Da Vinci's Ghost (10 page)

To prove their superiority over their fellow Italian city-states, Florentines devoted themselves and their growing fortunes to making Florence a kind of theater of political and cultural power. Their city, they decided, had to have the best of everything: the biggest cathedral, the most lavishly adorned churches, the grandest piazzas, the biggest homes, the loveliest statues, the most expensive paintings, the finest silks, the most skillful engineers, the most educated scholars, the most eloquent poets. By the time Leonardo arrived, few could deny how successfully and completely the city, now a republic of wealthy merchants and bankers, had reinvented itself—as a financial center, a political power, a cultural haven, and, ultimately, a work of art.
“Venetian, Milanese, Genoese
, Neapolitan, Sienese,” Benedetto Dei wrote tauntingly in 1472, “try to compare your cities with this one!”

Nothing better symbolized the nature of this transformation in the fifteenth century than the new streets of Florence: wide open spaces, all clean lines and smooth surfaces, that were gradually replacing the clutter and meandering disorder of the narrow medieval alleyways that had long wound through the city.
“How can I properly describe
the paved and spacious streets,” Ugolino Verino wrote, “designed in such a way that the traveler’s journey is impeded neither by mud when it rains
nor by dust during the summer, so that his shoes are never dirtied?”

Leonardo probably felt the same way as he entered the city. And he would have encountered some dazzling sights as he made his way along some of those streets toward his father’s home, where he is likely to have lodged at first.
According to one period inventory
, the city contained a remarkable 50 piazzas, each with its own church and shops; 33 banks, which collectively represented the beating heart of the city’s mercantile empire; and 23
palazzi
, or mansions, which provided bases of operations for the sprawling administrative staffs of the city’s 23 guilds. On display everywhere was a new architectural and artistic style, based on a clean, simple aesthetic that rejected centuries of medieval tradition and instead harked back (it was claimed, at least) to the classical ideals of Greece and Rome. And sitting at the center of it all, captivating everybody who saw it, was the city’s cathedral, capped by Brunelleschi’s magnificent dome.

But if the city was a work of art, it was also a work in progress. Riding through town, Leonardo would have been assaulted on all sides with the sights and sounds of construction—the kind of dirt and din that one Florentine apothecary of the time grumbled about in his diary when describing the building of a nearby mansion.
“The streets round about
,” he wrote, “were full of mules and donkeys carrying away the rubbish and bringing gravel, which made it difficult for people to pass. All the dust and the crowds of onlookers were most inconvenient for us shopkeepers.”

Everywhere Leonardo looked, he would have seen artisans and craftspeople at work.
According to figures
gathered in the
late 1470s, Florence was home to the studios of 270 woolworkers, 84 wood carvers, 83 silk workers, 54 master masons, 44 goldsmiths and silversmiths, and 30 master painters. Tellingly, more wood carvers and silk workers had set up shop in the city than butchers (70) and spice merchants (66)—a sign of just how hungry for the decorative arts Florence’s increasingly wealthy and status-conscious middle class had become. There was no better place to begin a career as a promising young artist.

The sight of all this bustle no doubt turned Leonardo’s thoughts to one of the city’s busiest and most important artistic workshops, located in the parish of Sant’Ambrogio, a short walk from his father’s office. It was a small factory of sorts, devoted to the production of paintings, sculptures, metalwork, tombstones, heraldic devices, suits of armor, theatrical sets, costumes, and more. Not long after Leonardo had settled in to his quarters, he sought the workshop out. It was his new place of employment: the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio.

N
OTHING SURVIVES OF
Verrocchio’s studio today. In all likelihood, however,
it resembled the studios
often depicted in fifteenth-century miniatures and frescoes. These show a large, open ground-floor space separated from the street by a simple awning of some kind. Outside the doorway, samples of the studio’s wares are on display to attract the attention of passersby. Inside, one can imagine a roomful of artisans engaged in all manner of tasks: hammering and welding metal, grinding and chiseling stone, carving wood, sculpting clay at turntables, operating kilns, sketching and painting at easels, sitting as models.
The environment is pungent, dirty, and noisy, more akin to what one encounters today in the shop of an auto mechanic than in an art studio. The master himself wanders about the studio, greeting clients, supervising apprentices and assistants, worrying about deadlines, devoting his attention to projects that need his special attention and expert touch. Tucked away in the back or upstairs are the living quarters, which he and his employees share.

When Verrocchio took Leonardo in, he would have assigned him the kinds of entry-level jobs he always gave his new assistants. Tables had to be cleaned, floors swept, errands run. Discovering that his new assistant was blessed with an alluring physique and extraordinary good looks, Verrocchio probably also put him to work almost immediately as a model. Some scholars have even proposed that he had Leonardo pose for the bronze statue of David he produced in 1466, the year Leonardo arrived. If this is true, the statue provides a sense of what Leonardo looked like as a fourteen-year-old (
Figure 16
).

Figure 16.
A possible likeness of the young Leonardo: Verrocchio’s
David
(
c.
1466).

Leonardo would also have spent time each day preparing materials for use in the studio, everything from paints and varnishes and glues—none of which came prepared in cans and tubes as they do today—to brushes
and drawing tablets and canvases. Many of these jobs were described in detail in a how-to manual that Verrocchio may well have made Leonardo study carefully:
Il libro dell’arte
, or
The Craftsman’s Handbook
, written in the late 1300s or early 1400s by the Florentine artisan Cennino Cennini. The following set of rather involved instructions, for example, appeared at the outset of the book, under the deceptively simple title “How You Begin Drawing on a Little Panel.”

First, take a little
boxwood panel, nine inches wide in each direction; all smooth and clean, that is, washed with clear water; rubbed and smoothed down with cuttle such as the goldsmiths use for casting. And when this little panel is thoroughly dry, take enough bone, ground diligently for two hours, to serve the purpose; and the finer it is, the better. Scrape it up afterward, take it and keep it wrapped up in a paper, dry. And when you need some for priming this little panel, take less than half a bean of this bone, or even less. And stir this bone up with saliva. Spread it all over the little panel with your fingers; and, before it gets dry, hold the little panel in your left hand, and tap over the panel with the finger tip of your right hand until you see that it is quite dry. And it will get coated with bone as evenly in one place as in another. … You must know what bone is good. Take bone from the second joints and wings of fowls, [and] just as you find them under the dining table, put them in the fire. When you see that they have turned whiter than ashes, draw them out and grind them well in the porphyry; and use it as I say above.

This sort of work, tedious, dusty, and messy, defined the life of a craftsman in fifteenth-century Florence—as does that delightfully casual reference to a dining-room floor strewn with chicken bones. But the work was critical, and the lesson that Verrocchio and other masters taught their assistants about it was this: to learn how to draw and paint, one had learn how to
prepare
to draw and paint.

The study of artistic technique was the next step. In Verrocchio’s studio, this would have involved a gradual introduction, over the course of years, to such subjects as how to organize a composition, how to sketch its outlines, how to flesh out subjects, how to render them using perspective and foreshortening, how to play with light and shade, how to apply color, and more.
The Craftsman’s Handbook
covered much of this, but Verrocchio would have also expected Leonardo to learn many of the basics by copying directly from a model book: a folio of drawings showcasing the kinds of generic figures and scenes that an artist might be asked to produce on demand for a client. And when it came to what was considered the most important element of any work of art, the depiction of the human form, Verrocchio would have insisted that Leonardo study and commit to memory what another Italian master described to his assistant in 1467 as the
“system of the naked body
”—that is, a standard set of ideal human proportions.

It was there, in the rote study of human proportions, that the young Leonardo probably had his first encounter with the ghost of Vitruvian Man—although neither he nor anybody else in Verrocchio’s studio would have recognized it as such. Vestiges of the figure certainly inhabited
The Craftsman’s Handbook
, in the section titled “The Proportions Which a Perfectly Formed
Man’s Body Should Possess.” After noting dismissively that the body of a woman wasn’t even worth discussing (
“for she does not have any set proportion
”), the author went on to explain, just as Vitruvius had done some fifteen hundred years earlier, that an ideal man’s face should be divided into three equal parts, and that his body, drawn in full, should be “as long as his arms crosswise.”

These proportional relationships would have become very familiar to Leonardo during his apprenticeship. The Florentine masters that Verrocchio made him study, after all, had been working with them for generations, and the results of their efforts could be seen all over Florence. And they were on obvious display in one archetypal image that Verrocchio would have made Leonardo copy again and again: the figure of Christ on the cross.

L
EONARDO LEARNED FAST
. One anecdote recorded by Vasari, although probably apocryphal, suggests just how fast.

Like many apprentices, Leonardo eventually began to assist his master with paintings, filling in color, providing background detail, adding minor characters. In Leonardo’s case this led to an awkward moment. According to Vasari, in 1472, while working on his famous
Baptism of Christ
, Verrocchio asked Leonardo to add in an angel to the scene. With a disconcertingly assured touch, Leonardo proceeded to produce a figure of such beauty, grace, and refinement that Verrocchio gave up painting altogether—
“chagrined,
” as Vasari put it, “to be outdone by a mere child.”

Whether the story is true or not, Leonardo did manage to complete his apprenticeship in six years, or only about half the time recommended by
The Craftsman’s Handbook
. In the summer of 1472 he made it official, by registering in the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine painters’ confraternity.

As a dues-paying member, Leonardo could have easily set up shop on his own. But he didn’t. Instead, for the next four years he remained with Verrocchio, as a partner of sorts. The decision made good sense. It guaranteed Leonardo a steady flow of work and income, and it allowed him, under the watchful eye of one of Florence’s best-known masters, to continue to hone his skills, develop his reputation, and pursue his ever-widening range of interests. It also meant, not insignificantly, that he could continue to live and work with the colleagues and friends in whose company he had come of age. The arrangement, in other words, made it possible for him not only to earn a living and continue to learn but also to have some fun.

The life of a young artist in Florence
involved plenty of revelry
. After the workday was over there were parties, with much music, and Leonardo no doubt took part. By all accounts he had a lovely singing voice, and entertained friends and colleagues by accompanying himself masterfully on the
lira da braccio
, or arm lyre: a small violinlike instrument with seven strings, played with a bow. All of his early biographers agree on the subject of his musical talents.
“Full of the most graceful vivacity
,” Vasari wrote, “he sang and accompanied himself most divinely.”

Horsing around at the studio, he also developed his lifelong taste for jokes, light verse, ribald banter, riddles, and fables—and, experimenting with the materials available to him in the studio, he also began to develop the kinds of party tricks that
later in his career would serve him well as a producer of special effects for ceremonial pageants. It’s easy to picture him some night at the studio stirring up some of the mischief he describes in one of his notebooks.
“If you want to make a fire
that will set a room ablaze without injury, do this. First, perfume the room with a dense smoke of incense, or some other odiferous substance: it is a good trick to play. Or boil ten pounds of brandy to evaporate, but see that the room is completely closed, and throw up some powdered varnish among the fumes. This varnish will be supported by the smoke. Then enter the room suddenly with a lighted torch, and at once it will be set ablaze.”