CHAPTER 10
THE MIDDLE IS OFF CENTER
Ages 38–39
IT WAS DURING this period that Leonardo drew his now-famous Vitruvian Man. Everyone’s seen it, everyone’s studied it, but no one just comes out and admits there’s something deeply strange about Leonardo’s drawing, other than the spare set of arms and legs. What is it? What is it supposed to show? The context is not self-evident, not what it pretends to be—and that is a clue. I’m pretty sure it’s a spoof. A very clever joke.
A little history first. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was an architect for Augustus Caesar who wrote a book on design he called De Architectura, or Ten Books on Architecture. Probably the first treatise of its kind, it had an enormous influence on subsequent centuries but then finally was lost until it was rediscovered in 1414 by the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini, who found a copy of a copy of a copy in the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland. Leon Battista Alberti reformulated Vitruvius’ text in 1452, and it was through Alberti’s work that the study of architecture based on the Vitruvian concept of man as the model of the world came back into vogue. It was part of the Renaissance attempt to rediscover how the ancients had achieved their beautiful art and marvelous proportions.
In the third “book” of De Architectura, Vitruvius expressed an already ancient belief that man was perfect in his proportions and was the model for creating perfection in all else. And Vitruvius’ example of such physical perfection was his own Caesar Augustus, to whom his book was dedicated.
Needless to say, this is a very human notion of perfection and has no support among the rest of the animal kingdom, then or now. That humans see projections of themselves everywhere and find themselves the glory of the universe has less to do with reality and a lot more to do with how enormously prejudiced and limited we are when we look around. We just see versions of ourselves everywhere. But the notion at the time was that humans were extra special, and once Christianity arrived we became the darling of God himself. Our natural perfection and ideal proportions became the model for all else, especially in the design of architecture, and most especially of temples and churches.
According to Martin Kemp, “The premise is that the human body is God’s most perfect design, and he designed it with geometry that is functional. It’s a reconstruction of nature along first principles, and there is no more divine principle in Christianity than the human body.”
True enough for the Christians out there, but for the few agnostics like Leonardo, things looked rather different. And for a very simple reason: Vitruvius was wrong in his assumptions and Leonardo figured this out. Being a first-century AD pagan, Vitruvius’ writings are a mix of myth and reality and tradition. This ideal form he saw was not inherent in the stone architecture so much as in the synaptic structure of his very human brain, which he then projected out onto all else. Vitruvius couldn’t know that that’s what he was doing, of course, but I suspect Leonardo guessed as much. He certainly knew human perception was unreliable, and he thought a lot about this unreliability and how to manipulate it through art. Human beings tend to view things in their own peculiar selfish way, and beauty is a big part of that self-serving distortion.
But beyond neurology there was another problem, of which Bracciolini and Alberti and others were aware—the Vitruvian manuscript found in the Abbey of St. Gall had no drawings. Vitruvius’ description of the ideal man laid out inside a circle or a square was described in words only. If there ever were drawings, they’d been left out over the centuries of copying by monks who could not draw. This created something of a mystery among literal-minded Renaissance thinkers; how to visualize this perfect model of mankind? If you measure a real human body you find that most of Vitruvius’ proportions are correct (i.e., in the relative distance between the chin to the mouth, and mouth to the nose, to the eyes, to the forehead), but his proof (that man’s proportions are perfect and symmetrical) is not. Vitruvius describes placing a man on his back with outstretched arms and legs which, from the navel out, would describe either a circle (the universe), or a square (the earth), because those two forms were perfect, and perfect things must harmonize.
And yet, for years no one could make Vitruvius’s idea work, and for various reasons—the main one of which is that the navel is not actually in the middle of the body. Maybe Vitruvius thought it should be, but it isn’t. In fact, species wide, it moves around; everybody’s different. Nor would a man inside a circle fit the same way as a man inside a square.
In short, to draw exactly what Vitruvius described was impossible.
But that’s precisely what Leonardo spoofed. No one could make it fit according to the rules, and then along comes Leonardo who not only centers the human figure inside a square (easy enough to do) but also includes a second set of arms so he can use the circle, on top of the square, which he has to draw extra large to make fit—a circle centered not on the navel but further down, closer to the groin where it needs to be to look right. Then, of necessity, a second set of legs. Nothing certainly that Vitruvius ever imagined, or intended, I’m sure.
Then, he turned the whole thing on its side so that instead of being a horizontal example as Vitruvius described, Leonardo makes it vertical, introducing gravity and shifting everything downward. Look at the feet, how they swell and flatten beneath him. This guy probably weighs 160 pounds if he weighs an ounce. Leonardo placed a real person inside an abstract drawing. This is art, not math. The drawing is suddenly very different, and strange all over. What’s more, it does none of the things it claims to do.
Vitruvius argued for symmetry and Leonardo answered with asymmetry. The artist as black magician. Creating reality out of illusion. He uses art to make Vitruvius’ man fit. It’s another flying elephant.
A spoof of a proof.
My guess is that Luca Pacioli was also working on the problem of how to make perfect forms fit together at the same time as Leonardo and, being a mathematician, Pacioli was doing it with numbers. When Leonardo showed him his answer, his perfectly beautiful and seemingly logical answer to all of the Vitruvian difficulties, no doubt Pacioli’s very first response was, “You cheated!”
And Leonardo’s response would’ve been, “Did I?” Pacioli would see it literally, and Leonardo metaphorically. It’s a jazzy fix of sorts. It only seems to work.
He made it appear so by adding that secret sauce no one else had—beauty. If it is beautiful enough, perfect enough, it becomes extra true. The Vitruvian Man and the whole notion of perfection is more religion than science, and I think Leonardo glimpsed that, and adapted the proof to the question. Since the human view is for humans only, beauty persuades. It’s a truth of sorts. Leonardo’s left hand could make anything look right.
Perhaps such pictorial spoofs or jokes were only for his most sophisticated friends who knew the problems beforehand. Pacioli would get it, Martini would get it, his good friends Andrea and Bramante would get it, but for others it was just a pretty drawing. There are many examples in Leonardo’s notebooks of visual humor. I would say his so-called “grotesques” are intended as darkly humorous, as is his monstrous drawing of a vagina, and the sketch A Cloudburst of Material Possessions, just to name a few.
What we miss about the Vitruvian Man is the social context in which he drew it and Leonardo’s absolute deadpan delivery. Leonardo’s wrap-around written description of Vitruvius’ model man is only a paraphrase of the original text, but it sets the stage for the illustration to be taken realistically. Another of those Leonardo ideas that take a moment to register. I’m sure his friends had to look and think and look again before they would recognize what it was and laugh out loud. Something like a parlor trick, too clever for words.
Followed by one last laugh as they recognized the face and asked him if he might be the model of all humanity. It was his face of course. He’d put himself into the drawing. The same jutting lip and wide-set eyes, those cheekbones, that jaw, all that extra-thick curly hair long to his shoulders, perhaps exaggerated out of vanity.
He could only smile and shrug, of course. Gesture somehow with his hands, talking in that pictorial way of his.
There is zero evidence Leonardo ever presented his drawing as a legitimate proof of Vitruvius’ model. It seems he drew it for himself and a few friends and otherwise kept it hidden away in a notebook. We see it differently today because we don’t have the context, and tend to be besotted with the idea of Leonardo as full-time genius. The truth may be that Leonardo’s most famous drawing is basically a fake proof to a false syllogism.
MEANWHILE, FIVE YEARS into the equestrian project, Leonardo was granted a second chance and surely redoubled his efforts. He produced still more fantastic drawings, and his head was no doubt stuffed to the gills with knowledge of casting and forging and all the problems the high water table under Milan created for him. Large-scale casting there was possible only above ground, instead of in a pit as normally would be the case. But casting above ground required an enormous mound of earth to bury the mold in, and this was apparently an ongoing difficulty for Leonardo. He did produce a giant clay model, however, twenty-four feet high, in time for the wedding of Ludovico’s still-alive nephew Gian in 1490. But, no bronze horse.
Apparently, Ludovico had already provided the seventy-two tons of bronze needed for the casting, but it sat untouched, perhaps in the courtyard of the Corte Vecchia, waiting for Leonardo. Everyone was waiting for Leonardo while he sat inside doing who-knows-what.
YEARS SPENT DRAWING and tweaking and designing and modeling and preparing himself in every way suggests quite a bit of second-guessing and retracing. And maybe it’s this endless second-guessing and retracing that was too evident, what others saw. And there’s apparently no model at all for the figure riding the horse, Ludovico’s father Francesco, the reason for the horse in the first place.
How did he talk about the project to others? Scholars imagine the mute sage pondering and pulling his beard, but Leonardo might’ve been quite vocal about his problems and his “all sides of the issue” discourse might’ve been bewildering. We don’t know.
What is fascinating to consider is that Michelangelo also cast a bronze equestrian statue of Pope Julius II that was about the same size as Leonardo’s in Bologna in 1507, and, knowing about as much about bronze casting as Leonardo did when he started, got his done and on the plinth in just over a year. In a sense, this illustrates a greater point—the sharpest contrast with Leonardo is Michelangelo. Both gigantic talents, they couldn’t have been more different: one was tentative and withdrawn and somehow wounded, endlessly braiding ideas; the other bold and assertive, knocking chunks off with his chisel.
Michelangelo’s talent represented a push into the world, Leonardo’s a retreat from it. Michelangelo reflected the world, Leonardo the self. Michelangelo’s talent was out in the sun and fed off approval; Leonardo’s was in the dark, an underground talent, reactive, secretive, often uncertain of itself, endlessly testing.
Whatever the multitudinous reasons for the delay of the horse (and there were surely more than we know) after ten years of work, he wasn’t even half-finished yet. There was no rider for the top. I think Ludovico gave up on him. There were too many other things to worry about.
1492 Christopher Columbus meets King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I and gains their support for his voyage to the East Indies.
1492 Jews are expelled from Spain; an estimated 40,000–200,000 leave.
1492 Trsteno Aboretum, the first known arboretum in Europe, is constructed near Dubrovnik, Croatia.
1493 Columbus leaves Cádiz on his second voyage.
1493 Tupac Inca Yupanqui, the Inca ruler of Tahuantinsuyu, dies.
1494 Aldus Manutius prints Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna in Venice; it is the first book to include the semicolon.
1494 The double-entry bookkeeping system is codified by Luca Pacioli.
1494 Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas, thus dividing the New World.
1494 Columbus experiences a tropical cyclone and provides the first written European account of one.
1494 The Italian Wars begin.
1495 King’s College in Aberdeen, Scotland, the first English-speaking university to teach medicine, is founded.
1495 Friar John Cor records the first known batch of Scotch whisky.
1495 Sculptor Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes installed at Florence Cathedral.