Henry S. Gillette

“ With his own friends discouraged, the Signoria hostile, and the friends of Michelangelo triumphant, Leonardo went back to Fiesole. He went back with his secret dream of flight. The world would soon forget the Battle of Anghiari—but the conquest of the air, if he could achieve it, would live forever. ”

“ People flung their scraps out of the window and at night in the poorly lit streets could be heard the scurrying of rats. Leonardo stopped, thinking half aloud:
“Two levels. Streets running one above the other—one 45 for pedestrians and one for carts and horses. Yes, and cutting through the whole city a system of canals to carry the city’s waste to a river or to the sea. Why not even ten cities of, say, five thousand houses in each—say, no more than thirty thousand people to a city?” ”

“ At any rate, Leonardo and Pacioli left Venice that same spring and arrived in Florence in April of 1500. One of the purposes of Leonardo’s journey was to visit his father who was now living on Via Ghibellina with his fourth wife. Leonardo was now forty-eight. Still tall and straight with the strength of his youth, his face prematurely aged and his hair thinning back from his high forehead, Leonardo was more than ever an outstanding looking man. He still scorned fashionable clothes and dressed according to his own comfort which made him even more noticeable among the crowd. ”

“ At any rate, during these months Leonardo was walking the streets of Florence, wandering into shops and mills, making careful observations of all the various methods of manufacturing. The more he saw, the more he thought to himself that one man could do the work of many—if only he had the proper machine. He even made drawings of laborers with picks and shovels to see if he could determine by mathematics better ways to swing and hold the tools. ”

“ Leonardo felt his fifty-four years that spring day in 1506. The bitterness of his failures and the frustration of his dreams added considerably to the weight of his years. All morning he had wasted in argument with Soderini and the Signoria. If it had not been for the letter from Charles d’Amboise, Viceroy of the King of France for Milan, he would have felt like a beggar. Charles d’Amboise had been appointed military governor of Milan by Louis XII ever since the French had conquered that city and captured Duke Ludovico Sforza. ”

“ In the inn where he and Atalante stayed, Leonardo overheard the current political rumors. All around him was talk of the war. Girolamo Riario was again in the field, and Ludovico’s ally, Alfonso of Calabria, had just been defeated by the Venetians in a bloody battle at Campo Morto.
Leonardo reread the letter he had written setting forth his own accomplishments and decided that now was the time to present himself as a military engineer. He would minimize the bronze monument, his music, and his painting, and instead, he would stress his skills in the inventions of war. ”

“ Thus Leonardo drifted farther and farther away from his painting. This, in itself, caused people to talk in the papal city. For he had earned fame as a painter, but his passion for science was regarded as strange and whimsical. Occasionally, he did receive a small commission from the workshop of Raphael, yet these were like the crumbs from a rich man’s table. ”

“ Florence and Pisa were in bitter rivalry, and their struggle had assumed the proportions of a major war. The Florentine army was now practically at the gates of Pisa. Niccolò Machiavelli urged the Signoria to enlist the help of Leonardo da Vinci, who might be able to think of an immediate plan for destroying Pisa and her army. Never one to think in terms of an immediate battle or a temporary success, Leonardo put forth a daring and sweeping plan that would forever reduce the power of Pisa. ”

“ In reality, Leonardo’s patron, Giuliano de’ Medici was a weak man. He played at being a patron but, like his brother the Pope, he lacked the force and decision of his famous father Lorenzo. Nevertheless, he did give Leonardo one small commission for a picture. Immediately Leonardo, excited by the exotic plants in the Vatican gardens, commenced to experiment with them to find a resin to make a varnish with which to cover the future painting. Pope Leo made fun of him exclaiming, to the delight of his court, “This man will never get anything done, he thinks of the end before the beginning.” ”

“ Although the young Raphael, who owed so much to 132 the example of Leonardo, now rode through the streets as a wealthy nobleman, Leonardo himself received no great commissions. While Pope Leo was indulgent of his brother’s whims he himself had no use for this tall, serious old man who roamed the shaded walks of the Vatican poking at the strange plants in the botanical garden or making drawings of the foreign animals in the private zoo. ”

“ Of them, Leonardo wrote in his notes: “They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned, not with their own labors, but by those of others, and they will not even allow me my own. And if they despise me who am an inventor, how much more blame be given to themselves, who are not inventors but trumpeters and reciters of the work of others?”
In accepting the commission to paint the altarpiece, Leonardo hoped to attract attention to himself. Perhaps then Lorenzo might welcome him to his court and grant him patronage. ”

“ A man might be a very fine artist, engineer, or philosopher, but unless he managed to bring his work to the attention of the ruler of one of the cities, he was likely to remain in obscurity. Thus it was that Piero da Vinci, knowing that his son would have to have a powerful patron if he was to succeed at all, brought Leonardo to Florence. ”

“ The birds flying in the currents of air and the fish swimming in the flow of water seemed very similar to him. He had already designed various instruments to tell him about the direction of wind and its velocity, and he had also commenced to analyze the wing structure of birds and bats. To soar through the air like a bird was an ancient dream of man, yet for Leonardo it had become a passion. ”

“ Embittered, Trivulzio had become a stubborn enemy of Ludovico from that time on, serving under any banner that marched against the house of Sforza. A stocky, square-faced man, his body was covered with the scars of many battles. He had been fighting with the French ever since the time Ludovico had betrayed Charles VIII. Trivulzio had seen the great monument that Leonardo had modeled and, although it was riddled by French arrows and damaged by wind and rain, the Marshal was impressed and wished for a similar memorial to himself. ”

“ In May of 1502, after having presented himself to Cesare Borgia in Rome, Leonardo began his hectic travels through Tuscany and Umbria. He was to inspect the fortresses and cities of Cesare’s new conquests there, and to make whatever recommendations he felt necessary for their improvements. Arriving in Piombino, he at once set down a project for draining the marshes and reclaiming the land. Also, while he was here, he spent hours by the sea watching the waves curl in from the Adriatic and studying the crash of water over the beaches. ”

“ A city-state was much more than a city—it was almost a kingdom in itself. Each had its own army, and very often there were large-scale wars between such city-states as Milan, Naples, Rome, Venice—and of course Florence. The Italians of those days considered themselves citizens—not of Italy as a whole—but of their particular cities ”

“ As Leonardo’s work progressed, his admiration for the complexity of the human body grew. Many times in the middle of explaining a section of anatomy he inserted a sentence or two of wonder or praise at the magnificent creation that is the human being. Indeed, these drawings and notes represent the sum of many, many dissections; moreover, Leonardo had to work under conditions that placed many obstacles in his path—the crude lights and instruments, the difficulties of obtaining corpses and, above all, the opposition of the 127 superstitious and ignorant. ”

“ But Leonardo’s conception of the evolution of the earth was mistaken in one respect. He regarded the earth as organic—living—and the flow of water he believed to be like the flow of blood in man. Indeed, according to Leonardo, all living creatures were reflections of a living, breathing earth. It was only when he again turned his eyes inquiringly toward the moon and the laws of the universe that he began to realize his error.
It had been the idea that the earth was the center of 105 the universe which supported Leonardo’s theory of an organic earth. ”

“ Then, because Leonardo’s inventions were so extraordinary, he began to give away the secrets of their mechanisms to Johannes the mirror-maker, another German, who had been replaced by Leonardo in the favors of Giuliano. This naturally made Johannes jealous of Leonardo. Georg gossiped, too, and told stories about the old, eccentric man who lived like a miser in the midst of all the luxury and who drew crazy circles on pages of paper. ”

“ The thick, high walls and round towers and especially the graceful, lacy spires of the king’s residence brought back much that he had known in his native land. The gardens had been planted by Italians—there were orange trees and even a mulberry tree from his beloved plains of Lombardy. The king’s residence and chapel had been constructed and the decorations carved in stone by Italian artisans. Leonardo could stop and talk in his native tongue with many of the men employed by the king. Since the time of Charles VIII, the French had brought in the latest Renaissance styles from Italy. ”

“ As a side result of his experiments in light, Leonardo had put a glass cylinder in the middle of a larger glass globe. A wick in olive oil was placed in the cylinder and the outside globe was then filled with water. The result was a bright, steady light magnified by the water in the globe.
He sat down by the small fire and arranged his papers in front of him. Then, with a glance at his lamp, he picked up his goose-quill pen and wrote, “No substance can be comprehended without light and shade; light and shade are caused by light.” ”

“ In addition, Leonardo returned to his studies of anatomy and comparative anatomy. For this latter he made many beautiful drawings of the legs of animals as compared to those of man. With them, Leonardo tried to indicate man’s place in the natural order of the world. He pointed out that our physical bodies are basically the same as those of animals, and that the muscular and organic differences are those of function only. For example, bird and man have the same chest muscles, called the pectoralis. But the bird, in order to fly, has developed these into powerful instruments of motion. ”

“ He always avoided arguments and competition when he could. When he walked through the marketplace and came upon the caged birds, he would buy them—just to set them free. Indeed, his love of animals had become so great that he no longer ate meat.
During these years in Verrochio’s service, Leonardo grew in stature as an artist and rapidly developed into a scientist of promise. He amazed his master when he painted an angel in an altarpiece that had been assigned to Verrochio. ”

“ Mathematician, anatomist, botanist, astronomer and geologist form only part of the long list of his accomplishments and give the clue to the man who considered all the natural world within his province of study. Because of the universality of Leonardo’s scientific thought he has been frequently mentioned as the forerunner of such men as Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, James Watt, Francis Bacon and William Harvey. ”

“ He proposed to write a treatise on the nature of birds’ flight, and, with his usual thoroughness, he began to weigh, dissect, and reconstruct various types of birds and their wing structure. He realized that one of the main difficulties of gliding was maintaining balance, or, more accurately, maintaining the center of gravity. From previous observations Leonardo had noted that man is capable of making the same motions that a bird does. He had also measured the strength of a man’s legs and had calculated that man has twice the power in his leg muscles that he needs for standing. ”

“ Above all Leonardo was attracted to the function of the muscles, especially those in the arms and legs. So faithfully, in fact, did he record the origin and insertion of all the various muscles that these drawings can be used as anatomical models today. Moreover, he believed that a good drawing was worth pages of words describing human anatomy. The muscles were rendered as cords so as to better understand their function. He described this function as one of pulling instead of pushing and he noted that for every muscle there is an opposing muscle. When one contracts the other expands. ”

“ Now, for the first time in his life, Leonardo knew financial security. With the income from the vineyard, and in the peace of his estate, he was left free to follow his own researches. He took no notice that his “peace” was surrounded by the threat of war. Indeed, he remained aloof from politics and court intrigues as much as was possible for a man living in the midst of such chaotic times.
Leonardo now had the opportunity to follow up an early interest—the study of plants. He made many beautiful drawings; no plant was too small to catch his eye. His notes on botany began to grow. ”