shaping the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual currents of the Renaissance in a challenge to the traditions and received wisdom that held sway throughout the middle ages.
Leonardo da Vinci
(1452–1519)
The period we call the Renaissance—fourteenth through seventeenth centuries in Europe—gave its name to the polymaths who created it. The phrase Renaissance man evokes a type of genius that the fifteenth-century Italian humanist, author, poet, philosopher, architect, master of languages, priest, and part-time cryptographer Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) described this way: someone who “can do all things if he will.” Alberti and others of the era did not conceive the ideal of the polymath as a mere showoff. Rather, the ideal was walking, thinking, showing that human beings possess a capacity for limitless development.
The word renaissance is French for “rebirth,” and it refers specifically to the rediscovery of classical (mostly Greek and Roman) philosophy and science, which had been suppressed as pagan and all but lost during the Middle Ages. Among the ancient philosophers rediscovered during the Renaissance was Protagoras (c. 490 BCE–c. 420 BCE), who is best remembered for having proclaimed “Man is the measure of all things.” During the Middle Ages, such a statement would have been heresy, since God and the changeless moral law of God were the measure of all things, the ultimate source of truth and value. In reviving the formulation of Protagoras, the thinkers of the Renaissance sharply distinguished themselves and their age from the religion-bound philosophers of the Middle Ages. The focus became human-centric: humanistic.
No symbol of the Protagoras formulation is more powerful than the one created by the ultimate Renaissance Man, Leonardo da Vinci. Drawn by the artist in 1490, “Vitruvian Man” depicts a male figure in two superimposed positions, his arms and legs apart inside both a square and a circle. It is both an artist’s study of ideal human proportion and the superimposition of man upon nature, showing that the human being fits the universe so perfectly that it may serve as its very measure. More than a representation of a perfectly proportioned nude figure—perfect because it fits a mathematical model of nature—“Vitruvian Man” is a demonstration that nature is perfect because it fits humankind. Man, not an invisible God and not churchly interpretation of that God, is the measure of all things. This belief was the core of Leonardo’s genius and the summation of his life’s work.
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It is helpful to think of Leonardo’s work as having a summation, given how dazzling its scope and breadth are. Through the centuries, Leonardo was considered chiefly a painter. His Mona Lisa and Last Supper are the most iconic artworks of the Renaissance—perhaps in all of Western history. But he was also an architect, inventor, technologist, and precursor of the modern scientist.
His inventions and scientific work are contained mainly in his notebooks, some 13,000 pages of manuscript material, which were not only unpublished in his own time, but written in mirror-image cursive script. Whether Leonardo wrote in this manner from a motive of secrecy or because he happened to be left-handed and therefore found it easier to write backward, we cannot know. But the technique kept most of his inventions, observations, and theories from wide distribution for centuries. Only in relatively recent times has the full extent of his cross-disciplinary disruptive genius been appreciated. Drawings and notes on human flight, designs for a helicopter and a fixed-wing glider aircraft, many advanced engines of war—who knows what effect these expressions of his innately futuristic imagination would have had if more of his contemporaries had seen them?
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Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, a town in the Tuscan republic of Florence. He was born out of wedlock to Ser Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a prosperous notary, and Caterina, a peasant woman. His father married four times, unions that produced a dozen half-siblings, who were born over a long span of time—the last when Leonardo was a middle-aged adult of forty.
Little is known of his childhood, except that he was educated in mathematics, geometry, and Latin. He himself related an illuminating incident from his youth in which he was exploring in the Tuscan countryside, where he found a cave. Although terrified that it might be the lair of some monster, Leonardo wrote, his irrepressible curiosity compelled him to venture inside. Whether or not this memory was real, it seems a fitting emblem for Leonardo’s life. He dared to explore, whatever trepidation he may have felt.
From 1466 to 1476, Leonardo was an apprentice to the great artist Verrocchio (Andrea di Cione, c. 1435–1488). The artist’s workshop was staffed by some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, including Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. This gave Leonardo an unparalleled artistic education. In 1472, his apprenticeship culminated in his membership in the Guild of Saint Luke, certifying him as a master artist. Leonardo felt such an affinity for Verrocchio, however, that he continued to collaborate in his workshop until 1476.
Nothing definite is known of da Vinci’s activity and work for the next two years, excepting a record showing that he was charged with, and ultimately acquitted of, the crime of sodomy. In 1478, he moved out of his father’s house and was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. He was subsequently commissioned in March 1481 to paint The Adoration of the Magi for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto, also in Florence. But he left both works incomplete when Lorenzo de’ Medici, in whose palace Leonardo may have lived, sent him to Milan. Lorenzo had commissioned him to create a silver lyre as a peace offering to the powerful and notoriously combative Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan.
Leonardo did more than make the delivery. He promoted his services to Ludovico—less as a painter (a competence he barely mentioned) than military engineer, which suggests much about how the artist thought of himself. He worked in Milan from 1482 to 1499, creating in this city the Virgin of the Rocks (for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception) and The Last Supper (for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie). The latter was commissioned by Ludovico about 1495 and took some three years to complete. The humanity of Leonardo’s depiction of the moment when Jesus informs the twelve apostles gathered for the Passover seder dinner that one would soon betray him was a breakthrough, unprecedented in its dramatic vividness. Tragically, however, the artist’s impulse to innovate doomed the masterpiece to early decay. He tried a new technique for the mural, painting with tempera and oil on dried plaster instead of painting a genuine fresco, a work on fresh plaster. He lived to see the beginning of the severe flaking that, despite modern restoration, severely mars the painting today.
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Ludovico Sforza was a great patron of the arts, best known for commissioning The Last Supper. But this was an epoch in which Renaissance men dealt with other Renaissance men, and so Sforza called on Leonardo to design the dome for Milan Cathedral and create a giant bronze monument showing Ludovico’s predecessor, Francesco Sforza, astride his horse. When Sforza was overthrown and imprisoned by French forces during the Second Italian War (1499–1504), Leonardo lit out for Venice, whose doge employed him not as an artist but as a military architect and engineer. The onetime sculptor and painter set to work designing innovative fortifications to defend the city from seaborne attack.
Returning to Florence in 1500, Leonardo was housed by Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata, where a workshop was set up for him. He created the cartoon—the full-size stencil used to lay out a fresco—for The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist. The work drew crowds of admirers to the monastery. But like so much else that Leonardo started, the work, now housed in London’s National Gallery, was left unfinished.
The peripatetic Leonardo moved on to Cesena in 1502, seeking employment with Cesare Borgia, cardinal, military commander, bastard son of Pope Alexander VI, and the ruthless inspiration for Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. Determined to secure Borgia’s patronage, Leonardo created a map of Imola, Cesare’s stronghold, showing how to defend it. At the time, almost any map was an innovation—as mapmaking was largely a mystery and maps very rare—but a map created specifically for strategic military purposes was all but unknown. Leonardo gave Borgia a secret weapon—and Cesare Borgia hired the artist as his chief military engineer and architect. On his orders, Leonardo next created a map of the Chiana Valley in Tuscany, which Borgia used as a guide in planning the formidable defenses of his territories.
In 1503, Leonardo was on the move again. Over the next two years, he worked on The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria in Florence. The work itself is lost, known today only through a copy by Peter Paul Rubens, but widely believed to be hidden behind the wall bearing a fresco by Vasari. Judging from the Rubens copy, it was a fresco of intense energy and action, in which the anatomy of clashing men and their horses in the most violent conflict was portrayed with meticulous accuracy. After he completed the fresco, Leonardo returned to Milan in 1506, was back in Florence the following year, and then again in 1508. His old age was spent, in part, living in the Vatican, under the patronage of Pope Leo X from 1513 to 1516. After King Francis I of France recaptured Milan in 1515, he commissioned Leonardo to make a mechanical lion that walked forward and opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies—fleurs-de-lis being the French heraldic emblem. King Francis’s mechanical lion, though designed, was never constructed.
In 1516, the artist, now in the service of Francis, moved to a manor house, Clos Lucé, near the royal Château d’Amboise, in the Loire town of Amboise. Here he lived out the final three years of his life. He died at Clos Lucé on May 2, 1519. He was sixty-seven.
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Leonardo’s artistic legacy is relatively small, just two dozen works—though the authorship of some additional paintings and drawings is disputed and at least seven major works are known to be lost. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of the fascination with Leonardo turned from his paintings to his inventions. This fixation culminated in 1994 when Microsoft founder Bill Gates purchased the Codex Leicester, a 72-page notebook that is just one small part of the roughly 13,000 known pages of Leonardo’s visionary journals. At $30.8 million, the highest price ever paid for a book, Gates believed he had acquired a bargain.
The Codex focuses on Leonardo’s musings about water—about tides, eddies, and dams, about engineering water, and about the relationship among water, the moon, and the sun. In other manuscripts, Leonardo delved deeply into the nature of light, of anatomy—both human and animal—geology, botany, mapmaking (which he pioneered to an astounding degree), astronomy, alchemy, mathematics, and geometry.
It is, however, the inventions, the acts of pure innovation drawn and written about in his journals, that most excite our imagination. In his Lives of the Artists (1550 and 1568), the painter, architect, and biographer Giorgio Vasari mentioned Leonardo’s “designs for mills, fulling machines and engines that could be driven by water-power.” Vasari cited in particular his “models and plans showing how to excavate and tunnel through mountains without difficulty, so as to pass from one level to another; and he demonstrated how to lift and draw great weights by means of levers, hoists and winches, and ways of cleansing harbours and using pumps to suck up water from great depths.” Writing years after Leonardo’s death, Vasari was most interested in the mechanical ideas in the notebooks. Then and now, others were attracted by the array of war machines, which included assault vehicles, antipersonnel cannons that could shower the enemy with stones, a giant crossbow, breech-loading artillery capable of continuous fire, a multi-barrel precursor of the late nineteenth-century Gatling gun, and a diving suit to be used by a man to sabotage ships below the waterline. These designs had been commissioned by warlike princes and kings. Closer to our own time, the main attraction has been Leonardo’s futuristic visions of flight. He designed a parachute that was never made, let alone tested, but that would almost certainly have worked, and a hang glider, based on his careful studies of bird and bat wings. This design also seems airworthy. More radical, because it departed from nature, was Leonardo’s human-powered “aerial screw,” a helicopter design based on a principle at least as old as Archimedes.
In his notebook, da Vinci captioned his drawing for the aerial screw with this comment: “If this instrument made with a screw be well made—that is to say, made of linen of which the pores are stopped up with starch and be turned swiftly, the said screw will make its spiral in the air and it will rise high.” The far-seeing aerodynamic theory behind the design was sound. Leonardo’s sketch was for a machine that compressed air to obtain flight, which is the principle by which modern helicopters fly. His comment shows that he also understood that the practicality of his invention depended on the material used and the energy available. This observation, alas, also identifies the two reasons why his disruptive dreams were so rarely translated into full-scale three-dimensional reality during his lifetime. The materials available in the sixteenth century did not combine the lightness of weight and the durability necessary to achieve flight. Not only were the available materials limiting, so were the available forms of energy. For some inventions, wind, water, or animal power could be harnessed. But for flight, the only available energy was human, and it was woefully insufficient.
In the end, Leonardo da Vinci’s disruptive vision was a focused dream, a pattern for innovation, a way of imagining. It supplied pieces of a future—pieces, however, insufficient in themselves to build that future.
Hundreds of years later, machine guns, diving suits, helicopters, and much of the rest were invented. Leonardo did not inspire these, but, in hindsight, we recognize today that he could have, had his notebooks become known earlier and more widely. No matter. Leonardo’s greatest innovation was himself as a presentation to the world—and, to the eye of history, the archetype of the Renaissance man, one who can indeed “do all things if he will.”