The Lost Battles Page 23
Leonardo dreamt of speaking with animals. He remembered a kite putting its tail in his mouth when he was a baby. In the light of these fantastical encounters, it is too rationalist to see his incorporation of cow anatomy into human biology as simply a mistake. It reflects a sense of concordance between humanity and the rest of nature, a mysterious integration of his own life into that of the world around him. This misting of distinctions defines his art. In one of his earliest paintings, the Annunciation, he depicts the angel’s wings as real bird wings, with a loving and precise observation of how feathers fold together and a scientific curiosity about how wings might take root in a humanoid body: like his invention of the human-cow uterus, this is science fiction, a detailed fantasy that imagines an angel as a real physical being with wings that appear to have been grafted onto its shoulders in a very tangible, fleshy way.
Even before this, Leonardo might have been the creator of a little grey dog who walks along loyally in the painting Tobias and the Angel from the workshop of his teacher Verrocchio. This dog is a sensitive creature, a lovable pet. Drawings done by Leonardo in the 1470s or early 1480s show, in a mesmerising attempt to capture movement in a flurry of poses, a toddler playing with a pet cat. Pets, in other words, are part of Leonardo’s artistic imagination from his very early career in Florence. He tenderly depicts the way the child hugs and strokes the cat, and the cat in a blur of limbs struggles to escape.
The fact that Leonardo shows the cat trying to wriggle free does not undermine the drawing’s charm—on the contrary, it makes it real. The child’s love of the cat is slightly clumsy. The same lifelike tension is stressed in drawings for a planned early painting of the Madonna and Child in which the young Christ was to play with a cat. Long afterwards, in The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, one of his last paintings, Leonardo has Christ play with a lamb that again tries to get away—in both designs there’s a lovely, acute realism in observing children with their pets. This surely goes back to Vinci and the young Leonardo playing with pets of his own. But adults, too, have pets in his paintings: in his portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza of Milan, she shows off a pet ermine, holding her long fingers against its white furry body in a gesture at once gentle and firm. Where the children in Leonardo’s pictures cuddle cats and lambs clumsily, Cecilia knows how to control a pet without hurting it. Again this is an exquisite observation of real animals, as creatures with wills of their own. His most ecstatically alive animals of all, however, are the frenetic, fast horses he drew in preparation for painting The Battle of Anghiari.
The cave is a glistening cathedral of crystalline spires, a place made magical by electric light which suddenly becomes deathly and isolating when you peer into the shadows. It is one of the places humanity first encountered its own mind; and you can still sense the danger of that discovery here, after hiking into the village through a silent landscape pockmarked with cavernous holes, climbing the mountain path, and descending to the painted grottoes of Pech Merle. Nature is so awe-inspiring in this cave in the Cahors region of south-western France, geology so imposing, that it is almost a disappointment to see the paintings, drawings, and engravings human beings made here long before the invention of writing, or cities, or history. It takes a moment, standing before a black charcoal image of a mammoth in a dark gulf within the chaos of rocks, to realise the utter extraordinariness of what you are seeing—a portrait by a Stone Age hunter of an animal that has long been extinct.
Deeper in the dark, footprints survive in a muddy pool, left by the explorers of this place tens of thousands of years ago. An outline of a hand floats on a rocky overhang among a field of soft red spots: the hazy effect was achieved by putting pigment in the mouth and spitting it. The process may well have been toxic. All these enigmatic images are surrounded by sparkling, orotund cascades and pillars of calcite-bright stone: and then the horses come.
Leonardo da Vinci, studies of horsemen, 1503–4. The knotted, convulsed dynamism of these sketches anticipates Picasso while echoing cave art. (illustration credit 11.2)
They materialise like spirits on a section of rock that stands alone, a vertical wall whose expansive flatness provided the artists with a natural painting surface. The black images they created by spitting charcoal pigment at the wall are at once horses and fields of dots. Two animals stand back to back, their hindquarters overlapping: black circles fill their forms and spill out beneath them, making it hard to tell if the painters intended the misty discs as decorations for the horses or not. Each horse has a stylised thin black face on a triangular black neck, and they have slender legs that almost look moulded out of clay. One of the animals has a second, more realistic head around its heraldic black one, formed by chance, by the natural shape of the rock wall—did this shape suggest the horses?
Across the millennia there’s an undeniable affinity between the earliest paintings of horses and the drawings that Leonardo made when he was preparing to paint The Battle of Anghiari on a wall. His drawings of horses from 1503–4 have a raw and savage power as well as infinite subtlety. Sometimes the very species seems to regress, as if, concentrating on their speed and fury, he was able to see the wild horses of prehistoric Europe. Big teeth, sucker-like lips, heads reduced to crude triangles—his sketches capture the horse in a primitive state. Yet there’s something else, too. Cave-art researchers see evidence in the art and its dreamlike locations beneath the earth of shaman-like rituals. In cultures around the world, shamans induce trance-like states in which they seem to travel to other realms, to animal worlds. The paintings in caves might be a record of visions, of animal other-worlds, a dream of communication with nature.
Leonardo’s method of finding ideas by staring at a wall sounds like a shaman’s way of inducing a trance or reverie. Gazing into the marks and stains and cracks, he says, you may see battles, faces, landscapes. He presents this as a practical method for the young artist, but it is of course far more than that. It involves relinquishing control, drifting into a daydream. As if to stress its peculiarity, Vasari ascribes this method not to Leonardo but to the eccentric painter Piero di Cosimo: “He would stop sometimes to contemplate a wall where for a long time sick people had been spitting, and from this would appear to him battles of horsemen [battaglie de’ cavalli], and the most fantastic cities and vastest landscapes ever seen; and he did the same with the birds of the air.” Piero may well have learned the method from Leonardo, who records in his notebooks that he also discussed it with Botticelli. But in making Piero di Cosimo the originator, Vasari associates this strange procedure with that artist’s anti-social, quirky personality and taste for the grotesque and fantastic. Piero di Cosimo painted scenes of the primitive world and wild moments from myth. Some of his shapes look like inkblots, as if he were following Leonardo’s method—for it wasn’t just that Leonardo advised looking at walls. Some of his own drawings really look as if he is letting his mind ramble, his hand move rapidly and almost unconsciously, to produce an unruly image. For Vasari this is all very odd and irrational, and he can’t bring himself to associate it with the divine Leonardo.
Dream images seem to well up in Leonardo’s sketches for his battle painting. In his drawings of horses rearing, galloping, raging, there’s something else: a visionary journey into the world of animals, perhaps—anyway, a rapturous quality as the riders in bloody red chalk are dwarfed by the might and power of their mounts. They blend with the horses as if sharing the same thought. They are faceless, passive, sucked along in the horses’ momentum, even appearing sexually aroused by the ecstatic speed.
Leonardo da Vinci, notes on safe flying and wing design, 1505. In Leonardo’s notebook on bird flight, he weaves continually between real birds and his plans for a flying machine. (illustration credit 11.3)
On the same sheet as his early sketches for Leda—and on the reverse of a drawing of mortars pouring fire into Pisa—a grey horse rears up massively. It takes a while to notice its rider, palely, spectrally sketched over the animal�
��s much more solid form: he leans over so that his head is in front of the horse’s mighty neck, and this creates a prodigious effect. The man’s face seems to merge with the horse’s neck muscles: a hybridisation is occurring. A centaur is being born. Half-man, half-horse, this phantom is the essence of Leonardo’s drawings as he planned The Battle of Anghiari. He is not only observing horses. He is letting his imagination be dragged by them wherever it is they’re galloping. We might wonder why he is compelled to draw all these horses. It is not just to find out what a horse looks like, but a way of imbibing the horse, drinking in its life: as if he is absorbing all the speed, energy, fury onto a sheet of paper—soaking up the horse’s wildness. His drawings are his trance.
Leonardo discovered an amazing ability to analyse motion with the naked eye. From horses, so fast they nearly fly, he looked up into the sky (as Vasari says Piero did) at the birds. His notebook known as On the Flight of Birds contains the most sustained scientific observation of the natural world by him that survives. He made it when he was in the middle of creating The Battle of Anghiari, in the spring of 1505. Here the acute observation of speed and energy in his horse drawings of 1503–4 becomes a much more explicit scientific enquiry. How do birds fly? How do they use those little feathery wings to move so easily in the sky? This is the mystery he tries to decipher simply by standing in the countryside between Florence and Fiesole, looking up. One page has beautiful, simple drawings of birds that might be swallows whirling, gliding, ascending. Beside the drawings Leonardo writes: “Of the 4 reflex and falling motions of birds under different wind conditions always the oblique descent of birds against the wind will be made beneath the wind. Their reflex movement will be made above the wind …”
The wind sounds in these words, ripples the taut drawings. The notes seem to feel their way through the sky, to register in words each twist a bird makes: it is an amazingly determined act of looking. Leonardo stands and stares long enough to become aware of when a bird is descending “upon the wind,” when it is “beneath the wind.” A rich awareness of the air itself is essential to what he’s doing; to describe birds he also has to describe the atmosphere they inhabit.
Turn the page, and the reverse of the same sheet—in the same ink, evidently written at the same time, in the same train of thought—is a surprise. A drawing shows a bird horizontal, and looking oddly stiff. Another diagram displays the inside of what appears to be a synthetic imitation of a bird’s wing, with “bones” worked by pulleys. Leonardo’s note is at first confusing:
Always the movement of the bird must be above the clouds so that the wing does not get wet and to survey more countryside and to flee the danger of the revolutions of the winds among the mountain gullies which are always full of winds going backwards and forwards. And beyond this if the bird turns itself upside down you will have lots of time to turn it over again with the orders I have given before it reaches the ground.
What kind of bird is this? It is not a bird at all—not a real bird. Leonardo gives the name uccello to his flying machine, and talks about it as if it were the same as the birds whose mastery of the sky he observes so acutely. Even in the drawings on this page, the ambiguity persists: in fact it seems quite clear from these and other sketches in the notebook that in 1505 Leonardo is planning to launch a machine that imitates a bird in flight. His boast on the cover of the notebook is not just a metaphor. Throughout On the Flight of Birds you are never sure when a note on living birds will mutate into a conclusion about the flying machine.
Leonardo’s observation of birds soaring above him is not disinterested naturalism. He needs to understand how birds do it so he can overcome the apparently insuperable obstacles to human flight. By the time he made these notes in 1505, he had been designing flying machines for at least twenty years. In Milan he came up with a whole series of ideas for a vehicle to be powered by human energy that could lift its pilot into the air. In his various drawings an aviator lies flat beneath a heavy system of pulleys and pedals madly to operate the wings above, or sits in a bucket almost like a flying saucer pumping the wings up and down via an equally complex and heavy set of gears. These early designs do not look too promising, but he developed sophisticated details such as bat-like wings with a leather skin and vents to let through air on their upward sweep—he reiterates the need to imitate the membranous wings of the bat in his 1505 notebook. He also devised a machine for testing the lift of his wing designs. A drawing in the 1505 codex still shows the flyer standing vertically as he tries to balance the bird. A note elaborates: “The man in the flying machine has to stand free from his belt upward so he will be able to balance himself as in a boat in order that his centre of gravity and that of his instrument may constantly change balance where necessary because of a change in the centre of its resistance.”
What is new in this attempt to fly in April 1505 is a focus on the sky itself, the way birds use the air. The way to fly, Leonardo reasons, is to imitate the birds, because birds know how to save their energy. Leonardo seems to blame the previous failures—he apparently attempted at least one flight in Milan—on the impossibility of a human body producing enough power to raise its own weight (and that of a wooden machine). As he writes:
Maybe you will say that the nerves and muscles of a bird are known to be without comparison more powerful than those of man because all the fleshiness of so many muscles and of the flesh of the breast goes to help and enhance the movement of the wings while the breast bone is of one piece and so gives the bird the greatest power … To which the reply is that such force gives it a power beyond what it ordinarily uses to sustain itself …
Here Leonardo’s determination to fly melts again into his love for the natural world. The technique of successful human flight has to emulate the way birds conserve energy: they do this, he explains, by gliding and riding the air. The human flier too must know how to exploit updrafts and follow the winds. It’s a skill. The machine he plans in his 1505 notebook will have wings like a bat’s, with a leather membrane, and be constructed as lightly as possible, held together with cords, avoiding the use of metal. But its success will depend on flying it like a bird, steering its articulated wings with pulleys to exploit and survive the currents of the air.
A bird, Leonardo agrees, is stronger than a human being. It’s a confession of the less than perfect nature of the human form. On the Campanile beside Florence Cathedral a cycle of fourteenth-century reliefs includes an image of the Greek scientist Daedalus, who in legend escaped from Crete by making himself wings of wax. Daedalus in this image is a bird-man: his entire body is covered in feathers. In 1505 Leonardo was on the verge of becoming a bird-man himself. His notes on bird flight are moving in their sensitivity and captivating in their dream of flying—not as humans eventually did learn to fly in powerful machines, but in a light contraption of wood, silk, and leather, navigating it with the freedom and grace of a bird.
There is no record of what came next, only those notes announcing that Leonardo planned to launch his bird from the mountain north of Florence. It would be wonderful to know if he made the attempt, who was in the machine—and what happened. Part of me, after reading On the Flight of Birds, believes he soared, for a perfect moment, in the blue.
TWELVE
Hell’s Mouth
Thunderclouds hung above Piazza della Signoria, black and blue phantoms low over the pink tiles. The very statues shivered. The long finger of the Palace tower pointed high into the thickening air, daring lightning to strike. Through the courtyard, through the apartments, was the door into the gloomy Great Council Hall. Its low vaulted ceiling and inadequate window lighting made the darkness gather, the day’s ill omens congeal, around Leonardo as he climbed the ladder to begin his painting on Friday, 6 June 1505. The cartoon had been brought into the Hall, carefully transported across Florence from the monastery so he could use it as the template for his wall painting. He had assistants with him to help with the actual work, but still, it was Leonardo who stood up ther
e on the scaffolding, brush in hand, when suddenly the great bell of the Palace shook his bones with its sonorous clang.
On the vast drawing suspended in the sepulchral Hall, hell had already broken loose. A horse’s wild eyes stared out as it sunk its teeth into its enemy’s forequarters, its lips sucking on the smooth equine flesh like some monstrous lamprey’s mouth. These beautiful beasts, these cavalli, were behaving like blind creatures in the depths of the sea, like heartless, brainless hunters. They had gone mad in the heat of battle. Beneath their frenzied forms men fought desperately on the ground, in the blood and mud, about to be trampled together into the same mire beneath the mighty hooves. One man screamed desperately as he lay pinioned by his enemy, who, even as a vast war horse reared murderously right above them, stared into his enemy’s eye and prepared to plunge a dagger into his throat. Another fallen man held up his shield against the lashing hooves, sheltering terrified in its shadow, as high above, the riders yelled and cursed in their fanatical struggle for possession of a shaft of wood hung with a fluttering cloth. One man twisted around with a mighty grimace, in his fantastical armour decorated with a ram’s skull on the breastplate, a spiralling spiky sea-shell on his raised shoulder, reaching around so that he could grasp with both hands the lance-like pole behind his head, as his enemies riding in from the right, one of them in a helmet whose raised visor was a grotesque mask, tried to take this standard away from him. At the heart of the struggle, his face a contorted scream of fury, an old warrior gripped the pole and raised his sword high over his head, ready to scythe his enemies’ grasping arms. From his black, wide-open mouth a silent scream of hate filled the Hall.