If Tommaso Masini the future metalworker and alchemist was already an apprentice or assistant of Leonardo’s in the late 1470s, he would be associated with Leonardo’s early efforts as an engineer. It is from this period that we find the first concerted signs of Leonardo the technologist. They are found in the Codex Atlanticus and in the pages of Vasari, who describes various technological interests pursued by Leonardo while ‘still a young man [giovanetto]’, which is vague but certainly means while he was still in Florence. Whether any of these ideas were translated into actual projects is doubtful.
As we saw, Leonardo had gained first-hand knowledge of Brunelleschi’s ingenious hoists and cranes in 1471, when he was involved in the placing of the palla on top of the Duomo. He seems to have returned to this interest in around 1478–80, which is the probable date of those drawings of Brunelleschian lifting-devices in the Codex Atlanticus. Vasari mentions Leonardo’s interest in heavy lifting-gear: ‘He demonstrated how to lift and draw great weights by means of levers, hoists and winches.’ These would be particularly appropriate for an ambitious project described by Vasari:
Among his models and plans was one he proposed several times to the ingenious citizens then governing Florence, which showed how to raise the temple of San Giovanni [i.e. the Baptistery] in order to place steps under it, without any damage. His arguments were so powerful that many people were persuaded it could be done, until they left his company and thought it over, and realized it was impossible.
The idea is not as outrageous as Vasari implies. A similar feat – the moving of a church tower – had been achieved twenty-five years before, in Bologna, by the engineer Aristotele Fioravanti. Raising the Baptistery would have had advantages both aesthetic (to bring it up to the level of the Duomo opposite) and practical (to protect it from the periodic flooding of the Arno). The idea of placing it on steps was still current a century later, when Vasari’s friend Vincenzo Borghini published two engravings of an imagined reconstruction of the Baptistery ‘classicized’ and placed on a plinth with steps.26
That curious device I mentioned earlier ‘for opening up a prison from the inside’ is a further application of Brunelleschian engineering. The drawing in the Codex Atlanticus shows a stout three-legged winch with a screwed bolt at right angles; the bolt has a gripping mechanism on the end which Leonardo refers to as its ‘tongs’ (‘tanagli’). In one of the drawings it is shown ripping out the iron bars of a window. This machine might come under the heading of military hardware, but it might equally be referred back to Leonardo’s memories of imprisonment – ‘voi mi metteste in prigione’ – after the accusation concerning Jacopo Saltarelli. It is conceivable that this device is mentioned in an obscure corner of Vasari’s Lives concerning a Florentine blacksmith named Caparra: ‘Some young citizens brought him a drawing of a machine which could break and tear iron bars by means of a screw, and they asked him to make it for them.’ The blacksmith angrily refused, thinking it a ‘thief’s device’ for ‘robbing people or disgracing young girls’. He thought the young men were of good sort (‘uomini de bene’), but wanted nothing to do with this ‘villainy’.27 Could this drawing be the one now found in the Codex Atlanticus, and could Leonardo be one of those dubious but basically decent young citizens who approached Caparra to make it?
Vasari also says that Leonardo ‘designed mills, fulling machines, and engines that could be powered by water’, and this is echoed in an early sheet showing millstones, grinders and ovens. Other early drawings feature hygrometers for measuring moisture in the air, and hydraulic devices for raising water. The latter show Leonardo’s early interest in the Archimedean screw, a device which raises water through a helix rotating inside a cylinder.28 These drawings, or ones very like them, occur in his list of works written inc. 1482: ‘some machines for waterworks’ and ‘some machines for ships’. The list also mentions ‘drawings of furnaces’, but these seem to have been lost.
Early technology. Leonardo’s devices for ‘opening up a prison’ and (below) for raising water.
These are some of Leonardo’s earliest technical drawings; they belong still to the somewhat two-dimensional style of the Quattrocento engineer, which one sees in the drawings of contemporaries like Buonaccorso Ghiberti, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Giuliano da Sangallo. Only later, following his studies of the ‘human machine’, does the true Leonardian technical drawing develop: multifaceted, sumptuously detailed, fully modelled and shaded without losing its analytical function – a visual language with which to explain mechanical processes and structures.
On another sheet of the Codex Atlanticus belonging to this time there is a list of eight names: a circle of acquaintances, or perhaps acquaintances to which Leonardo aspired.29 Of the five whose names can be identified, one, Domenico di Michelino, is a painter; the remaining four are scientists and scholars. This is again Leonardo the nascent scientist of the late 1470s. The first item on the list reads, ‘Quadrante di Carlo Marmocchi’. Marmocchi was an engineer and mathematician in the service of the Signoria: the ‘quadrante’ referred to may be either a treatise written by him or an actual quadrant – an instrument for measuring the altitude of stars – owned by him. ‘Benedetto de l’Abaco’ refers to another well-known Florentine mathematician, also known as Benedetto Arithmeticus.
The best-known person on the list is the one whom Leonardo simply calls ‘Maestro Paolo the physician’ – almost certainly a reference to the great Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, whose position as the grand old man of Florentine science I have already mentioned. One of his disciplines which would have interested Leonardo was optics. Toscanelli is thought to be the author of a treatise on perspective, a copy of which survives in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. It includes discussions of aerial perspective, optical illusion, and the observation of celestial phenomena. This work was well known in the Quattrocento, and was used as a kind of artist’s handbook on perspective; Leonardo seems to be citing it in some notes headed ‘Reasons for the increased size of the sun in the west’.30 An interesting drawing in the Codex Atlanticus belongs to this period. It shows a man looking through a ‘perspectograph’ (p. 175) – an optical device which helped the artist to reproduce an object in correctly scaled proportions. Under a caption reading‘Put your eye to the tube’ (in other words the sight-hole) it shows a young man in a long loose gown, with curly hair topped off with a berretta.31 This may well be a self-portrait: the figure has some similarity to the probable self-portrait in the Adoration of the Magi, painted in 1481–2.
The last name on Leonardo’s list is ‘Messer Giovanni Argiropolo’. This is the Greek scholar Joannes Argyropoulos, probably the most famous Aristotelian in Italy.32 He was born in Constantinople in about 1415 and, like so many Byzantine scholars, sought asylum in Italy after the fall of the city in 1453. For fifteen years (1456–71) he was public lecturer at Florence’s university, the Studio, where he discoursed on the Aristotelian texts – the Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, Analytics, etc., all of which he translated into Latin. He was a vital figure in the Renaissance re-evaluation of Aristotle, which stressed the analytic, scientific side of his philosophy, as opposed to the metaphysics which had been grist to the mill of medieval scholarship. Argyropoulos influenced a whole generation of Florentine intellectuals – Ficino, Landino and Poliziano were all his students and admirers, as was Lorenzo de’ Medici. In 1477, after a spell in Rome, he resumed his post at the Studio, but his star was fading and he was ousted; he left Florence in 1481. Leonardo’s note belongs to this last declining phase of his influence. Like Toscanelli, another ageing guru, Argyropoulos was a pioneer of clear-sighted empiricism. All ‘researchers of immortal wisdom’ were grateful to him, wrote Poliziano, for chasing the ‘mists and glooms’ from their eyes.
On the same sheet as these names appear, Leonardo drew a sketch of a clock using compressed air, and this in turn evoked some morose-seeming thoughts about the passage of time and the fear of ‘this miserable life’ passing ‘without leaving some memory of ourselves in the minds of mortals’. This gives his list of scholars and scientists an air of resolution, a determination to seek out and cultivate these important men, to try to do something memorable so that his ‘course should not be sped in vain’.
Lifting huge weights, ripping out the iron bars from windows, raising and channelling water – these are the first aspirations of Leonardo the young technologist: a pitting of human and mechanical ingenuity against the brute forces of gravity; a harnessing of natural energies. In the hydraulic devices and Archimedean screws we find the genesis of one of the great energy principles of Leonardian physics – the spiral, or, as Leonardo calls it, the coclea (snail-shell), in which resides the force of screws, drills, propellers and turbines, and, in nature, tornadoes and whirlpools. The vortical power of water is eloquently described in Alberti’s treatise on civil engineering, De re aedificatoria (which Leonardo certainly knew): ‘The rotation of waters or whirlpools is like a liquid drill, which nothing is hard enough to resist.’33 The force of the vortex fascinated Leonardo – a fascination expressed most powerfully in the late drawings known as the ‘Deluge’ series, but already present, in miniature, in the cascading ringlets of the Ginevra.
Study of currents and whirlpools, c. 1508–10.
And there is something else in these rudimentary technical folios: the ultimate defiance of gravity. There is a scruffy-looking page among the Leonardo drawings in the Uffizi, dated c. 1478–80.34 On the verso of it is the earliest extant drawing of a Leonardo flying-machine. It is no more than a doodle, but quite unmistakable. It is seen from directly above or directly below; it has reticulated wings like a bat’s, a fanned-out tail like a bird’s, and a cockpit or framework shaped rather like a kayak. To the side of it is a more detailed drawing of a mechanism which would manoeuvre the wing by means of a handle operated by the pilot. The restricted movement of the handle suggests that this is essentially a hang-glider (as opposed to later designs that have mechanisms to make the wings actually flap up and down). This is confirmed on the other side of the sheet, in the upper left-hand corner, by a single zigzag line with the note ‘Questo è il modo del chalare degli uccelli’ – ‘This is the method by which birds descend.’ The line shows a bird’s descent as an angled fall punctuated with short upthrusts to break the momentum.
The first flying-machine, c. 1478–80.
This brief sentence and the scarcely perceptible line which illustrates it constitute Leonardo’s first known pronouncement on the mechanics of avian flight, already linked – as the machine on the verso clearly shows – to the dream of human flight: his ‘destiny’, as he would later put it, remembering or inventing that kite which flew down to him in his cradle.