Da Vinci's Ghost (25 page)

The illustration has a dreamy quality to it. But it was no idle fancy. It was an attempt to sum up the essence of the human analogy—the idea, as Francesco put it in his
Treatise
, that
“all the arts
and all rules are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body.” Many of the other human figures who
inhabit Francesco’s architectural drawings bear an uncanny likeness to this figure, and that’s no accident. They are
all
Vitruvian Men.

Figure 45.
The first drawing of Vitruvian Man known to be based directly on the description in the
Ten Books.
From Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s
Treatise
(c. 1481–84), owned by Leonardo.

Francesco was more suggestive than precise in drawing his Vitruvian Man. He drew him as an idea, it seems, but didn’t worry much about the details. The circle and square that surround him are imperfectly drawn. So is the figure himself, whose proportions don’t correspond terribly closely to those described by Vitruvius—and who, in general, doesn’t fit especially neatly inside the two shapes. In drawing the picture Francesco also
chose to sidestep a basic problem with the Vitruvian text, one that Filarete had called out some two decades earlier in his own architectural treatise. “
Vitruvius,” he wrote, “says that the navel is the middle of the figure of man.”
So far, so good. “However,” he went on, scratching his head as he confronted the obvious, “it does not seem to be exactly in the middle.”

The navel indeed does not occupy the halfway point between the human head and feet—as is obvious to anybody who takes even a cursory look at the human body. Roughly speaking, the pelvic region occupies the halfway point, and Francesco drew his young man accordingly. Anatomically, that was the right choice, but, as he must have recognized, it meant that his figure did not live up to the Vitruvian ideal. Not that this seems to have troubled him much. In theory, he explained in his
Treatise
, following Vitruvius, a building’s measurements should derive from an ideal canon of human proportions—but as a practical matter, he continued, they
“can be decreased
or increased somewhat at the choice of the artisan.”

Did Francesco show Leonardo his drawing of Vitruvian Man? If so, did seeing it prompt Leonardo to draw his own? It’s impossible to say for sure, but enough circumstantial evidence does survive at least to suggest a link between the two drawings. Before the 1480s, when Francesco summoned up his image of Vitruvian Man, nobody in the fifteen-hundred-year life of the
Ten Books
had ever translated the work into the vernacular, and nobody is known ever to have explicitly illustrated its famous man in a circle and a square—but then, in 1490, the very year that Francesco and Leonardo lodged together in Pavia, Leonardo decided to illustrate that very same figure. Leonardo didn’t date his drawing, which ultimately makes its dating to
1490 a guess—but as guesses about Leonardo go, it’s about as good as they get. The style of draftsmanship, the type of handwriting, and the kind of paper and pen that Leonardo used for his Vitruvian Man all correspond closely to other drawings that he is known to have produced in 1490. And that’s the very period in his career when he was immersed in his intensive study of human proportions and had a special interest in comparing his own measurements to those listed in the Vitruvian canon.

A
FTER ONLY A
few days in Pavia, Francesco returned to Milan
to help write a final report
on the
tiburio
project. The report, dated June 27, detailed how the structure should be built. Not long afterward, the cathedral overseers at last picked two local architects to carry out the project.

Leonardo was not among them. Perhaps, having just spent time with Francesco, he knew already what the outcome would be and so decided to linger in Pavia rather than returning home to be let down. He does seem, at least, to have allowed himself some
time in Pavia for research
and sightseeing. In his notes he not only mentions the contents of the Witelo book he wanted to find, which suggests he spent time at the Visconti library, but he also praises the town’s ancient equestrian statue, describes the design of the chimneys at the Visconti Castle, sketches one of the town’s churches, and records the techniques he observed local workmen use as they shored up the foundations of the old city walls.

Leonardo made no mention of how long he stayed in Pavia. But sometime before July 22 he was back in Milan, because that night, according to his notes,
he had dinner in the city
with
another architect and military engineer who may have helped inspire him to draw Vitruvian Man: a mysterious figure known as Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara.

What little is known about Giacomo Andrea derives primarily from a remark made by the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In one edition of his
On Divine Proportion
(1498), which contains geometrical illustrations by Leonardo, Pacioli included a dedication to Ludovico Sforza that began with a list of the
“many very famous and wise men
” who served the duke at his court in Milan. Pacioli placed Leonardo prominently on the list, describing him in the most glowing of terms—and then, immediately afterward, singled out Giacomo Andrea as one of Leonardo’s closest friends.
“There was also Giacomo Andrea
da Ferrara,” Pacioli wrote, “as dear to him as a brother, the keen student of Vitruvius’s works, but who is nonetheless well versed in his special military field.”

That single, tantalizing sentence represents virtually the full extent of what survives of Giacomo Andrea in the historical record. One of the few other known references to him concerns the circumstances of his death. In 1499 the forces of the French king Louis XII invaded and occupied Milan—and the following year, evidently because of his continuing loyalty to Ludovico Sforza, they hanged Giacomo Andrea. Not only that,
they quartered his body and displayed its pieces
on the gates of the city: a gruesome warning to those harboring like sympathies.

Leonardo himself seems to have had substantially better relations with the French, but at the end of 1499 he decided to leave Milan. He would return to live there some seven years later, in the summer of 1506—whereupon, if he hadn’t heard the news
already, he must have learned of Giacomo Andrea’s death. No doubt still grieving for his old friend, he soon made another reference to him in one of his notebooks.
“Messer Vincenzo Aliprando
, who lives near the Inn of the Bear,” he wrote, “has Giacomo Andrea’s Vitruvius.”

It’s possible that Leonardo sought out Giacomo Andrea’s copy of the
Ten Books
for purely sentimental reasons: as a memento of a dead friend. But there may be more to the story than that. According to the architectural historian Claudio Sgarbi, who has spent years investigating the matter, Giacomo Andrea’s copy of the
Ten Books
wasn’t just
any
copy. It was a special manuscript that Giacomo Andrea produced for his own private use—and one that he may have collaborated on with Leonardo. Sgarbi believes that he has located the manuscript itself, in the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea of Ferrara, where, miscatalogued unpromisingly as an
“imperfect work
starting from Book Seven” and misdated as a sixteenth-century edition of the
Ten Books
, it had long evaded the attention of scholars. Some twenty-five years ago, however, when Sgarbi first encountered the manuscript, he realized that in fact it dated to the 1490s, contained almost the full text of the
Ten Books
, and included an unprecedented 127 illustrations, all of remarkable sophistication.

Sgarbi was astonished by what he found. By illustrating a number of Vitruvian concepts in his
Treatise
, Francesco di Giorgio Martini had broken new ground—but even he had not attempted to systematically illustrate the
Ten Books
itself. Nobody had. The Ferrara manuscript thus represented a historical landmark, as Sgarbi announced in a 1993 journal article describing his discovery. “The manuscript,” he declared, “is the
earliest
surviving attempt to combine the text of Vitruvius’s
De architectura
with a programmatic apparatus of illustrations. It must therefore be considered a completely original, perhaps revolutionary, work.”

A fully illustrated Vitruvius
. This on its own might explain Leonardo’s interest in tracking the work down. But what particularly enthralled Sgarbi was an illustration he found buried deep in the body of the manuscript, on the reverse side of its seventy-eighth folio: a drawing of a distinctly Christ-like Vitruvian Man, which bears a powerful resemblance to Leonardo’s own (
Figure 46
).

The correspondence is eerily close—and unique in the history of art. No other drawing of Vitruvian Man before the sixteenth century using this particular relationship between the circle and square survives. The two pictures correspond so closely, in fact (
Figure 47
), in terms of not only the circle and the square but also the figures’ bodily proportions, that Sgarbi believes they must have been produced as part of some kind of collaboration. And the only person in the 1490s who could plausibly have worked on the drawing with Leonardo was Giacomo Andrea—one of only a handful of Italian experts on Vitruvius at the time, and the only one, other than Francesco di Giorgio Martini (whose drawings were very different), whom Leonardo seems to have known personally.

Of course, the Ferrara drawing might represent a direct or indirect copy of Leonardo’s drawing. Sgarbi has yet to find firm documentary proof that the two men collaborated on their drawings. But the possibility of its being a copy is highly unlikely, he contends, because upon close inspection the Ferrara drawing reveals itself to be a very tentative effort, full of
erasures, false starts, and corrections—all of which would have been unnecessary had its illustrator simply been trying to reproduce Leonardo’s picture. Sgarbi instead imagines Leonardo and Giacomo Andrea working side by side, perhaps with Giacomo Andrea sketching out an initial idea rooted in traditional Christian imagery and with Leonardo then realizing how he could enhance the image to make it a statement of his own ideas and personal philosophy. Elsewhere in the manuscript are drawings of machines and engines that are so ahead of their times in terms of artistic technique that Sgarbi believes only one person could have conceived of, if not actually executed, them: Leonardo himself.

Figure 46.
Vitruvian Man from the Ferrara manuscript of Vitruvius’s
Ten Books.

Figure 47.
The Ferrara figure superimposed on Leonardo’s, revealing a startlingly close correspondence between the two.

It’s a fascinating theory. But as much fun as it is to ponder, the trail of speculation ultimately goes cold—as it does for anybody pondering the rich swirl of people, texts, images, and ideas that may have prompted Leonardo to draw his picture. Ultimately, despite how much can be said on all of those fronts, the picture stands alone. One has to let it speak for itself (
Plate 9
).