Leonardo da Vinci

by Sir Kenneth M. Clark

  CHAPTER THREE—THE NOTEBOOKS

  TO the early years of Leonardo’s residence in Milan belong the first of those notebooks and manuscripts which, for the remainder of his life, give us a full record of his activities, both practical and scientific. It is a curious fact that these records only begin when Leonardo was thirty, an age when the average busy man ceases to take notes; yet the few scraps surviving from the earlier period of his life do not suggest that he was then in the habit of recording his interests, or indeed, that his interests were very wide. They consist of some drawings of machinery and engines of war done in a simple diagrammatic style, with a primitive notion of dynamics, and show that in spite of his boasting letter to Ludovico, Leonardo’s knowledge of military engineering was not in advance of his time. But as official artificer to the Sforza court he was expected to undertake a number of duties demanding technical skill—architecture, engineering, the conduct of masques and pageants. In order to increase and display his mastery of such work he began to keep notes of machinery and ingenious devices of all sorts, either seen or invented. Before Leonardo’s time other Renaissance artists had set out the result of their inquiries into machinery, architecture, and fortification in the form of treatises: such, for example, is a manuscript in the Laurentian Library (cod. Ashb. 361) by Francesco di Giorgio, which actually belonged to Leonardo and is annotated in his handwriting. It contains plans of churches, drawings of weapons and machinery—everything, in fact, which we find in the early manuscripts of Leonardo, and although the style of drawing is more primitive the technical knowledge displayed is hardly inferior. Inspired by some such compilation as this, Leonardo began to arrange his notes with a view to a systematic treatise, and the result was the so-called MS. B in the library of the Institut de France.

  Before analysing these early notebooks as evidence of Leonardo’s interests at this date, it may be convenient to give some account of his manuscripts as a whole. He seems to have kept nearly everything he wrote, and at the end of his life he bequeathed these writings to his disciple Francesco Melzi.{22} A great part has survived and forms a mass of material for the understanding of Leonardo’s thought. The most important collection is the great scrapbook of notes and drawings in the Ambrosian Library, known as the Codice Atlantico. It contains about four thousand sheets of various dates and sizes, dealing with every subject, all covered with Leonardo’s minute writing, and was put together by the same hand as the collection of drawings now at Windsor Castle, probably by the sculptor, Leoni, who bought Leonardo’s papers from Melzi’s heirs. The compiler has made a half-hearted attempt at arrangement, but has done little more than classify certain drawings of machinery, and for all practical purposes the sheets are in no order. It is our greatest source of knowledge about Leonardo’s movements, friends, pupils, reading, and mental habits.

  Then come thirteen manuscripts in the Library of the Institut de France, which are referred to by the letters A to K inscribed on their covers. They are all of different dates and sizes, and most of them were used for a period of one or two years. Some are half-arranged treatises; others are quite small and may properly be called notebooks. The Library of the Institut also contains one of these pocket-books dealing with the flight of birds, and three more of the same size are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Forster Collection. There are other Leonardo manuscripts in the collection of the Earl of Leicester, in the Trivulzio Collection, and at Turin, and there is a very important manuscript in the British Museum which belonged to the Earl of Arundel, the original possessor of the drawings now at Windsor. Two-thirds of this manuscript dealing with dynamics were written consecutively at one date; a third is a collection of odd sheets like the Codice Atlantico.

  This mass of material is the most exacting subject of study because of its complete lack of continuity. At any point, on any sheet, embedded in the most trivial discussion, there may be some important evidence of Leonardo’s movements or opinions. The student of Leonardo is engaged in a vast jigsaw puzzle and, in spite of the labours of devoted scholars such as Müller-Walde, Calvi, and Solmi, much remains to be discovered. In particular, very little effort has been made to gauge how far Leonardo’s knowledge increased and scientific method improved as his life went on. Some idea of Leonardo as a mind developing by contact with other minds is necessary if we are to form a true picture of him, and compare his scientific activity with his development as an artist. But to form this idea would require immense erudition, for not only would the student need to be familiar with all Leonardo’s writings in their chronological order, but he would have to know enough about the state of learning in the Renaissance to judge Leonardo’s progress in relation to that of his contemporaries. Lacking this equipment, I shall not attempt a critical study of the notebooks, but simply indicate their character.

  I have said that Leonardo’s earliest notebooks are chiefly concerned with technical matters, and that a number of entries are no more than a record of ingenious devices. But almost from the first, Leonardo’s penetrating grasp of construction, combined with his restless curiosity, gave his notes on technical matters a more general value. He was not content to record how a thing worked: he wished to find out why. It is this curiosity which transformed a technician into a scientist. We can watch the process at work in the manuscripts. First, there are questions about the construction of certain machines, then, under the influence of Archimedes, questions about the first principles of dynamics; finally, questions which had never been asked before about winds, clouds, the age of the earth, generation, the human heart. Mere curiosity has become profound scientific research, independent of the technical interest which had preceded it. In this gradual change of attitude towards the objects of his curiosity Leonardo preserved an unusual capacity for self-education. He had received the ordinary training of a poor boy in Florence, practically confined to reading, writing, and that characteristically Florentine instrument of education, the abacus; and at an early age he was apprenticed to Verrocchio. Nothing in his education can have prepared him to wrestle with the crabbed and tortuous encyclopedias in which the scientific know-Hedge of antiquity was embalmed. Yet the notebooks give evidence-of very wide reading. They are full of reminders to borrow or consult books, and research has shown how many passages, which used to be taken as original discoveries, are copied word for word from other authors. The turning-point in this process of self-education—we may almost say in Leonardo’s life—was the period about the year 1494 in which he taught himself Latin. We have evidence of this process in two manuscripts, H and the Trivulzian, into which he has copied out almost the whole of a contemporary Latin Grammar by Niccolo Perotti, and a large part of a Latin Vocabulary by Luigi Pulci. At that date few of the scientific writings of the ancients were accessible in the vulgar tongue. In particular the works of Archimedes, which, as Séailles rightly pointed out, were the greatest single influence of Leonardo’s thought, seem to have existed only in Latin translations. We can imagine how this new key to the mysteries of nature made Leonardo, as contemporaries describe, impacientissimo del penello, out of all patience with his brush.

  Love of learning alone does not account for the contents, still less the form of Leonardo’s notebooks. His passion for finding things out was accompanied by a far less profitable passion for writing them down. His notebooks are like the result of a Chinese examination in which, as we are told, the examinee is placed in a room alone and asked to write down all he knows; and in part they are little more than commonplace books—selections from his reading, often of the most unexpected kind. He seems to have enjoyed exposition. He wished his demonstrations to be perfectly clear and unmistakable, and repeats his proofs from every angle so that all contradiction is impossible. He also repeats the same demonstration several times in different parts of the manuscripts, rather than risk an unsupported statement. This thoroughness is an essential characteristic of his mind, and he defends it in a passage which may well make the author of a brief study of Leonardo pause in embar
rassment.

  Abbreviations do harm to knowledge and to love, seeing that the love of anything is the offspring of this knowledge, the love being the more fervent in proportion as the knowledge is more certain....Of what use, then, is he who abridges the details of those matters of which he professes to give thorough information, while he leaves behind the chief part of the things of which the whole is composed? It is true that impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if such persons had not life long enough to serve them to acquire a complete knowledge of one single subject, such as the human body; and then they want to comprehend the mind of God in which the universe is included, weighing it minutely and mincing it into infinite parts, as if they had to dissect it!{23}

  A result of this characteristic was his dislike of general principles. Rather than risk a formula he would, repeat a proof many times for each particular instance, and it was only mistrust of generalizations which prevented him from anticipating many of the discoveries of later scientists, amongst them the circulation of the blood. The only form of abstraction which he allowed himself—and it is safe to say that he did not recognize it as such—was mathematics. ‘The man who blames the supreme certainty of mathematics feeds on confusion and can never silence the contradictions of sophistical sciences which lead to interminable conflict.’ ‘There is no certainty in sciences when mathematics cannot be applied.’ These and similar pronouncements are to be found throughout the manuscripts, and show that to Leonardo mathematics were not simply a convenient means of measuring his researches. They were an article of belief. It is significant that the certainty of mathematics is more than once contrasted with the uncertainty of theological discussions.{24} Living on the eve of the Reformation, Leonardo seems to have anticipated the futility of religious conflicts, and to have held that new faith in mathematical science, which in the seventeenth century was to replace, in the finest minds, the lost certainties of revealed religion. This does not mean that Leonardo was a great mathematician. To him figures were the most incontrovertible of facts, and facts were good in themselves. They should not be made to create hypotheses. He therefore used mathematics as a means of proof rather than as a technique of speculation; and it must be confessed that he also used them in those games and puzzles on which so many early mathematicians wasted their abilities.

  Leonardo’s lack of synthetic faculty, perceptible in the notebooks as a whole, is partly responsible for their complete lack of order. Perhaps it would have been impossible at that date to give such an accumulation of facts any rational structure. The logical system of scholasticism, which compelled all facts into the service of God, had broken down under the weight of its own elaboration. The philosophical system of the seventeenth century with its faith in the laws of nature had yet to be evolved. But Leonardo’s observations are not simply devoid of a controlling plan; they are put down at random with a capricious, or even wilful inconsequence, which students have found difficult to explain. Some writers have claimed that his sense of natural order was so great as to make all observations equally relevant to a central scheme. Il a un sens extraordinaire de la symétrie, says M. Valéry, qui lui fait problème de tout. This is the idealistic view of Leonardo, by which his defects, like disreputable Old Testament stories, are interpreted in the light of later spiritual experience and given a symbolical value. In contrast is the recent view that Leonardo was the victim of psychological frustrations, which prevented him from concentrating on a single theme: a poor theory by which to explain the author of the Last Supper, but perhaps nearer the truth than the first, for there was something abnormal about Leonardo’s appetite for information, which led him to gobble up every fact with almost equal relish. Perhaps the chief reason for the lack of order in Leonardo’s manuscripts is the one he himself gives in a kind of introductory note to the British Museum MS. He could not arrange his notes for lack of time. It is a miracle that any man should have observed, read, and written down so much in a single lifetime; and we should not complain that in the urgency of his appetite for facts he did not always stop to consider their order or ultimate purpose.

  Having outlined the character of Leonardo’s notebooks as a whole, let me examine those which date from his first residence in Milan. The earliest of these, MS. B, I have already mentioned as containing the drawings for engines of war with which he hoped to win Ludovico’s favour. In addition to these it contains a number of drawings which prove that in about the year 1487 Leonardo was seriously interested in the problems of architecture. Unfortunately, Leonardo’s architecture has never been properly studied and I can only treat it here in a superficial way. At this date we can distinguish between two kinds of architectural employment, practical and real. The former arose out of his position at court, and consisted chiefly in the renovation or completion of buildings in which the Sforzas were interested. For example, he made one of the many attempts to design a central tower or dome for the Cathedral of Milan, and in 1488 presented a model of his proposals, as did also Bramante, Luca Fancelli, and Pietro da Gorgonzola. In 1490 he was summoned to Pavia where, in company with Amadeo and Francesco di Giorgio, he was consulted about the completion of the Cathedral. Writers on Leonardo have suggested that some drawings of churches in MS. B were connected with this work, and certainly the manuscript dates from this period; but there is no substantial evidence that any of Leonardo’s designs were used. We may speculate on Leonardo’s relations with Francesco di Giorgio, who more than any of his older contemporaries shared his range of interests; but although he owned one of Francesco’s MSS., no record of their intercourse remains. MS. B also shows that he was continually occupied with the great castle of the Sforzas in Milan, on which, to a large extent, their power depended. In several drawings we see one of its towers raised to an unprecedented height in order to command the surrounding plain; in others new bastions, escarpments, moats, and trenches. How far any of these grandiose projects were carried out, it is impossible to say. They were largely engineering jobs, and as such have remained anonymous. Leonardo’s name is not connected by tradition with any building in the Milanese, and he probably contributed by giving rough sketches or verbal advice, rather than working plans. We can infer from the notebooks that he did supervise personally some modest architectural work for his patrons, a pavilion for the Duchess’s garden and a heating system for her bath.

  At the same date we have our first evidence of Leonardo’s interest in town planning. The idea of building a model city was familiar to the Renaissance and had already been carried out in Ferrara and Pienza. The motive was partly aesthetic, partly practical, for it was hoped in this way to avoid the plagues which ravaged Italian towns once at least in every decade. Leonardo’s plans for Milan were made in consequence of the terrible plagues of 1484-5, and his intention was to produce an efficient rather than a beautiful city. They should, however, be classed as ideal rather than practical, for they show a strain in Leonardo’s character, to which I shall often refer—the romantic colouring which he gave to utilitarian undertakings. In all his engineering work he wished to achieve grandiose and improbable results, to remove mountains and divert huge rivers. And so his replanning of Milan was to involve a town on two levels: ‘No vehicles,’ he says, ‘should go in the upper streets; these should be reserved for the use of gentlemen. And through the lower streets would go the carts and barrows and things used by the populace.’ This plan also allows for subterranean canals. Town planning was to be one of his last recorded activities during his residence in France (see p. 156), but there again, we do not know how far his designs were carried out.

  Lastly, and most important of all, there is a series of drawings showing the plans and elevations of domed churches (Pl. 26). As far as we can tell, these were not intended to be built, but were simply solutions of the architectural problem, how to construct a church which should achieve its spiritual quality by uniting the two ‘perfect’ geometrical forms, the square and the circle. It was a problem which had occupied the greatest con
temporary architects, from Alberti to Bramante. Leonardo was familiar with Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (written about 1450) and was the close friend of Bramante. The drawings in MS. B probably reflect Bramantesque ideas otherwise unknown to us, projects which found fulfilment later in works of Bramante’s disciples, such as Santa Maria della Consolazione at Todi.{25} Leonardo’s elevations are not all successful. In some his ingenuity has outrun his sense of proportion. The North Italian tradition which permitted an accumulation of domes and turrets has appealed too strongly to his own horror vacui, and some of his designs recall the Church of S. Front at Périgueux or the Santo at Padua. A few even give the impression of those Russian churches in which every inch is covered with excrescences till the sense of scale is lost and a large building looks the size of a pepper-pot. We feel that Leonardo lacked that native sense of interval, of allowing one space to tell against another, which the simplest Tuscan muratore can give to a farm building, and which remains the essential quality of classical architecture. But then, as I shall often repeat in these pages, Leonardo’s true taste was not classical and could have been more fully displayed a hundred years later, when the Baroque style would have allowed him to indulge his love of curves without loss of unity. The ground plans are done with more conviction, since they afforded the kind of geometrical puzzle which always interested him. To the end of his life he continued to draw patterns of squares, circles, and arcs, trying to exhaust every possible combination rather as an alchemist might try every possible combination of fluids in order to discover the elixir of life; and this passion, disciplined to the service of architecture, produced plans of great originality. In some the church is thought of as a circular hall for preaching (he actually describes it as teatro da predicare), an idea rarely attempted until a much later date, for example, in the Frauenkirche at Dresden. In others, the cluster of chapels round the central space reminds us of advanced Baroque design like Borromini’s earlier drawings for Sant’ Agnese.