A History of the World (41 page)

Leonardo had to leave the comradely world of the workshop and join the search for grand patrons. The old days of working for the whole community, in a spirit of city pride, were over. Artists and engineers needed rich dukes, bankers and bishops if they were to survive.

Leonardo did well enough in Florence under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici; but clearly, he was not considered essential there, given that he was sent off to Milan to present himself as the ultimate all-rounder. In Vasari’s biography there is already a faint note of warning. Although a genius, brilliant with pen and brush, interested in everything and a great model-maker, ‘Leonardo started so many things without finishing them; for he was perfectly convinced that his
hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination.’

In Milan, Leonardo would prove the truth of this. He made some beautiful pictures, decorated a chamber of the palace and bombarded the duke with drawings and plans for ingenious war machines. He designed pageants and helped with architectural rebuilding.
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But his grand plan for a huge equestrian monument for the first Sforza came to nothing. It was too ambitious. The bronze collected for it was eventually used for cannon to be deployed against an invading French army. Then, when it came to the most famous commission of Leonardo’s Milanese years, one of the most celebrated paintings ever, the phenomenally inventive artist-inventor overreached himself.

The Last Supper
, painted during 1495–7 in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent in Milan, was in many ways the perfect challenge for an ambitious student of Verrocchio’s, fascinated as he was, in particular, by lighting and perspective. The commission required Leonardo to make a massive painting extending to well above head height, which would allow the viewer to see Christ and his disciples clearly and appear to be a natural part of the chosen room, rather than simply attached to a wall. Leonardo solved the problems of lighting and perspective brilliantly, producing such strong effects that Christ’s head seems to attract the viewer towards him.

Leonardo scoured the streets, and his notebooks, to find models for the disciples. When the prior complained about his habit of merely coming in on some days and staring at his work-in-progress, Leonardo was called before the duke. He explained that he needed to look and think before he could know what to do with his hands; and suggested that since he had not yet found a face with the malevolence and cruelty of a Judas, he could always use the prior’s. The duke, apparently, roared with laughter.

Unfortunately, Leonardo was also experimenting with the paint itself. The traditional method of painting on walls was fresco, which involved putting wet plaster on the section to be painted, then applying watercolour quickly, before it set. This produces bright, fresh colours but allows for no second thoughts, and it did not suit Leonardo’s slow, deliberate brushwork. So he tried something new. He coated the wall of the refectory with a mixture of pitch, gum and chalk and then painted on it dry, using tempera, the egg-bound paint
that normally lasts very well. It did not, however, last well on the prepared wall that Leonardo was working on. Less than twenty years after he had finished, the painting was starting to flake, and forty years after that it was described as ‘ruined’. The cultured nouveau-riche duke would never have known this, however, because long before the painting had begun to deteriorate he was captured by the French, and died in 1508 in an underground dungeon.

Leonardo may have been mortified – but perhaps not: he was a compulsive dabbler and experimenter, and with his fizzing butterfly mind, easily bored. He used other new (and unsuccessful) painting techniques later, infuriated a pope who claimed he never finished anything, and produced hundreds of designs for hundreds of objects – which, given the relatively primitive technology of his day, would never have actually flown, attacked soldiers, flooded enemy cities or blown up castles – the list is very long indeed. He produced gloriously beautiful drawings and a few of the most exquisite and enigmatic paintings ever executed.

But at the centre of his lifelong search was his dream of uncovering a small number of underlying principles and patterns that would explain all of nature. His notebooks are crammed with pictures and speculations about the structure of vortexes, heart valves, cloud shapes; the designs of leaves, human veins, bones and levers; about how character is expressed in the shape of faces. Everywhere, he is looking for correspondences. Are flowing human locks like rivulets of water? Are human arms like birds’ wings? Are there perfect proportions for the human body, and do they relate to the proportions of horses’ legs and muscles? What are the symmetries in plant forms, and what are the rules that guide them? In Leonardo’s world there is not yet a clear divide between ‘science’ and ‘art’. They are the same thing. The artist coldly analyses form, perspective and the effect of distance on colours, which will give his pictures their impact. The artist uses lenses, learns how to cast metals, and works on his equations so he knows how to support the dome of a new church.

For Verrocchio and Leonardo, ‘science’ simply means learning and understanding; it is the practical preparation that allows buildings, sculptures and paintings to be properly made.

This hunger for knowledge, not least his interest in forces and engineering and such things as levers, has led Leonardo to be called
the original ‘Renaissance man’. The image that blurs into our idea of Leonardo himself is that of his perfectly proportioned nude standing inside a square and circle,
Vitruvian Man
, the complete human, executed about 1487.

But what does this have to do with the Renaissance, if strictly defined as the rebirth of classical learning, as the humanists taught? Leonardo was not educated in – or apparently much interested in – Roman and Greek writers. He was looking for patterns and symmetries around him in a way that is much closer to the concerns of modern biologists and physicists than to Aristotle or Cicero. Yes, the Renaissance was inspired by all those statues dug up in Rome, and by the translation of old texts. This was the decoration, the trimming, of the age. Beefy cardinals, meanwhile, were enjoying the violent, sexually explicit stories of old Rome, and decorating their family palaces with soft porn lightly covered in a classical gauze. But Leonardo, like the best artists, remains alive because he was about looking – looking harder, looking afresh – looking ahead – and not about looking back.

Leonardo benefited from learning transmitted through the Muslim world – for instance on optics – and from the wealth brought to southern Europe by the new trade routes. Christian Europe had advanced not simply through her own exertions, but because of changes beyond her borders, from Genghis’s annihilation of the core of Asian Islam, to inventions made in China under the Song and new thinking about God and the world that emerged in al-Andalus. Leonardo has become not simply the archetype of the Renaissance man, but of the European spirit at its boldest and most optimistic. But the West had moved beyond her old status as muddy melting pot long before he first picked up a brush. Now she was ready to explode outwards.

1492–1640: Europe Erupts in All Directions, While the Rest of the World Struggles On

It is said – rightly – that the two most significant changes in human history were the invention of agriculture, upon which everything else depended, and the industrial revolution, which shaped today’s world. Some think the latest advances in digital technology and brain science add up to a third leap; others disagree. But if farming and capitalism were the first and second leaps, perhaps we need to add one more stage, a kind of half-leap forward, or just a purposeful stride.

This stage is global trade, which emerged out of the age of discovery. It was driven by the unequal distribution of plants, minerals and animals around the world, creating flows of sugar, tobacco, spices, and money. Without it, we would never have had capitalism and so we would never have had the industrial revolution – at least, not in anything like the way it actually happened.

We have seen plenty of examples of local trading systems extending huge distances. The achievement of the Arab sailors in linking India and the Mediterranean, and thus connecting with the sailing traders of the Far East, was one. The caravan traffic across the Sahara was another; the river system exploited by the Vikings, leading to the creation of Russia, a third. But it was only when Western European sailors, exploiting new ocean-going sailing ships, forged their way from continent to continent, that the real global trading system began. They were demonstrating a classic instance of incremental technology. A wooden bucket made of ropes, new keel and rudder developments and new ways of rigging sailcloth suddenly becomes a galleon, guided by compasses and star-reading instruments, and soon armed with cannon. These vessels had evolved over centuries from the galleys of the ancient world and from the old rounder, sea-going cargo boats.

Their effect was shattering. Scholars argue about this, but at the time of the arrival of these new boats, the Americas may have had a population of around fifty million people, roughly on a par with
Europe. These people were mostly concentrated in today’s Brazil, Mexico, Peru and along the Mississippi River. Soon afterwards, population figures plunged. In the more advanced central and southern American regions, Spanish and Portuguese colonists reimposed a form of forced labour and slavery, leading to centuries of slow development and political stagnation. In the emptier north, different kinds of colonists eventually settled, learned to farm there, and built a democratic culture.

These changes left their mark on the balance of power and prosperity in today’s world. The flow of gold and silver back to Europe, then to China, caused political turmoil in both these areas. In Europe, the old religious hierarchy found itself challenged, and the continent became radically divided: the needs of global traders brought about the invention of financial systems which, again, mark today’s world. In the East, societies such as Japan and China struggled to find a way to respond to the new seaborne arrivals, who began to build empires wherever they could.

This part of the book will look at how, when Europe flung herself out around the rest of the world, using relatively primitive technology – most of it learned from others – some of the key building-blocks of modernity started to fall into place. This phase was once recounted as a self-admiring, heroic tale of explorers and conquerors, bringing religion and enlightenment to the natives; of exotic items arriving in European cities; of admirably self-reliant farmers ploughing virgin soil. It now reads like a much more brutal story, with Europeans trampling across much of the planet rather like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. When we ask why certain parts of the world are so much richer than others – what has worked and what has not – we see that this is a key period.

And we shall also see that the real story was odder than any summary can convey; it takes in Europe’s terror of coastal pirates, her admiration for national defenders such as Vlad the Impaler; the importance of staying cosy to the greatness of Russia; and the role of anti-smoking campaigners in England and Japan.

Trouble in Paradise

If the Spanish ‘discovered’ America in the 1490s, then Napoleon ‘discovered’ Russia in 1812. It was an invasion. The European invasion of America was one in which wooden ships, using the Chinese inventions of the compass and gunpowder, Muslim navigational mathematics and European Atlantic sailing skills, acted the part that horses and chariots played on land. It is remembered by Europeans and their modern American cousins as ‘the discovery’ only because the invaded peoples were so militarily weak and succumbed so quickly to disease. Also, after centuries of deforesting and draining, mass hunting and overfishing, Europe was so relatively barren in natural resources that the Americas seemed to many Europeans a rich, ripe, unplucked wilderness, another paradise. Preachers, sailors, entrepreneurs and writers announced the discovery of a land of empty forests and friendly heathens just waiting for the bounties of proper farming, property rights and the Gospel.

In fact, America’s forests and prairies had been extensively hunted for millennia, after bands of Asiatics reached it across a land bridge perhaps around twenty thousand years ago.. The history of native Americans between then and the arrival of Europeans is a complex story of many different civilizations and of a continent which, far from being unpeopled, probably supported more humans than did Europe at the time of Columbus. In the 1490s, there were perhaps around seven to eight million ‘Indians’ in North America, many of them very effective farmers, which, added to the heavily populated Mexican and southern areas, suggests a population of 75–100 million, as compared with 70 million in Europe.
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American societies ranged from Inuit hunters to pueblo-dwellers, from sophisticated farming cultures and bands of federated tribes to empires. The first European descriptions of savages along the North American Atlantic coast, and the popular lore telling of fierce tent-dwelling hunters constantly at war with one another, are mere propaganda. Most people there were farmers, living in villages and small towns, or pueblos, growing a mix of crops, even if much of their agriculture was based on a slash-and-burn system, the farmers moving on every few years and allowing the land to regenerate – very similar
to early farming in Britain, France and Germany. Their tribal systems were often characterized by a balance of power that included a place for leading women, who chose the male chiefs, as well as complex arrangements and alliances intended to avoid conflict. Above all, this was a very varied continent socially. It has been estimated that in North America alone there were over six hundred different societies and around a dozen unrelated language groups, ‘in some cases more dissimilar than English and Chinese’.
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