, a dogmatic fundamentalism, led by the fiery cleric and orator, Girolamo Savonarola, had swept Florence. He inveighed against the sin of accumulating wealth and demanded a return to a simpler lifestyle that required strict adherence to the dictates of the Church. Savonarola destroyed many works of art, considering them to be sinful and a detraction to worship. He instituted what amounted to a reign of terror that lasted until the people rose up against him, and he was publicly hanged in the piazza in 1498.

  When Leonardo arrived, the city was still suffering from the after­effects of this episode of madness, and a pall of anxiety and depression still hung over the populace. Nevertheless, Milan’s court painter’s reputation as a consummate artist had preceded him. The citizens of Florence had taken a lively interest in his artistic achievements as news of his Milanese works had seeped back to the city that claimed him as a homegrown son. But upon his return Leonardo discovered that he had to contend with another personality whose talent closely matched his—Michelangelo Buonarroti.