Fritjof Capra (3 page)

Like all true scientists, Leonardo based his science on systematic observation. Hence his starting point is the human eye. His careful investigations of the anatomy of the eye and the origin of vision were unparalleled in his time. He paid particular attention to the connections between the eye and the brain, which he demonstrated in a series of beautiful drawings of the human skull. Using brilliant anatomical dissections, Leonardo displayed for the first time the complete path of vision through the pupil and lens to the optic nerve, and all the way to a specific cavity in the brain, known to neurologists today as the third cerebral ventricle.
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This is where he located the “seat of the soul,” where all sense impressions meet. Leonardo’s concept of the soul comes very close to what cognitive scientists today call “cognition,” the process of knowing.
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His theory of how sensory impulses travel along the nerves from the sense organs to the brain is so ingenious that I doubt if neuroscientists today could conceive of anything better, were they given the restrictions of having to work without any knowledge of electromagnetism, biochemistry, and microbiology.

Leonardo saw his discoveries in optics and the physiology of vision as the grounding of his science of painting, beginning with the science of perspective, the outstanding innovation of Renaissance art. “Painting is based on perspective,” he explains, “and perspective is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.”
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From perspective, he moved on to explore the geometry of light rays (known today as geometrical optics), the effects of light falling on spheres and cylinders, the nature of shadow and of contrasts, and the juxtaposition of colors.

These systematic studies, illustrated in long series of intricate drawings, were the scientific basis of Leonardo’s extraordinary artistic ability to understand and render the most subtle visual complexities. Most renowned was his invention and mastery of a special art of shading—a melting of shades, known as sfumato—which delicately blurs the outlines of bodies. In the words of art historian Daniel Arasse,

The supreme expression of the science of painting and of its divine character, Leonardo’s
sfumato
was the power behind the poetry of his paintings and the mystery that seems to emanate from them.
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Eventually, these sophisticated studies of the effects of light and shade led Leonardo to thoroughly investigate the very nature of light. With only the most rudimentary instruments, he used his phenomenal powers of observation, his ability to recognize similarities of patterns, and the great intuitive understanding of light he had acquired as a painter to formulate concepts that were diametrically opposed to the ideas of his contemporaries, but were almost identical to those Christian Huygens would propose two hundred years later in his famous wave theory of light.
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THE LIVING FORMS OF NATURE

Leonardo’s studies of living forms began with their appearance to his painter’s eye, and then proceeded to detailed investigations of their intrinsic nature. In the macrocosm, the main themes of his science were the movements of water and air, the geological forms and transformations of the Earth, and the botanical diversity and growth patterns of plants. In the microcosm, his main focus was on the human body—its beauty and proportions, the mechanics of its movements, and how it compared to other animal bodies in motion, in particular the flight of birds.

The science of living forms, for Leonardo, is a science of movement and transformation, whether he studies mountains, rivers, plants, or the human body. To understand the human form means to understand the body in motion. Leonardo demonstrated in countless elaborate and beautiful drawings how nerves, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints work together to move the limbs; how limbs and facial expressions perform gestures and actions.

As always, Leonardo used the insights he gained from this extensive research in his paintings. In the words of Daniel Arasse,

From the early
Madonnas
, through the portraits, to
St. John the Baptist
, Leonardo caught the figure in motion. The immediate and exceptional impact of
The Last Supper
was largely due to the fact that Leonardo replaced the traditional arrangement with a rhythmical composition that considerably changed the very idea of the subject.
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As a painter, Leonardo felt that he should use gestures to portray the frames of mind and emotions that provoked them. He asserted that, in the painting of a human figure, the most important task was to “express in gesture the passion of its soul.”
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Indeed, to portray the body’s expression of the human spirit was the artist’s highest aspiration, in Leonardo’s view. And it was one in which he himself excelled, as the paintings of his mature period attest. As art historian Irma Richter explains in the introductory comments to her classic selections from the Notebooks, for Leonardo, “the human body was an outward and visible expression of the soul; it was shaped by its spirit.”
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We shall see that this view of soul and spirit, unmarred by the mind-body split that René Descartes would introduce in the seventeenth century, is perfectly consistent with the conception of the “embodied mind” in today’s cognitive science.
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Figure I-1: The Mechanisms of the Arm, c. 1510, Anatomical Studies, folio 135v

Unlike Descartes, Leonardo never thought of the body as a machine, even though he was a brilliant engineer who designed countless machines and mechanical devices. He clearly recognized, and documented in superb renderings, that the anatomies of animals and humans involve mechanical functions (see Fig. I-1). “Nature cannot give movement to animals without mechanical instruments,” he explained.
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But that did not imply for him that living organisms were machines. It only implied that, in order to understand the movements of the animal body, he needed to explore the principles of mechanics, which he did for many years in a thorough and systematic way. He clearly understood that the means of the body’s movements were mechanical. But for Leonardo, their origin lay in the soul, the nature of which was not mechanical but spiritual.
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LEONARDO’S LEGACY

Leonardo did not pursue science and engineering to dominate nature, as Francis Bacon would advocate a century later. He had a deep respect for life, a special compassion for animals, and great awe and reverence for nature’s complexity and abundance. While a brilliant inventor and designer himself, he always thought that nature’s ingenuity was vastly superior to human design. He felt that we would be wise to respect nature and learn from her. It is an attitude that has reemerged today in the practice of ecological design.
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Leonardo’s synthesis of art and science is infused with a deep awareness of ecology and systems thinking. It is not surprising that he spoke with great disdain of the so-called “abbreviators,” the reductionists of his time:

The abbreviators of works do injury to knowledge and to love…. Of what value is he who, in order to abbreviate the parts of those things of which he professes to give complete knowledge, leaves out the greater part of the things of which the whole is composed?…Oh human stupidity!…You don’t see that you are falling into the same error as one who strips a tree of its adornment of branches full of leaves, intermingled with fragrant flowers or fruit, in order to demonstrate that the tree is good for making planks.
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This statement is revealing testimony of Leonardo’s way of thinking and is also ominously prophetic. Reducing the beauty of life to mechanical parts and valuing trees only for their lumber is an eerily accurate characterization of the mind-set that dominates our world today. In my view, this makes Leonardo’s legacy all the more relevant to our time.

Our sciences and technologies have become increasingly narrow in their focus, and we are unable to understand our multifaceted problems from an interdisciplinary perspective. We urgently need a science that honors and respects the unity of all life, that recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all natural phenomena, and reconnects us with the living earth. What we need today is exactly the kind of thinking and science Leonardo da Vinci anticipated and outlined five hundred years ago, at the height of the Renaissance and the dawn of the modern scientific age.

ONE

Infinite Grace

T
he earliest literary portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, and to me still the most moving, is that by the Tuscan painter and architect Giorgio Vasari in his classic book
Lives of the Artists
, published in 1550.
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Vasari was only eight years old when Leonardo died, but he gathered information about the master from many artists who had known him and remembered him well, most notably Leonardo’s close friend and disciple Francesco Melzi. An acquaintance of Leonardo, the surgeon and art collector Paolo Giovio, wrote a short eulogy, but it is unfinished and merely a page long.
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Vasari’s chapter, “Life of Leonardo da Vinci,” there fore, is as close as we can come to a contemporary account.

Besides being an accomplished painter and architect, Vasari was a keen collector of drawings by famous masters and of stories about them. The idea of writing a book on the history of Italian art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries was suggested to him by Giovio during a dinner party in Rome.
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The book became a bestseller when it was first published, and its wide popular appeal has endured over the centuries due to the author’s lively and colorful portraits, replete with charming anecdotes. Through a series of engaging stories about the lives of its greatest artists, Vasari’s
Lives
conveyed the revolutionary nature of the Italian Renaissance. In spite of many inaccuracies and a tendency toward referring to legends and idolizing, Vasari’s work remains the principal source for anyone interested in that period of European art and culture.

QUALITIES AND APPEARANCE

The opening paragraphs of Vasari’s chapter on Leonardo are an emphatic declaration of the master’s exceptional qualities and appearance:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with various remarkable qualities and talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art.

Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease. He possessed great strength and dexterity; he was a man of regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind; and his name became so famous that not only was he esteemed during his lifetime but his reputation endured and became even greater after his death.

Vasari’s effusive portrait of Leonardo may seem exaggerated, but his description is echoed in many contemporary accounts and references, in which Leonardo was often compared to the classical geniuses and sages of antiquity—Archimedes, Pythagoras, and most frequently Plato.
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Indeed, when Raphael, another great master of the Italian Renaissance, painted his fresco
The School of Athens
in the Vatican, he gave Plato the features of Leonardo, dressing him in a rose-colored toga (a color favored by Leonardo), with his index finger raised in a characteristic gesture well known from Leonardo’s paintings.

Figure 1-1: Andrea del Verrocchio,
David,
Museo Nazionale, Florence

Leonardo’s physical beauty in his youth and middle-aged years must have been exceptional, as it is mentioned by all his contemporary commentators, even though this was not customary at the time. An anonymous writer called the Anonimo Gaddiano exclaimed, “He was so unusual and many-sided that nature seemed to have produced a miracle in him, not only in the beauty of his person, but in the many gifts with which she endowed him and which he fully mastered.”
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Others marveled at the unique combination of physical strength and grace he seemed to embody. Many authors, including Vasari, referred to him with the ultimate epithet—
il divino
.

As a youth, Leonardo liked to dress flamboyantly. “He wore a rose-colored cloak,” the Anonimo Gaddiano tells us, “which came only to his knees, although at the time long vestments were the custom. His beard came to the middle of his breast and was well-combed and curled.”

As he grew older, Leonardo apparently dressed more conventionally, but his appearance was always elegant and refined. Paolo Giovio described him as “the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially pageantry.” Leonardo’s own description of the painter’s inherent refinement is revealing as well:

The painter sits in front of his work at great ease, well-dressed, and wielding a very light brush with delicate colors. He adorns himself with the clothes he fancies; his home is clean and filled with delightful pictures, and he is often accompanied by music or readers of various beautiful works.
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There exists no confirmed portrait of Leonardo as a young man, but legend has it that he was the model for several angels and other youthful figures portrayed by Renaissance artists. The most credible of them is the lovely adolescent
David
sculpted by Andrea del Verrocchio during the time Leonardo was his student (see Fig. 1-1). The slender figure, wavy hair, and strikingly handsome face certainly match the contemporary descriptions of the young Leonardo, and art historians have pointed out that several of the statue’s facial characteristics seem to foreshadow those in the well-known portraits of the old master.
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There are quite a few portraits of Leonardo as an older man, most of them idealizing him as a venerable sage.
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The most authentic is that which is considered the artist’s only existing self-portrait, a captivating, highly detailed drawing in red chalk that he made when he was about sixty, although he appears older than his age (see Fig. P-1 on p. xxii). The drawing is housed in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin and is known as the Turin self-portrait. Unfortunately, it has been severely affected by centuries of exposure to air and light. The paper is now covered with “fox marks” (rusty-brown spots caused by excessive moisture and subsequent accumulation of iron salts), and the drawing is rarely exhibited in public.

In spite of its poor condition, the Turin self-portrait, which has been reproduced in countless posters and books, exerts a powerful effect on the viewer. This is even more true if one is fortunate enough to spend some time with the original, viewing it from different angles and distances, revealing the portrait’s complex and subtle expressions. Leonardo drew this portrait at a time of personal uncertainty and discontent. He was well aware that the greater part of his life was behind him; his eyes had weakened and his health was failing. He was living in Rome at the time, where he was revered. But already he was beginning to become out of fashion as an artist, eclipsed by younger rivals like Raphael and Michelangelo, who were in their prime and were the favorites of the papal court.

In Leonardo’s self-portrait, this unhappy time is reflected in a line of disillusionment, or perhaps contempt, around the mouth. Yet, under the bushy brows and majestic forehead, his eyes—the “windows of the soul”—have preserved the quiet intensity of his gaze as well as a deep serenity. The resulting expression, to me, is that of a powerful, critical intellect, tempered by wisdom and compassion.

Over the years, the Turin self-portrait has become not only the iconic image of Leonardo, but the model for the archetypal portrait of the old sage in the centuries after him. “This great furrowed mountain of a face,” wrote art historian Kenneth Clark, “with its noble brow, cavernous eyes, and undulating foothills of beard is like the faces of all the great men of the nineteenth century as the camera has preserved them for us—Darwin, Tolstoy, Walt Whitman.”
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A quality that is not visible in Leonardo’s self-portrait but was always mentioned by his contemporaries was his kind and gentle nature, in the words of the duchess Isabella d’Este, “this air of sweetness and gentleness that is so characteristic of him.” “Leonardo’s disposition was so lovable that he commanded everyone’s affection,” Vasari writes. “He was so generous that he sheltered and fed all his friends, rich or poor.” He was also eloquent and charming in conversation. In fact, Vasari claimed he was so persuasive that he could “bend other people to his own will.”

Leonardo combined this gentle and charming disposition with great physical strength. In his younger years he was apparently quite an athlete, “most skillful in lifting weights,” as the Anonimo Gaddiano tells us, and an excellent horseman. According to Vasari, “he was physically so strong that he could withstand any violence; with his right hand he would bend the iron ring of a doorbell or a horseshoe as if they were lead.” Vasari may have exaggerated Leonardo’s strength (and we know that Leonardo was left-handed), but his athletic prowess seems to have been well known.

During his years in Milan, he entertained the court with fables, songs, and charming conversation. “He sang beautifully to his own accompaniment on the
lira
to the delight of the entire court,” we are told by Paolo Giovio. But Leonardo also pursued his scientific research with intense concentration and needed to escape frequently to spend long periods of time alone. “The painter or draftsman must be solitary,” he wrote in the
Treatise on Painting
, “and most of all when he is intent on those speculations and considerations which, continually appearing before the eyes, give material to the memory to be well stored.”
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These frequent withdrawals into periods of solitude, spent in contemplation and sustained observations of nature, likely contributed to the air of mystery that surrounded him.

CHARACTER TRAITS

Throughout his life, Leonardo displayed an air of serene self-confidence, which helped him overcome professional setbacks and disappointments with equanimity and allowed him to calmly pursue his research even during times of great political turbulence. He was well aware of his unique genius and skill, yet he never boasted about them. Nowhere in his Notebooks does he vaunt the originality of his inventions or discoveries, nor does he flaunt the superiority of his ideas, even as he explains how they differ from traditional beliefs. This lack of arrogance and ego was remarkable indeed.

Another quality that distinguished him was his passion for life and for all living things. He immersed himself in the study of living forms not only intellectually, but emotionally as well. He held a great awe and reverence for nature’s creativity, and felt particular compassion for animals. His love of horses was well known to his contemporaries, and can be seen in his drawings, in which he used his acute powers of observation to render the animals’ movements and “noble proportions” in exquisite detail. Vasari claimed that Leonardo always kept horses. Equally touching is Vasari’s famous story of Leonardo buying birds in the marketplace, so that he might set them free:

Often when he was walking past the places where birds were sold he would pay the price asked, take them from their cages, and let them fly off into the air, giving them back their lost freedom.

His love of animals was also the reason Leonardo became a vegetarian—something unheard-of in Italy during the Renaissance, and therefore widely noticed. Leonardo’s justification for his vegetarianism combines his firm moral stance with keen scientific observation. He argued that, unlike plants, animals are sensitive to pain because they are capable of movement, and he did not want to cause them pain and suffering by killing them for food:

Nature has ordained that living organisms with the power of movement should experience pain in order to preserve those parts which might diminish or be destroyed by movement. Living organisms without the power of movement do not have to strike against any opposing objects, so that pain is not necessary in plants, and hence when they are broken they do not feel pain as do animals.
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