Da Vinci's Ghost (28 page)

Figure 53.
Hands and foot of Vitruvian Man.

The picture is reproduced so often today, and in so many different contexts, that it’s hard not to think of it as ubiquitous, timeless, and inevitable. Looking at the original, however, I found myself drawn to the little things: the brittleness of the paper; the gently fading quality of the ink; the stray marks on the page; the occasional flourishes atop Leonardo’s letters; the name “Leonardo da Vinci” written at the bottom of the page in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century hand; the faint residue of glue on the back of the picture, where Venanzio de Pagave
had pasted it down into his folio. It all made me reflect on the utter contingency of the image, which could so easily not have existed. What if the Greeks had defined beauty and the nature of the cosmos differently? What if Octavius hadn’t decided to reinvent himself as Augustus? What if Vitruvius had never written the
Ten Books
, or if medieval scribes, flummoxed by the difficulty of the text, had quit copying it? What if Christian theologians and mystics hadn’t incorporated elements of Vitruvian Man into their worldview? What if Leonardo hadn’t lived in Florence, studied with Verrocchio, or turned to the study of architecture and anatomy in Milan? As distractible as he was, what if he had just never quite gotten around to drawing the picture? Or what if it had simply disappeared after Francesco Melzi’s death, like so many of Leonardo’s other drawings?

One particular day more than five hundred years ago, I couldn’t help thinking, Leonardo set other business aside, laid this particular sheet of paper down on a table somewhere—and then, after carefully dipping the nib of his pen into a pot of brown ink, began to draw Vitruvian Man. Perhaps he worked with Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara at his side. Perhaps he drew the picture after lodging with Francesco di Giorgio Martini in Pavia, or after discussing Vitruvius with Bramante in Milan. Perhaps he drew it to make sense of an age-old idea, to illustrate an ancient text, or to sum up the essence of the human analogy. Perhaps he flipped back and forth through his own notebooks as he worked, imagining that he’d include the picture in a treatise of his own. Perhaps he drew it to impress Ludovico Sforza, or perhaps he drew it only for himself, as a sort of metrological relief that he could consult privately while working on his paintings.

Perhaps he just
drew
it, without really knowing why.

Whatever the circumstances, he had much of his career still before him at that moment. He had yet to create his famous giant clay model of the Sforza horse, which would quickly win acclaim all over Italy as one of the greatest sculptures of all time—only to be reduced to rubble in 1499 by French soldiers celebrating their capture of Milan. He had yet to paint
The Last Supper
and the
Mona Lisa
, the works for which today he is best known. He had yet to conduct the remarkable series of anatomical investigations that would make him a true pioneer in the history of both medicine and art, and he had yet to devise some of his most famous experiments and inventions. He still had countless plans to make, pictures to draw, notebook pages to fill.

When he sat down to draw Vitruvian Man, in other words, the moment was ripe with potential. Already Leonardo had observed and studied the natural world more thoroughly than anybody before him, and now, by marrying his unique talents as a scientist and an artist, perhaps he felt he was on the verge of attaining what had eluded others for so long: the godlike ability to see and understand the nature of the world as a whole. That’s the spirit, at once medieval and modern, and ultimately rooted in the quest for self-understanding, in which Leonardo would go on to live his life—and it’s why, after his death, in 1519, his friend and final patron, King François I of France, eulogized him with the highest praise he could imagine.
“I cannot resist
repeating the words I heard the king say of him,” a member of François’s entourage wrote. “He said that he could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only of sculpture, painting, and architecture; and that he was a truly great philosopher.”

“With what words
, O writer,” Leonardo wrote alongside one of his anatomical studies, “will you describe with similar perfection the entire configuration that the drawing here does?” He might as well have been describing Vitruvian Man. Brought into being more than half a millennium ago and born of concepts far older still, the picture contains whole lost worlds of information, ideas, stories, and patterns of thought. But look its subject directly in the eye, and you’ll also see Leonardo da Vinci, staring out at you from the page. The man himself died centuries ago, but his ghost—timeless, watchful, and restless—remains unmistakably, unforgettably alive.

T
HE ONLY OTHER
book devoted exclusively to Vitruvian Man that I’ve been able to unearth is
Vitruvs Proportions-figur
, a scholarly monograph published in German in 1987 by the Leonardo expert Frank Zöllner. It’s not easy to find, but much of its argument is reprised in the fifth chapter of Zöllner’s giant and beautifully produced
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519: The Complete Paintings and Drawings
, which is widely available in libraries and stores. The definitive source of information about the picture itself is
I disegni di Leonardo da Vinci e della sua cerchia
, a grand catalogue published in 2003, in a run of only 998 numbered copies, that contains facsimiles and meticulously detailed descriptions of all the Leonardo drawings owned by the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice. The Accademia devoted an exhibit to Vitruvian Man in late 2009 and 2010, at which time it produced a companion volume of essays titled
Leonardo: L’uomo vitruviano fra arte e scienza
, which provides interesting reading for those who know Italian.

Books about Leonardo abound in such quantity and such varying quality that it can be hard to know where to start or which ones to trust. I found three general works particularly useful as I tried to get a handle on his life and thought: Charles Nicholl’s
Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind
; Martin Kemp’s
Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man
; and Serge Bramly’s
Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci
. A less comprehensive but extremely engaging introduction to Leonardo is
The Treasures of Leonardo
by Matthew Landrus, a lovingly produced volume that includes removable facsimiles of documents, drawings, and paintings by Leonardo and his contemporaries. For those interested in the earliest accounts of Leonardo’s life, a particularly good source is
Leonardo da Vinci: Life and Work and Paintings and Drawings
by Ludwig Goldscheider, which gathers together several of them in a single place. Giorgio Vasari’s invaluable but not always trustworthy short biography of Leonardo appears in Goldscheider’s work, but it’s also very easy to find in the many editions of Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists
that have been published over the years.

For Leonardo in his own words, I relied primarily on two works: Jean Paul Richter’s
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
, an essential and engrossing two-volume work originally published in 1883 but reissued in 1970; and Carlo Pedretti’s two-volume
The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci
, a staggeringly detailed, entry-by-entry commentary on the contents of Richter’s compilation, published in 1977. Richter painstakingly translated every remark he found in Leonardo’s notebooks and then organized his translations by subject; Pedretti, for his part, updated and corrected Richter’s translations, provided
extensive glosses, did his best to date every single entry, and published new material from the two Leonardo notebooks that were accidentally rediscovered in 1967 in the bowels of the National Library in Madrid. I also consulted
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
, a popular one-volume abridgment of Jean Paul Richter’s two-volume collection, first published by his daughter Irma in 1952 but often reissued since, and in a few cases I relied on Edward MacCurdy’s two-volume
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
, published in 1938. Another source I found extremely helpful was Philip McMahon’s translation of and commentary on Leonardo’s
Treatise on Painting
, a work begun haphazardly by Leonardo himself but then cobbled together into book form from his notebooks (including some now lost) after his death by his apprentice Francesco Melzi. For Leonardo’s extensive writings on anatomy, I regularly consulted
Leonardo da Vinci on the Human Body
, compiled by Charles D. O’Malley and J. B. de C. M. Saunders, and discovered much useful related information in Martin Clayton’s
Leonardo da Vinci: The Anatomy of Man
.

As for Vitruvius, I found Indra Kagis McEwen’s
Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture
an invaluable guide, not just to the man and his book but also to the complicated social, political, and religious context in which he wrote it. I also learned much from the two most recent English translations of Vitruvius’s book: the very readable 2009 edition by Richard Schofield, published under the title
On Architecture
, and the amply annotated 1999 edition by Ingrid D. Rowland, published under the title
Ten Books on Architecture
. Both include a wealth of very helpful background information. One other English translation is worth consulting: the 1914 edition
produced by Morris Hickey Morgan, which has stood the test of time remarkably well.

The remaining sources I consulted while working on the book—on ancient Greece and Rome, on the early reception of Vitruvius in Europe, on Christian symbolism and mystical thought, on medieval master builders, on the early history of medicine, on the artists and architects of the Renaissance, on Leonardo, and more—are too numerous and varied to call out individually. For a representative sampling, see the Works Cited section of this book, which also includes full bibliographic details for the works mentioned above.

F
ULL REFERENCES
for all works cited in short form in the Notes can be found in the Works Cited section of this book.

xiii
“Leonardo, the complete man”: Betty Burroughs, “Editorial Notes on Leonardo,” in Vasari,
Vasari’s Lives
, 197.

xvii
“Man is a model”: Jean Paul Richter,
The Notebooks
2, no. 1162, 291. Translation slightly modified.

1
an inn called Il Saracino: Beltrami,
Documenti
no. 50, 32.

2
“The building supervisors”: Schofield, Shell, and Sironi,
Giovanni Antonio Amadeo
no. 209, 183. Unpublished English translation supplied to me by Richard Schofield, professor of architectural history, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia.

2
“Master Leonardo the Florentine”: Ibid., 183.

3
contributed more to the development: Vasari, “The Life of Francesco di Giorgio Martini,” in Vasari,
Lives
.

3
his illustrated treatises were copied: Scaglia,
Francesco di Giorgio
, 16.

3
“He was very attractive”: Nicholl,
Leonardo
, 11, citing an anonymous source known as the Anonimo Gaddiano. For the full text, see Anonimo Gaddiano, “Leonardo da Vinci,” in Goldscheider,
Leonardo
, 32.

4
“by nature very courteous”: Nicholl,
Leonardo
, 126, citing the artist Paolo Giovio.

4
“He was so pleasing”: Vasari,
Vasari’s Lives
, 188.

4
“It was asked of a painter”: Jean Paul Richter,
The Notebooks
2, no. 1285, 350.

4
“From the dawning of the day”: Bramly,
Leonardo
, 258.

4
“As you go about”: Jean Paul Richter,
The Notebooks
1, no. 571, 287. Translation slightly modified, based on Irma A. Richter,
The Notebooks
, 220.

5
“The measurement of Milan”: Jean Paul Richter,
The Notebooks
2, no. 1448, 434. Translation primarily from Pedretti,
Leonardo: Architect
, 26, with modifications based on the excerpt that appears in Kemp,
Leonardo
, 84–85. All three sources provide glosses on Leonardo’s list.

7
dates from the early 1480s: Martino,
Trattato
2, xv. “The Opera Architectura,” 133.

8
“Basilicas [have] the proportions”: Kruft,
A History
, 56.

10
“Man, called a little world”: Ibid., 57. Translation slightly modified.

10
“All the arts and all rules”: Betts, “On the Chronology,” 5.

10
“As far as we are concerned”: Alberti,
On the Art of Building
, 154.

11
“Virturbius de architretis”: Pellegrin,
La Bibliothèque des Visconti
, 254.