Leonardo Da Vinci - Chapter II

Top Left: comparative drawings of the male and female genitalia.
Others : anatomical studies of the developing foetus.

Chapter II

When he writes that he is an uomo senza lettere, he is sug­gesting that he did not have a formal education, that he did not learn either Latin or Greek, or even the literary Italian of the times: in a word, that he is self-taught. And so, this genius with a universal mind, whose intelligence wished to capture and tap every source, never had the humanist forma­tion, which during the Renaissance, distinguished the well bred from the common man.

He was an insatiable reader who exhaustively delved into the libraries of all of his friends. The books he bought or borrowed were destined for the purpose of discovering the universe. He thought that any book not read, and any experience not fully understood, left a hole in the fabric of the fundamental being.

It seems as though tradition never weighed him down nor slowed his pace, nor inhibited him in his flight towards the ex­ploration of curiosities and realisations. He did not share the respect for "the Ancients" that sometimes paralysed the human­ists religiously attached to antiquity.

He was only thirty years old when he introduced himself to Ludovico the Moor, the regent of the kingdom of Milan, in a famous letter where he offered him his secrets. He expressed himself as though he had in his power a method through which he could resolve all the problems that outside circumstances or his own will could pose to him.

Self-taught, with meagre means at his disposal, he explored the universe. Through the use of analogies and correspondences, he developed a general theory of the world — solid, powerful, coherent. He cities Aristotle: "Man deserves merit or blame only in consideration of what is in his power to do or not to do." It is however from 1490 as far as can be seen, that Leonardo tries to assimilate and rigorously inventory (after what he called "my mathematical principles"): the totality of human knowledge; restructuring it, correcting it when needed, and stretching it if possible. He was always thinking about the universe, and he had fixed his sights on this obstinate rigour that considers itself the most demanding of all. This rigour established, a positive liberty becomes possible, while apparent liberty is only to be able to obey each impulse of chance; the more we enjoy, the more we are tied up around the same point, just as the cork bobbing on the sea which nothing holds, which is attracted by everything, and which all the forces of the universes fight over and destroy. The entire operation of this master Leonardo is uniquely deduced from his great work; as if a particular being had no relation to

From these thousands of sketches and notes we get the ex­traordinary feeling of a staggering display of sparks exploding from some fantastic creation. Leonardo is revealed as obsessed

He writes: "One cannot possess either a lesser or greater do­main than the domain of oneself." This Apollo ravishes us to the utmost of ourselves. What is more seductive than a god who rejects mystery, who does not build his power on the disquiet of our senses, who does not address his prestige to the darkest, to the most vulnerable, the most sinister part of ourselves; who forces us to agree and not to bend; and for whom the miracle is to make himself clear; the depth, a perspective well-defined? Is there a better mark of an authentic and legitimate power than not to practice under a veil? Never was there for Dionysius a more deliberated enemy, nor one so pure, nor armed with so much light, than this hero less preoccupied with bending and breaking monsters than with considering their motives; disdainful of piercing them with arrows so much as harassing them with ques­tions; their superior more than their conqueror, he wished to understand them rather than to triumph over them — almost to the point of reproducing them; and as soon as he got hold of their principles he could very well abandon them, derisively reducing them to the humble condition of particular cases and explicable paradoxes.

He was also a visionary who was not afraid to venture be­yond the limits of experience and reason. Who can listen to him dreaming of a prehistoric era wherein huge fish lived in oceans covering the earth, and perceive the extent to which the naturalist and the poet reciprocated information? In the Codex Atlantica can be found an assortment of different, extraordinary texts where Leonardo appears under the guise, new and strange, of a visionary poet, an adventure novelist, capable of describing the destruction of the earth by a universal deluge with such tragic

Here is the memory he records of having explored a cave, probably in the Apennines. In this extraordinary account, so characteristic of Leonardo, one finds intertwined the art of evoking an image and his passion for earthly enigmas.

"Driven by an ardent desire, anxious to see the varied and strange abundance of forms that artful nature creates, having gone a cer­tain distance between the overhanging rocks, I arrived at the en­trance of a huge cavern and stopping for a moment, struck with stupor since I did not know of its existence; back arching, the left hand embracing my knee while with the right shading my furrowed eyebrows, I leaned from side to side, to see if I could perceive anything inside, against the intensity of the darkness. After staying in this position for sometime, two emotions sud­denly swelled in me — fear and desire — fear of this menacing dark cavern, desire to see what sort of marvel it was hiding."

Leonardo made himself more admirable from research to re­search, training his thoughts, developing his acts. He used one or the other hand for his most precise designs; he stripped them down and reassembled them, he tightened the connections of his will with his powers, pushing his reasoning in the art further and preserving his elegance.

He had other forms of precious knowledge in addition to the knowledge obtained from books: intuitive knowledge and, knowledge of nature that only a man closely related to the ele­ments, informed by them in the physical nature of his own body could possess. A good horseman, he gladly visited the stables of the Duke of Sforza or those of the pope, thoroughly noting down in his notebooks the particularities of the animals he fa­voured, he demonstrated by these notes what an intimate un­derstanding of the animal he possessed. His sketches of horses are of stupefying anatomical exactitude and specially attest to an extraordinary understanding of the soul of the horse, of its

This failure of Leonardo is the consequence of what he mis­takenly imagined: that the impossible is possible in the absolute! His intentions and his imagination took giant strides; unfortu­nately, technique did not follow at the same pace.

Leonardo wanted to surpass the possibilities of his time. One would think that he wished to be independent of time, as of space, to escape from the constraints of dimensions, without worrying about what is real and what the world in which he lived demanded. This flight of the visionary, constantly unsatisfied, who aspired to perfection, led him to a series of well-known fail­ures that trail his life.

Michelangelo had perhaps well understood this unlucky inno­vator the day he reproached him for not knowing how to finish.

Whenever he began to paint, it seemed that Leonardo trembled, and he never finished any of the works he commenced because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.

Giorgio Vasari said the following:

Clearly it was because of his profound knowledge of painting that Leonardo started so many things without finishing them; for he was convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination.

When he travelled with the cumbersome luggage of The Virgin

We see a picture of the world as if here and there reducing itself into intelligible elements. At times our senses suffice, at other times, even though the most ingenious methods are in­volved, some gaps are left. The attempts remain blank. It is here the kingdom of our hero. He had an extraordinary sense of symmetry that made a problem of everything for him. The productivity of his mind slipped into any small crack of under­standing. He was like a physical hypothesis. He would have to be invented, but he existed. The universal man can now be imag­ined. A Leonardo da Vinci may exist in our minds. In a very clear consciousness the memory and phenomenon find them­selves so linked, expected, answered; the past so well used; the new so quickly compensated; the state of total relation so clearly won over that nothing seems able to start, nothing to end, in the heart of this almost pure activity.

The methods of his mind were such that in everything he came back to the origins, the principle; the experience and the knowledge acquired by others did not satisfy him. As it is, any­thing can become better. He questioned workmen and settled himself in their workshops, examining their tools, the way they used them, and he took those tools in his own hands, made the gestures of the workmen, and at the same time thought of the

Leonardo had the overwhelming impulses of the genius, he also patiently and carefully followed the methods of an explorer of knowledge that, following him, leave everything ironed out, checked, in place, before going any further. The orderly manner in which he organised his conquests is strict and meticulous; whether he galloped or plodded, it was with the same tenacious passion. Leonardo wrote that stupidity was a daughter of impa­tience. He worked at a terrific pace, but without haste. Always ready to wait, to postpone; it took him longer to paint the Mona Lisa than for Raphael to decorate the Vatican. What he con­ceived in a flash, he invariably postponed in the execution; he rarely missed reconsidering or modifying his own projects, he untiringly went over the series of means and causes; if he wanted to cut a piece of cloth, he began by inventing new scissors, a new alloy of metal for the scissors he wished to make. If he wanted to paint a smile he wanted to know the muscles that permit the smile. When Ludovico the Moor ordered the equestrian statue, Leonardo started to write a treatise on the horse and then one on the different ways to melt bronze.

His capacity to work was frightening. An ordinary man would labour enormously if only he had to copy so many sketches, verify so many calculations, put up so many apparatus, accu­mulate so many notes. And yet many of his notes, calculations, designs and even his paintings have disappeared. He retained all the appetites of adolescence with a robust hunger that sits at the

Leonardo's sharpness of vision was prodigious, superhuman; the analysis of his sketches where one sees the course of water, the beating of wings proves it: Leonardo could see details that the human eye would capture only several centuries later, with the invention of slow motion cinema.

At one time or another, we have all played at throwing stones in water. Who among us has been able to observe that two peb­bles thrown away from each other on a flat surface of water make two series of concentric circles which while widening meet and mix with one another without breaking — and be surprised and to come to a conclusion about the reasons for it? Leonardo observed that the water that seems to move, in reality is im­mobile; those are, he said, "some kind of little cuts or marks which, opening and closing, suddenly imprint a certain reaction on it which is more a vibration than a movement". If the series of circles do not break when crossing each other "it is because water is homogenous in all its particles and this sort of vibration is transmitted to its particles, without the water itself moving". And so having defined the principle of waves, Leonardo foresaw that sound and light spread in the air in the same way. Does it matter if afterward he was led astray? Nature was his labora­tory; he identified his most perfect instrument of investigation. Open your eyes he said. Suffice it to see well to understand. He studied the holes in stones, gravel that rolls in rivers, lime and mud. From shells, from remains of algae that he found in moun­tain sediment he concluded that long ago oceans covered the globe. He arrived at the most amazing conclusions with bits of candles, the eye of a needle, a funnel, a bucket, a metal box. He used a glass globe filled with water as a magnifying lens. It is while passing a sheet of paper pierced with a pinhole in front of the surface of a white wall that he defined the trajectory of light rays. An ember shaken in the dark looks as though it is tracing

If all Leonardo's mental faculties were greatly developed or if his other activities appeared considerable in every field, the man becomes more and more difficult to grasp and has a tendency to escape from our effort. From one extremity of this mental outspread to another there are such distances that we have never gone! To us, the thread linking this mixture is missing. One must therefore linger, become familiar with, and overcome the obsta­cles which force themselves on our imagination, in this meeting of heterogeneous elements.

He established a relation between the movements of the eye, the mind and sunrays. Nothing is born, he thought, where nothing exists "neither sensitive fibre nor rational life". His con­ception of the human machine influenced his engineering works and vice-versa; he argued botany with the vocabulary of an em­bryologist while approaching anatomy as a geographer.

He tried hard to embrace certain truths and certitudes. To bring to the humanly visible the infinitely great and the infinitely small he fabricated microscopes, telescopes and mirrors to cap­ture reflections, stray light rays and evasive images. He tried to stretch his senses by all sorts of instruments of investigation, which would multiply his faculties to see and touch, which would bring the universe closer to his eyes and hands. He did not seem like everyone else, to have to attach himself to a nation, to a tradition, to a group practicing the same art, to be understood. He was made to be the despair of the modern man who from adolescence is plugged into a speciality in which it is believed he must become superior because he is shut in it. He was the master of faces, anatomies, and machines He knew of what a smile is

Leonardo intensely disliked the pretence of priests who "pro­pose words, amass great wealth and give away paradise". "Many are those", he wrote, "who swindle and simulate miracles, tricking the insane multitude; and if no one denounces their lies they would impose them on everybody". The flagrant anticlericalism of Leonardo does not mean that he was an atheist. Leonardo believed in God — in a God not much Christian; he found him in the miraculous beauty of life, in the harmonious movement of the planets, in the wise alignment of muscles and nerves inside the body, in the inexpressible masterpiece that is the soul. He would almost be jealous of the Creator he calls primo motore: the inventor of all seems to him a better architect and mechanic that he will never be. "0 admirable necessity!" he cried, talking about the eye. "0 powerful action! What mind will ever be able to pen­etrate your nature? What language will know how to express this marvel? Probably none! It is here that human discourse turns towards the contemplation of the divine."

Leonardo studied anatomy from his first years as an appren­tice; his interest in "the art of building" did not bring him to the discovery of this science but instead, brought him into it; they both cement and use one another; and the branches of knowl­edge criss-cross and overlap each other, to prop each other up. Other sectors of his activity benefitted from what he acquired from these studies. Leonardo always put man at the centre of

Leonardo, this indefatigable seeker, this prodigious distrib­utor of treasure was elusive. Everywhere present, everywhere lively, active at the centre of each thing, identifying himself with the source of everything. He knew his power. He liked to be challenged, to be utilised. And also, he liked to serve. "May I be deprived of the faculty to act, before being tired of serving," he repeats over and over again. "I would rather lack movement than usefulness, rather death than weariness. I am never tired of being useful". If he found that nature is an admirable success, he was eager to get his hands on the work of man, this imperfection. "For the good of others, I will never do enough. Nature made me so".

One revelatory sentence can be read in the Codex Atlantica, written by Leonardo near the end of his life: "While I thought that I was learning to live, I have been learning to die". This is one of those phrases that can be turned inside out, questioning its multiple meanings He has left, about death, some lines which perhaps came back to haunt him at the moment he was leaving everything. "See: one hopes and wishes to go back to one's birth­place — just as the moths fly toward the light. And the one who always happily expects new months and new years — and even if the time to which he aspires finally arrives, he will always find that this time comes too late — that one does not know that his desire contains the seeds of his own death". "But this nostalgic

Musing on pain — moral pain, not physical pain — he said: "The greater an individual, the greater his capacity for suffering grows." Suffering also had a place in his material and spiritual universe; he did not cherish it, but he did not try to avoid it either. He would sometimes even sigh, feeling discouraged, and ask himself: "Lionardo perche tanto penate?" "My poor Leonardo, why did you try so hard?" Why in fact did he try so hard? Why did he want to amass for himself alone all the knowledge, which if divided, would make the wealth of specialists? Why had he always refused to acknowledge that the finite governs the life of men and that the infinite is the domain of metaphysics and, that one should not mix it with practical matters, at the risk of

"What is the soul?" This is one small question which theolo­gians and philosophers have had such difficulty to answer since man has begun to think. Leonardo slides it into the middle of a series of interrogations curiously chaotic; in appearance without any link between them. It is the discovery and the knowledge of the soul that he was pursuing, because he knew without a doubt that there resides the centre of everything, the seat of circular ir­radiation, the home of the rays of light, the place where they all converge and from where they diverge.