The Lost Battles Read online

  The massive leather volume lies on a table in the Royal Library in Windsor Castle. Its huge folio cover is worn and reddened. When you open it up there is nothing—this is an empty book, an eviscerated tome. The drawings and written notes it once held have in modern times been carefully removed and each precisely catalogued sheet sealed in plastic to preserve the fragile blue and pink papers.

  When we speak of “Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks,” we are referring to actual, physical objects of fragile antiquity. This particular great album was assembled in Milan in the sixteenth century, found its way to Spain, and ended up by the end of the seventeenth century (by a mysterious route) in the British Royal Collection. It contained a raw collection of Leonardo’s notes assembled after his death from papers he left to his pupil and friend the Milanese nobleman Francesco Melzi; another vast collection assembled in the same way is the Codex Atlanticus in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Often “Leonardo’s notebooks” means these posthumous collections of diverse sheets and fragments. But sometimes “notebook” means a notebook that Leonardo used as such and that survives as it looked when he owned it—from the novel-sized Manuscript B in the Institut de France in Paris to the pocket-sized Codex Forster II in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Leonardo’s notebooks contain everything from lists of books and clothes, instructions to young painters, drafts of letters, and household accounts to drawings of grotesque faces, maps of Italy, and science fiction stories. They are the direct, unedited transcription of one person’s thoughts: the mind of Leonardo da Vinci moves in his notebooks from one interest to another, one level of reality to another—the most refined philosophical questions appear side by side with the most prosaic matters. Many of his sheets contain a diversity of themes and speculations, and when a written note appears beside a drawing it does not necessarily mean the two are directly connected. A diatribe against cannibals might be next to a drawing of the human heart. Leonardo’s words and images together—the words in a reversed script to be read with the aid of a mirror—constitute a unique form of art, as well as an intellectual marvel. When Vasari wrote his Lives he reported on the astonishing notes he had seen in the house of Leonardo’s heir Melzi: “And he cherishes them and looks after them like relics, along with the portrait of the happily remembered Leonardo, and to those who read these writings, it appears impossible, that that divine spirit reasoned so well of art, and of the muscles, and the nerves, and the veins; and with such diligence of all things.”

  The wonder that Leonardo’s notes inspire has not diminished in five hundred years. From being pure enigma, however, they have been gradually transcribed, translated, and published. The first attempt to put them in order was by Melzi himself, who collated the master’s writings about art into a manuscript, Treatise on Painting, printed in French in 1651 and in English in the Napoleonic age. The trouble with such attempts to edit Leonardo’s notes into a coherent “book,” however, is that even though he did plan to write books, he never did in fact, and to remove the mess and chaos of his notebook pages is also to remove the dizzying energy and mystery of his mind’s convolutions. In 1883 Jean-Paul Richter transcribed and edited the first modern edition of Leonardo’s writings, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, which gets far closer to the sprawling diversity of Leonardo’s thought. Since then, his notebooks have been quarried not so much for artistic advice as for marvellous inventions and science. Here too there’s a danger of rationalising away their magic, for Leonardo got no closer to complete scientific theories than he did to finished works of art. It is the process, the journey, that fascinated him as both artist and scientist, and the pleasure of following his mind is that of exploring a meandering river’s unexpected course.

  Leonardo was a self-taught intellectual who took a big book collection with him wherever he went. The same notebook that contains the inventory of the clothing he put into storage when he left Florence in the autumn of 1504 also lists the books he left behind. They ranged from a volume about palmistry to tomes on architecture by Alberti and Leonardo’s friend Francesco di Giorgio Martini of Siena; works of natural science, including Ptolemy’s Cosmography, a work by the Arab astronomer Albumasar, and Pliny’s Natural History; and mathematical works, including basic arithmetic primers as well as Euclid. As with mathematics, so with literature; Leonardo’s curiosity was never held back by snobbery or pretension. Just as he collected school-level arithmetic books to help him with his calculations, he owned basic grammars and comic verse, including Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, yet also possessed three volumes of Livy’s History of Rome.

  Many of these books had been in Leonardo’s collection for years and are recorded on an earlier inventory; others were new. Who knows, perhaps he found some of the saints’ lives that are fairly numerous in this inventory lying around the monastery and quietly added them to his hoard. All his books were for use rather than ostentation. His own copy of one of the items listed in this inventory survives: the manuscript of Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s treatise on architecture in the Laurentian Library in Florence still has the annotations that Leonardo made in it. They show how, when he read, he made notes, singled out useful ideas and images. In fact he often transcribed what he read into his own manuscripts. The 1504 inventory shows he still had his copy of Valturio’s compendium of miltary inventions De re militari with him in Florence; in his notebooks from his time in Milan in the 1480s he’d copied out many of this book’s descriptions of ancient war machines and drawn his own improved versions of them. Reading was not a leisure activity for Leonardo—it was part of the process of creative thought.

  That shows in the maverick diversity of his reading materials. Fifteenth-century Florence had been the site of an intellectual revolution. “Humanism,” as later historians named it, was a movement to revive and properly translate the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors, and was at the heart of the Renaissance as a cultural movement. Yet Humanism was by definition led by an élite that wrote in Latin. Leonardo da Vinci did not belong to that élite. He did not have a university education. As an adult he taught himself some Latin—his primers are there in the inventory—but most of his reading was in Italian. And he did not in any way regulate it according to the hierarchies a Humanist might; classic literature had to share shelf space with trash. There are some key Florentine Humanist works in his 1504 list: Ficino’s interpretation of Plato and the Hermetic tradition, On the Immortality of the Soul; Matteo Palmieri’s On the Civil Life; and Alberti’s writings. There are translations of the classics too—including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the great source of ancient mythology in which Renaissance artists found stories like the fall of Icarus, the loves of Jupiter, and the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs.

  But the classics rub up against a wild diversity of themes and authors. Leonardo is as happy with a book on palmistry—De Chiromantia—as with the Philosophy of Albertus Magnus, as fascinated by Aesop’s Fables—of which he stored three editions, one in prose, one in verse, and one in French—as he is keen to study medical works such as Guidone on surgery and Montagnana on urine. He reads to learn about the world, and that means books about herbs and hydraulics, the works of Aristotle, and a strange attack on women called The Mangle. Books by his friends Francesco di Giorgio and Luca Pacioli bear witness that, far from brooding in solitude, he was a social person whose ideas were freely shared with others—as were his books. He lists a couple in his inventory that were on loan to others; notes scattered through his papers reveal him constantly borrowing and lending books. He always seemed to be looking for books by Archimedes, yet this reverence for an antique author does not make him a classically fixated Humanist. On the contrary, in one of his notes on Archimedes’ war machines he plucks this scientist from ancient Greece and dumps him in medieval Spain: “I have found in the Histories of the Spaniards that in their wars with the English was Archimedes of Syracuse who at that time resided in the company of Ecliderides, King of the Cirodastri …” This sounds l
ike something Leonardo might have read in a chivalric romance. Similarly, in the notebook that contains his book inventory, on a map of the Pisa region he mentions (in the summer of 1503) the “castles of Cascina” in an apparent reference to a popular romance called Amadis of Gaul. In some ways Leonardo’s reading of poetry and history was not that different from the trashy literacy of Don Quixote.

  Books were raw material for the notebooks he kept filling in such profusion. In the chest in 1504 he stored some of his own codices: a book of war machines with a skull on its cover and one of designs for the armature of the bronze horse. Other notebooks would have gone with him on his travels—including, obviously, Madrid Codex II. In these years he also was adding to the Codex Arundel and producing notes that ended up in the Codex Atlanticus in Milan and in the Royal Library, Windsor. In other words, when he lived at the monastery in Florence he was producing notes and drawings with giddy creativity. His varied collection of books helped stimulate a heightened fluency of thinking that might take him in one of a multitude of directions at any moment.

  If you look at his notes from around the year 1504 you get some inkling of the vast range of his interests at the time he took on the commission for the Great Council Hall. He was thinking about canals, water music, waves, mythology, artillery, fortifications, the wind, and, above all, pure mathematics. Any one of these topics might engross him for hours, for a day, while he worked on his notes in the rooms off the Great Cloister at Santa Maria Novella. To call these topics “distractions” is inaccurate, because the life his notebooks reveal is one long distraction.

  Even setting up his workshop provided days of fun. In February 1504 a labourer was paid for making a doorway to give Leonardo direct access to the Sala del Papa, where he was drawing his cartoon, from his camera, his living chamber. Surely this camera was also a study. Renaissance artists were fascinated by the image of the intellectual at work in a well-appointed study. Their paintings breathe a romance of books and paper. Fathers of the Church are portrayed at work in monastic spaces—that is, in settings that are idealised versions of the Florentine cloister where Leonardo based himself from October 1503 onwards. In Antonello da Messina’s painting Saint Jerome in His Study, the scholar works in a fabulously well-designed wooden cubicle inside a monastery. He has everything he needs: a lectern for reading, a comfortable circular chair, convenient shelves on which his books are propped open to the right page so he can consult them with minimum fuss, even a couple of potted plants. The Gothic cloister is airy around and above his open study, so he gets both privacy and space.

  In reality, Leonardo’s rooms at Santa Maria Novella centred on a semi-derelict old hall whose roof urgently needed to be mended—but he would certainly have striven to make his cloistered environment as comfortable as St. Jerome’s. In his writings on the painter’s beautiful life—he pictures himself working in fine clothes, gently touching a picture with the lightest of brushes, while musicians play for him or poetry is read out to him—Leonardo devises a living-machine as fine-tuned as Jerome’s: “a chest, where it is possible to raise and lower the work, so the work moves up and down and not the master; and every evening you can let down the work and shut it up on top, so that in the evening it may function as a chest which when closed makes a bench.” This is his personal device for making work easier, an artist’s version of the ergonomic furnishings that appear in Renaissance images of studies. One type of Florentine chair was even named after the prophet Savonarola, who was said to have invented it for use in his study at the convent of San Marco: woodcuts in his books portray him working with a lectern as cleverly designed as the one painted by Antonello. Leonardo, of course, was not a scholar: he was an artist who worked with ideas, and what he needed was to be able to draw efficiently. His chest on which the work could be lowered up and down was geared to his lifestyle.

  Leonardo lived up to the image of the Renaissance man, the universal mind, portrayed in paintings like Antonello’s. One of the greatest of these images is Botticelli’s St. Augustine in His Study, done on a wall in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence in about 1480. Tellingly, it dates from the moment when Leonardo was starting to reveal himself as a thinker as well as an artist. Botticelli was his contemporary and rival, and in his vision of St. Augustine’s study he portrays a life of the mind as free-ranging as the one Leonardo was embarking upon as he designed his Adoration of the Magi. In Botticelli’s painting, the Father of the Church is no narrow theologian. Behind his workstation with its intricate lectern that doubles as a chest of drawers (a nearly identical one appears in a woodcut of Savonarola’s study), Augustine has an astronomical globe and a clock, books in fine bindings—and, intriguingly, an opened codex covered with handwriting and geometrical drawings.

  It looks teasingly similar to some of Leonardo’s notebooks. At the very least this shows the idea of intellectual life to which Leonardo aspired: a world of mathematical speculation and mysterious “secrets” in great handwritten volumes. At a pinch, who knows—it could even be an allusion to his own first attempts at making notes (though no notebooks survive from his early years in Florence). Not only did he know Botticelli; this painting was commissioned by the Vespucci family for their local church, and Leonardo was friends with the Vespucci, including of course Agostino, who in the 1500s worked in the government Palace. “Il Vespuccio wishes to give me a book on geometry,” Leonardo reminded himself in a note.

  Leonardo may have had books like St. Augustine’s, but he was no saint. He did not live a life of ethereal asceticism. The rooms at Santa Maria Novella would not have been filled just with books but with all sorts of stuff—including his beautiful velvet and satin garments. He was constantly collecting and then giving away or selling odd things, to use in experiments or for art or just for pleasure. Stray notes give glimpses of a chaotic material life:

  Tapestry

  compasses

  Tommaso’s book

  Giovanni Benci’s book

  box in the Dogana

  to cut the cloth

  the sword-belt

  to resole the little boots

  a light hat

  the canes from the ruined houses

  the debt for the tablecloth

  swimming bag

  book of white paper for drawing

  charcoals.

  Notes by other hands—probably his assistant Salaì’s—among his sheets from about 1504 include shopping lists for meat, bread, wine, to feed not just Leonardo (who may already have been a vegetarian at this point, as he certainly was later) but his team. He had assistants and students with him at Santa Maria Novella. Salaì was the leader, always around except when he was off getting expensive clothes made. Leonardo also had a servant, Tommaso. In August 1504 “Jacopo the German” joined them, and in April 1505 a seventeen-year-old called Lorenzo. In between his deep thoughts Leonardo had to take care of his working family: “The morning of St. Peter’s Day on the 29th day of June 1504 I took out 10 ducats, of which I gave one to my household servant Tommaso to spend.” “On Monday morning one to Salaì …” And Salaì writes:

  The morning of Santo Zenobio on the 29th day of May 1504, I had from Leonardo Vinci 15 gold ducats, and commenced to spend them.

  to Mona Margarita S 62 d 4

  to repair the ring S 19 d 8

  clothes S 13

  good beef S 4

  eggs S 6

  owed at the bank S 7

  velvet S 12

  wine S 6 d 4

  meat S 4

  mulberries S 2 d 4

  mushrooms S 3 d 4

  salad S 1

  fruit S 1 d 4

  candles S 3

  The food wouldn’t only have been for Leonardo and his associates. The gregarious artist would surely have had other people over to eat with him. The still life he painted of a meal laid out on metal plates on a neat blue-trimmed white cloth in The Last Supper suggests the kind of simple but good fare you’d have enjoyed at Leonardo’s table.

  Le
onardo’s life was not the background to his work, nor was science a diversion from art. His notebooks reveal no such distinctions. There was no hierarchy in his mind between designs for commissioned paintings and free-ranging speculations on whatever happened to interest him. This is at the heart of the story of the Great Council Hall competition. The simple fact is that Leonardo had many other things on his mind as well as the battle painting for the Republic. As far as Florence was concerned, his job in 1504 was to make a painting for the People. In his own mind, the painting was only one of several areas of activity, one winding road among infinite regions of thought.

  I think he liked Santa Maria Novella. He liked it so much that he arranged to work there instead of in the Great Council Hall. For he chose to work in Florence in a way that differed from and yet also tried to re-create his previous experience of this kind of painting, when he had undertaken The Last Supper.

  He had worked slowly and subtly while painting his Milanese mural, rejecting the traditional, tried and tested technique for painting on plaster, buon fresco—which means painting into wet plaster so the colours harden into the very surface and can endure as long as it does—because it has to be painted in rapid bursts before sections of plaster dry. Each section is called a “day”: the technique defines the pace. Leonardo instead painted on the dry wall, slowly, delicately. The disastrous fate of The Last Supper is owing to the meditative way in which he lingered over this thoughtful work in its monastic setting.

  The point is, the quiet of a monastic setting gave Leonardo time and space to think. The Great Council Hall, on the other hand, was a busy, secular, sometimes very crowded room at the political heart of Florence. It was not possible to work in privacy or calm there. In all our attempts to understand the story of the competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo, this simple fact is easy to lose sight of. For an artist who insisted on a contemplative style of life and thought, working in the Great Council Hall was an unpleasant prospect. He was better off prolonging his time at Santa Maria Novella. There, he could work peacefully.