Da Vinci's Ghost (9 page)

Figure 13.
Some of the earliest medieval European anatomical illustrations, from the same twelfth-century manuscript as the illustration in
Figure 12
. Clockwise from top left: Bone Man, Nerve Man, and Muscle Man.

The idea that the body of the world could be envisioned in this way—at once anatomically, geographically, and cosmographically—intoxicated Hildegard and many of her contemporaries.
“Nature’s lineaments
,” the mystical theologian Alan of Lille enthused, could now be observed in miniature in the human body, “as in a mirror of the universe itself.”

Only a few decades after Hildegard’s death, this idea came together in one of the grandest visualizations of the microcosm ever drawn: the giant Ebstorf mappamundi, a circular world map produced in northern Germany sometime in the early 1200s,
quite possibly by Benedictine nuns
(
Plate 4
).

The map lays out a geographical scheme typical of medieval European world maps. Bounded by a single vast ocean, the world consists of three parts: Asia, Europe, and Africa. But the world itself is an embodiment of Christ, whose head appears at the top, in the east; whose feet appear at the bottom, in the west; and whose hands appear at the sides, in the north and south. Geography, in other words, has merged with not only cosmography but also anatomy. The world’s waterways have become Christ’s bloodstream and nervous system, its land formations have become his flesh and bones, and its center, Jerusalem, has
become his navel. Framed in a cosmic circle and an earthly square, the map depicts Christ’s full body of empire, which, needless to say, brings Vitruvian Man to mind.

As does Hildegard’s stunning vision of the microcosm. Did Hildegard somehow have Vitruvian Man in mind when she contemplated her famous vision? It’s certainly possible. Many of the copies of the
Ten Books
that survive from her time
were produced in German monasteries
, and at several points in the
Book of Divine Works
Hildegard herself seems to be echoing Vitruvius. In describing the nature of the microcosm, for example, she repeatedly discussed the proportions present in the human form.
“God created humanity
with one limb fitted to another,” she wrote at one point, “in such a way that no limb should exceed its proper proportion.” She zeroed in several times on the relative distances among various parts of the body, too.
“It is the same distance
from one of our ears to the other,” she observed, “as the distance from our ears down to the shoulders, or the distance from our shoulders to the base of the throat.” But she echoed Vitruvius most closely when she described the ideal figure at the center of her visions and then generalized about his proportions.

“If we extend
both our hands and arms out from the chest,” she wrote, “the human form has the same length and width, just as the firmament is also as tall as it is wide.”

I
NFLECTED WITH THE
Vitruvian spirit, images of the microcosm proliferated in Europe in the centuries that followed. But Vitruvius’s
Ten Books
itself remained a work rarely copied or understood. That began to change in about 1415, however, when the
early Italian humanist Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini visited the monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland.

Poggio had recently embarked on a book-hunting tour: a quest to find copies of lost or long-forgotten ancient Roman texts, many of which sat moldering and worm-eaten in the great monastery libraries of central Europe, ignored in favor of newer Christian works. The effort paid off handsomely. During the course of his travels he discovered copies of works by, among others, Cicero, the poet Lucretius, the grammarians Quintilian and Priscian, the astronomer Manilius, and the land surveyor Frontinus—and one day, while making his way through the rich collection at St. Gall, he stumbled across a beautifully preserved eighth-century copy of the
Ten Books
.

As he was doing with many of the other works he discovered, Poggio had the manuscript sent back to Florence, the efflorescent hub of the newly emergent Italian Renaissance. Injected into this lively new social and intellectual environment, the work would take on new life in the decades that followed, gradually spawning copies that would be studied not just by theologians and philosophers but also by practicing architects and artists—among them Leonardo da Vinci.

I can carry out sculpture
in marble, bronze, or clay; and in painting I can do everything it is possible to do.

—Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1484–85)

O
N A SPRING DAY
in 1452, in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, some thirty miles from Florence, on the final page of an old journal in which he had already recorded the birth of his own children, an elderly landowner named Antonio da Vinci recorded the arrival of the newest member of his extended family.
“There was born to me a grandson
,” he noted, “the son of Ser Piero, my son, on the 15th day of April, a Saturday, at the 3rd hour of the night.” The boy was illegitimate, conceived out of wedlock by Piero and a young local woman named Caterina, but that doesn’t seem to have bothered Antonio. With matter-of-fact pride he went on to describe how, on the day after his birth, the baby had been baptized by the local parish priest in
the presence of ten godparents and a number of other witnesses from Vinci. They christened him Leonardo.

No other reference to Leonardo da Vinci survives from his childhood, and one can only guess as to how he spent his youth. He probably lived like many other Tuscan country boys: rising with the sun, doing early morning chores, tending to farm animals, plowing and planting and harvesting in the fields, helping to press grapes and olives into wine and oil. He surely whiled away plenty of hours making mischief with village kids, too, and wandering off on his own into the countryside, pausing to drink from streams, idly tracing pictures in the dirt, crouching down to study bugs, dozing under trees, gazing up at the clouds. The natural world was his classroom, and hands-on experience his teacher; they would remain so for the rest of his life. A lifelong lover of the view from above, he would have clambered to the tops of nearby hills to survey the full contours of his little Tuscan world: a sight captured in his earliest surviving drawing, from 1473 (
Figure 14
).

By his own account, Leonardo received only limited schooling as a child, little more than some rudimentary training in reading, writing, and mathematics. As a youth he probably taught himself how to write, developing the famously eccentric mirror script that he would use throughout his life, in which he formed his letters backward and ran his text from right to left. Much has been made of this script as a kind of secret code, but it probably has a very simple explanation: Leonardo was left-handed. Writing from right to left would have allowed him to avoid dragging his hand over wet ink. With no formal schoolmaster to correct the habit after he developed it, he would have persisted in it until it became second nature.

Figure 14.
Leonardo’s earliest surviving drawing, of a Tuscan landscape (c. 1473).

The lack of schooling probably suited Leonardo just fine. Even at a young age he seems to have been a creature of passionate but fleeting enthusiasms, driven by a restless, inquisitive spirit that refused to be confined by traditional limits. That’s the picture that emerges in the account of the art historian Giorgio Vasari, who in the sixteenth century gathered anecdotes about Leonardo’s early life.
“He would have been very proficient
at his early lessons if he had not been so volatile and unstable,” Vasari wrote. “He set himself to learn many things, only to abandon them almost immediately.”

Leonardo’s artistic talents emerged early. It’s fun to imagine with what wide-eyed astonishment those around him began to take notice as he doodled portraits, sketched landscapes, and sculpted objects out of whatever material lay at hand. By the time he was in his early teens, the word around Vinci must have been that Piero and young Caterina had produced a prodigy. Piero, who lived and worked as a notary in Florence, even found himself wondering if the boy might possess enough talent to make a living as a big-city artist—and in about 1466, with Leonardo soon to be coming of age and in need of a career, he decided to find out. “
One day
,” Vasari recalled, “Ser Piero took some of Leonardo’s drawings along to [the well-known Florentine artist] Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a good friend of his, and asked if he thought it would be profitable for the boy to study drawing. Andrea was amazed to see what extraordinary beginnings Leonardo had made, and urged Piero to make him study the subject. So Piero arranged for Leonardo to enter Andrea’s workshop.”

And so, at about the age of fourteen, Leonardo left Vinci behind and set out for Florence.

H
E PROBABLY MADE
the trip in a day, on the back of a mule and in the company of his father. For hours they would have ridden through the Tuscan countryside, on well-worn dirt tracks, and then at last the great city would have come into view. It was a feast for the eyes—the kind of sight, as the Florentine poet Ugolino Verino would write not long after Leonardo arrived, that makes
“every traveler arriving
in the city swear that there is no place more beautiful in all the world” (
Figure 15
).

The city was indeed a marvel to behold. Home to 50,000 people, enclosed by a circular wall seven miles in diameter, it spread out along both sides of the Arno River, with 80 defensive watchtowers studding its walls: a reminder that in the fifteenth century the threat of war among Italian city-states loomed large. Spanning the Arno were four bridges, among them the famous Ponte Vecchio, then as now a tourist attraction lined with shops. But what dominated the cityscape from afar was the soaring, majestic dome of the cathedral of Florence, erected in the 1420s and 1430s by the legendary Filippo Brunelleschi. When Leonardo moved to Florence a generation later, the structure was still provoking wonder and pride in the city’s inhabitants—among them Ugolino Verino. “
Nothing is superior to this dome
,” he wrote, “not even the seven wonders of the world.” Already there was talk of the
malattia del duomo
, or cathedral sickness,
a malaise akin to homesickness that had just one symptom: an intense longing for the sight of the cathedral and its great dome.

Figure 15.
Florence in 1492, as Leonardo knew it.

Scores of other churches also came into view as Leonardo approached the city. A total of 108 of them lay inside the city walls. They, too, were a source of great civic pride—
“meticulously maintained
,” the Florentine diplomat Benedetto Dei wrote in 1472, “and exquisitely furnished with cloisters, chapter houses, refectories, infirmaries, sacristies, libraries, bell towers, relics, crosses, chalices, silver items, gold and silver paramagnets, and velvet and damask clothes.”

The churches—and much of the rest of Florence, for that matter—had all been built with something very specific to prove. Once a provincial town known primarily for its cloth makers and small-time moneylenders, the city had been overshadowed in previous centuries not only by Rome but also by other regional powers: Venice, Milan, Genoa, Naples. These were feudal cities, where birth defined one’s class and profession, where wealth was inherited, and where political power was the birthright of the nobility, which ruled absolutely. But early in the thirteenth century the merchants and craftsmen of Florence began to create a new kind of social order, by organizing themselves into loose trade associations, or guilds. The move proved a spectacular success. “
The barons
,” wrote one thirteenth-century Florentine, bemoaning the loss of the old order, “must sometimes give precedence to the merchants, for they go on foot while the merchants have horses and carriages. Nowadays his majesty Money is the most highly esteemed of all.” Soon Florence possessed such wealth, such trading power, such a strong working class, and such an expansive
administrative bureaucracy that its guild members began to chafe under the rule of the existing feudal elite. Why not rid their city of its useless hereditary nobility, they felt, and just run it themselves as a republic? The early Romans had done something similar two thousand years earlier—and
that
experiment had turned out pretty well.