Fritjof Capra (10 page)

To the adolescent Leonardo, arriving in Florence from a farm and a small village of a few dozen houses, this lively, enterprising, and beautiful city must have seemed like something out of a fairy tale. Brunelleschi’s magnificent dome, crowning the shining marble of Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral of Florence, was newly finished and already being admired as a wonder of the modern world. The river Arno was spanned by four bridges. In the city’s center, Leonardo would have frequently passed by the proud and stately palace of the Medici family. Near the Ponte Vecchio, one of the city’s great bridges, he would have seen the finely proportioned Palazzo Ruccellai, both built just before his birth. On the other side of the Arno, construction had begun on the imposing Palazzo Pitti. Two dozen more palaces would be built during the sixteen years Leonardo spent in Florence. This massive beautification of the city was supported by a huge number of workshops in which artists and artisans produced the required materials, works of art, and splendid decorations. During Leonardo’s apprenticeship, Florence could boast of 54 workshops for working marble, 40 goldsmiths, and 84 workshops for woodworking in addition to 83 for silk and 270 for wool.
⁹

Leonardo’s apprenticeship came about as a result of the connections his father had. When Leonardo came to live with Ser Piero, he brought with him the drawings he had made in Vinci. “One day,” Vasari tells us, “Piero took some of Leonardo’s drawings to Andrea del Verrocchio (who was a close friend of his) and earnestly begged him to say whether it would be profitable for the boy to study drawing.
¹⁰
Andrea was amazed to see what extraordinary beginnings Leonardo had made and he urged Piero to make him study the subject. So Piero arranged for Leonardo to enter Andrea’s workshop.” Ser Piero had not shown much concern for his son’s early education, but with the choice of Verrocchio he redeemed himself. Of all the workshops in Florence, Verrocchio’s was the most prestigious, the best connected, and for Leonardo the ideal place to nurture his talents.

Andrea del Verrocchio, who was about the same age as Leonardo’s uncle Francesco, was a brilliant teacher. Originally trained as a goldsmith, he was a skilled craftsman, an accomplished painter, and a noted sculptor. He also had considerable engineering skills. He had excellent connections to the Medici family and a solid reputation, and hence received a steady stream of commissions. It was well known in Florence that his workshop could handle every kind of request.

Verrocchio’s workshop, like those of the many other Florentine artists and artisans, was quite different from the painters’ studios of subsequent centuries. In his biography of Leonardo, Serge Bramly gives us a vivid description.

This was a
bottega
, a shop—just like that of the shoemaker, butcher, or tailor—a set of ground-floor premises opening directly onto the street…an awning was pulled down to act as a door or shutter. The living quarters would be at the back or upstairs. Artists’ materials would be hanging on the walls, alongside sketches, plans, or models of work in progress, while ranged around the room would be a collection of sculptors’ turntables, workbenches, and easels; a grindstone might stand alongside a firing kiln. Several people, including the young apprentices and assistants (who generally lived under the same roof as the master and ate at his table), would be working away at different tasks.
¹¹

The
bottega
of a master like Verrocchio would produce not only paintings and sculptures but also a vast variety of objects—pieces of armor, church bells, candelabras, decorated wooden chests, coats of arms, models for architectural projects, and banners for festivities as well as sets and scenery for theatrical performances. The works leaving the
bottega
(even those of the highest quality) were rarely signed and usually produced by the master with a team of assistants.

Leonardo spent the next twelve years in this creative environment, during which he diligently followed the rigorous course of a traditional apprenticeship.
¹²
He would have drawn on tablets and familiarized himself with the artists’ materials, which could not be bought ready-made but had to be prepared in the workshop. Pigments had to be freshly ground and mixed every day; he would have learned to make paintbrushes, prepare glazes, apply gold to backgrounds, and finally, after several years, to paint. In addition, he would have absorbed considerable technical knowledge by watching the master work on a variety of projects. Over the years, as he honed his skills by imitating his elders, he and the other apprentices would have increasingly participated in the
bottega
’s production until he was finally designated a master craftsman and accepted into the appropriate association, or guild, of craftsmen.

In Verrocchio’s workshop, Leonardo was introduced not only to a wide variety of artistic and technical skills, but also to many exciting new ideas. The
bottega
was a place where lively discussions of the latest events took place daily. Music was played in the evenings; the master’s friends and fellow artists dropped by to exchange plans, sketches, and technical innovations; traveling writers and philosophers visited when they passed through the city. Many of the leading artists of the time were drawn to Verrocchio’s
bottega
. Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio all spent time there after they were already accomplished masters to learn novel techniques and discuss new ideas.

The Florentine
bottega
of the fifteenth century fostered a unique synthesis of art, technology, and science, which found its highest expression in Leonardo’s mature work. As historian of science Domenico Laurenza points out, this synthesis lasted for just a hundred years: by the end of the sixteenth century, it had dissolved.
¹³
For Leonardo’s own artistic and intellectual development, the years he spent in Verrocchio’s workshop were decisive. His way of working and his entire approach to art and science were shaped significantly by his long immersion in that workshop culture.

One important influence on Leonardo’s future work habits was the use of a
libro di bottega
(“workbook”), which all apprentices had to keep.
¹⁴
It was a journal in which they recorded technical instructions or procedures, personal reflections, solutions to problems, and drawings and diagrams of their ideas. Continuously updated, annotated, and corrected, the
libro di bottega
provided a daily record of the activities in the workshop. Its composite character of accumulated notes and drawings, without any particular organization, is recognizable in many pages of Leonardo’s Notebooks.

Shortly after Leonardo began his apprenticeship, Verrocchio received a commission for his biggest and most spectacular engineering project yet—the construction of a gilded copper ball, 2.5 meters in diameter, or roughly seven feet, to be placed together with a cross on top of the marble lantern of Brunelleschi’s dome. The famous architect had died before being able to crown his masterpiece, but had left detailed plans for the lantern and copper ball, which Verrocchio was charged to execute. The project took three years, and the young Leonardo was able to observe every stage of it, and likely contributed to it as well.
¹⁵

It was a complex project, involving securing the lantern to withstand strong winds; precisely casting, shearing, and welding the copper ball’s many sections; and finally, hoisting the heavy ball and cross to the top of the lantern by using special hoisting devices, designed by Brunelleschi himself. The welding alone was a major feat of science and engineering, because there were no welding torches in the fifteenth century. Small welds could be executed at the forge, but the copper ball was so big that the only way to weld it with a hot flame at precise points was to use concave mirrors to “burn” a weld (a technique that had been known since antiquity). Manufacturing such concave mirrors required considerable knowledge of geometrical optics and very precise grinding equipment. This explains Leonardo’s frequent studies of the geometry of “fire mirrors,” as he called them, in his early drawings.
¹⁶
They later led him to formulate sophisticated theories of optics and perspective.

The project was finally completed in 1471. Contemporary chroniclers recorded that on May 27 of that year a large crowd gathered in front of the Duomo to watch the hoisting of the great gilded ball, perfectly smooth and shining, to the top of the marble lantern, where, after a fanfare of trumpets, it was secured to the plinth to the sounds of the “Te Deum.” It was a spectacle that Leonardo never forgot. Forty-five years later, when he was over sixty and working on the design of a large parabolic mirror in Rome, he wrote in his Notebook as a reminder to himself, “Remember how we welded together the ball of Santa Maria del Fiore!”
¹⁷

Toward the end of Leonardo’s apprenticeship, Verrocchio was working on a picture of the
Baptism of Christ
(Fig. 3-2). Since the youth had shown great promise, the master let him paint parts of the background and one of the two angels. These portions of the painting, the first record we have of Leonardo as a painter, already show features of his distinctive style. In the background, we see wide, romantic hills, rocky cliffs, and water flowing from a pool in the far distance all the way to the foreground, where it forms small waves rippling around the legs of Christ. Close inspection of this flow of water in the original painting, now in the Uffizi Gallery, reveals several tiny waterfalls and turbulences of the kind that fascinated Leonardo throughout his life.

Figure 3-2: Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci,
Baptism of Christ,
c. 1476, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Equally striking is the originality of Leonardo’s angel. Its grace and beauty are far superior to those of Verrocchio’s, which the master could not fail to notice. “This was the reason,” reports Vasari, “why Andrea would never touch colors again; he was so ashamed that a boy understood their use better than he did.” Indeed, it seems that from that time on, Verrocchio concentrated on sculpture, and left the execution of paintings to his senior assistants.
¹⁸

YOUNG MASTER PAINTER AND INVENTOR

At the age of twenty, Leonardo was recognized as a master painter, and in 1472 he was admitted to the guild of painters known as Compagnia di San Luca. Curiously, the company was included in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, which was based at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. For Leonardo, this was the beginning of a long association with the hospital. For many years he used the guild as a bank for his savings, and it was at Santa Maria Nuova that he found his first opportunities to perform anatomical dissections.

The young Leonardo was already familiar with the dissection of muscles; close to Verrocchio’s workshop was the
bottega
of the brothers Pollaiolo, whose paintings were known for their vivid rendering of muscular bodies. They had derived their knowledge of muscles from frequent dissections, which Leonardo must have watched closely during his apprenticeship. A few years later, he used his acute knowledge of the musculature of the neck and shoulder to give the figure of the ascetic
Saint Jerome
a powerful expression of pain and sorrow.

After his acceptance into the painters’ guild, Leonardo remained in Verrocchio’s workshop for another five years, but he was now employed as a collaborator of the master rather than an assistant. This was not unusual; the large number of commissions received by Verrocchio encouraged his apprentices to continue working with him after they had become masters.

There was probably another good reason for Leonardo to stay on. During his apprenticeship, he had become familiar with a wide variety of mechanical and optical devices, and he was now increasingly experimenting with improvements of existing machines as well as the invention of new ones. In the
bottega
, his curious and creative mind would have found endless challenges as new commissions kept coming in. He also had at his disposal all the necessary instruments, equipment, and raw materials for his mechanical and optical experiments. As he embarked on his dual career of painter and inventor, Verrocchio’s
bottega
continued to be an ideal working environment.

In addition to his designs of concave mirrors, Leonardo’s early optical inventions included new ways of controlling light, most likely in connection with stage design. “How to make a great light,” he writes next to a sketch of light going through a convex lens; elsewhere he draws “a lamp that makes a beautiful and great light” (a candle in a box equipped with a lens).
¹⁹
On a sheet of the Codex Atlanticus from that period there is a sketch of a machine “for generating a big voice,” and on other sheets drawings of various lanterns, one of them with the notation “put above the stars”—all of them evidently meant for theatrical settings.
²⁰