Biographies & Memoirs

Ways of Escape

In 1485 Milan was in the midst of a three-year epidemic of bubonic plague. Leonardo had had some experience of the plague in Florence: there was an outbreak there in 1479, but it had subsided after a few weeks. This was far worse. According to some estimates, possibly exaggerated, it killed nearly a third of the urban population. We know the imagery: the ravaged neighbourhoods, the foggy air, the corpses carted off to mass burials. Hysterical rhetoric from the pulpits. Fraught self-examination in search of the glandular swellings or ‘buboes’ which are the tokens of infection. On 16 March 1485 there was a total eclipse of the sun, ominously interpreted. Leonardo viewed it through a large sheet of perforated paper, as recommended in a brief note headed, ‘How to watch the eclipsed sun without damage to the eyes’.24

All through this epidemic Leonardo was working on the Virgin of the Rocks: there is no reason to assume he was anywhere else than Milan, in the de Predis studio near the Porta Ticinese. We know Leonardo’s fastidiousness: a man with the scent of rosewater on his fingers. The foul smells assail him, as do the teeming crowds and the infections they carry in his own words, ‘this congregation of people herded together like goats, one behind the other, filling every corner with stench and spreading pestilence and death’.25The painting is a charmed space from which all this is excluded: a cool stony grotto miles away from anything, conferring the benedictions of the wilderness.

Around this time he wrote down a recipe for a medicine – it is perhaps a plague nostrum:

Take seed of medicinal darnel…

spirits of wine in cotton

some white henbane

some teasel

seed and root of aconite.

Dry it all. Mix this powder with camphor and it is made.26

Out of this cauldron of the plague, and given urgency by it, come the earliest of Leonardo’s concerted thoughts about the shape and practice of the ‘ideal city’. This was a topic much in vogue in the Renaissance. Alberti and Filarete had discoursed on it, and the great Roman architect Vitruvius before them; we can imagine Leonardo conversing on the subject with his learned friend Donato Bramante. His notes and drawings, dated about 1487, show an airy, geometric, futuristic city of piazzas and loggias and tunnels and canals (‘futuristic’ in that curious cul-de-sac sense: the future as it was envisaged in the past). The city would be built on two levels – the upper level for pedestrians, social, aesthetic, akin to the ‘pedestrian areas’ in modern cities, while the lower level, giving directly on to a network of canals, would be for the movement of goods and animals, for traders and warehouses, and for the dwellings of what he calls ‘ordinary’ people. The streets are wide, the height of the façades regulated, the chimneys tall to disperse smoke high above the roofs. He recommends spiral staircases in the public buildings, because square staircases have dark corners which people use as urinals. Improved sanitation was much on his mind, no doubt in response to the plague. He has some thoughts on the ideal lavatory as well – not quite a flushing toilet, as invented by Sir John Harington a century later, but well appointed: ‘The seat of the latrine should be able to swivel like the turnstile in a convent and return to its initial position by the use of a counterweight. The ceiling should have many holes in it so that one can breathe.’27

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Notes and drawings on a theme of the ‘ideal city’.

It is also at this time that his thoughts turn again to the compelling motif of human flight:

See how the beating of its wings against the air supports a heavy eagle in the highly rarefied air… Observe also how the air in motion over the sea fills the swelling sails and drives heavily laden ships… So a man with wings large enough, and duly attached, might learn to overcome the resistance of the air, and conquer and subjugate it, and raise himself upon it.28

The passage continues with his description and sketch of a parachute: ‘If a man has a canopy of coated linen 12 braccia [24 feet] wide and 12 long, he can throw himself down from any great height and not hurt himself.’ This suggests he was now seriously considering the possibility of manned flight: why else would he be thinking about a parachute?

Leonardo’s pyramid-shaped parachute remained on the drawing-board until 26 June 2000, when an English skydiver, Adrian Nicholas, test-jumped it from 10,000 feet over the Kruger National Park in southern Africa. The parachute was made almost exactly to Leonardo’s specifications, except that cotton canvas was used instead of linen. The canopy, lashed to pinewood poles, weighed nearly 200 pounds – about forty times heavier than conventional modern parachutes – but despite this weight the drop went perfectly. Nicholas fell 7,000 feet in five minutes: a slow descent. He cut himself loose for the final descent by conventional parachute – the one flaw in the Leonardo model being that it was not collapsible, so there was a danger of the whole contraption landing on top of him. ‘I had a feeling of gentle elation and celebration,’ said Nicholas afterwards. ‘I could not resist saying, “Mr Da Vinci, you kept your promise, I thank you very much.” ’29

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Leonardo’s parachute: sketch and specifications in the Codex Atlanticus, c. 1485.

These are ways of mental escape from the plague-ridden city – the benevolent wilderness of the Virgin of the Rocks, the airy boulevards of the utopian city, the wide open spaces of the skyway. But there are things a man cannot escape, things within himself, and another product of this same period is a curious and revealing series of allegorical drawings now at Christ Church College, Oxford.30 They have two themes – the inevitability of pain after pleasure, and the assaults of envy on virtue – but these themes tend to blur into one another, and one feels that the drawings are really about the same thing: the fundamental dualism of experience, the negative that every positive must have, the inevitable ‘other’ which lurks and destroys. They are rather crudely drawn: there seems to be a sense of urgency in them.

Pleasure and Pain are represented as a hybrid male creature with a single body sprouting two heads and two pairs of arms. The caption says, ‘Pleasure and Pain show themselves as twins, because the one is never without the other, as if they were stuck together [appiccati].’ Pain is an old man with a beard; Pleasure is young and long-haired. The drawing thus provides a commentary on the many sketches and drawings Leonardo made, at different times and in different styles, of an old man (often the so-called ‘nutcracker-man’, with the jutting chin and imploded lips suggesting toothlessness) facing a young, pretty, curly-haired man. Two captions beneath the figure tell us that one foot of this hybrid body stands on gold, the other in mud.

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Allegory of Pleasure and Pain.

Another part of the text reads, ‘If you take pleasure know that he has behind him one who will bring you tribulation and repentance.’ Leonardo can never resist a pun, and this tribulation (tribolatione) is represented by the mysterious little spiked objects that fall from the old man’s right hand, which are a weapon known in Italian as tribolo. In English it is called a ‘caltrop’, i.e. a heel-trap (Latin calx = heel). They feature in a drawing of the later 1480s, captioned ‘triboli di ferro’, with a text explaining how they are to be scattered on the ground at the bottom of ditches to impede the advance of the enemy. Commenting on this passage, Count Giulio Perro recalled that ‘Some years ago [he was writing in 1881], when they were building the new riding school at the castle of Milan, they found two of them, which I saw myself, and they were precisely the same as those described and drawn by Leonardo.’31 This pun relates the drawing to Leonardo’s activities (or wished-for activities) as a military engineer.

Pain lets fall the little spikes of tribulation in one hand, and in the other he brandishes a branch which presumably represents the flagellum of repentance. Pleasure’s action mimics him: he drops a trail of coins out of one hand, for pleasure is expensive (remember the Modena joke: ‘I have to pay 10 gold ducats just to get my cock in’), and he holds a reed in the other. Leonardo’s explanation of the reed is fascinating, because it is one of those rather rare double-layered texts – not unlike the note about the kite – where an ostensible subject-matter suddenly parts to reveal another, more personal subject entirely. He explains that Pleasure is shown ‘with a reed in his right hand, which is useless and has no strength, and the wounds it inflicts are poisonous’. This is the overt emblematic meaning, but it shades into a kind of reminiscence or reverie as follows:

In Tuscany they use reeds as a support for beds, to signify that it is here that one has vain dreams, and here that a great part of one’s life is consumed, and here that so much useful time is wasted, that is in the morning, when the mind is composed and rested, and the body is fit to begin new labours, and then so many vain pleasures are taken, both by the mind, imagining to itself impossible things, and by the body taking those pleasures which are often the cause of the failing of life [mancamento di vita]: and this is why they use the reed for this purpose.

One can assume that the use of woven reeds in Tuscan beds was for practical rather than symbolic reasons, and that the moral he draws and elaborates in this rather breathless syntax is more personal. This is a moment of confession: he has ‘vain dreams’, i.e. sexual fantasies, when he lies in bed in the mornings; he feels bad about it because he should be up and about doing things, and perhaps because the nature of the fantasies is homosexual. That the phallic stem in Pleasure’s hand is only a weak and ‘useless’ reed is pretty clearly a symbol of detumescence, which the tenor of the text might suggest is post-masturbatory rather than post-coital. The note of infection – ‘the wounds it inflicts are poisonous’ – completes the sense of self-disgust which has welled up around this image, and seems to connect it once more to the poisonous infections of the Milan plague.

The ‘Virtue and Envy’ drawings lead in the same direction: they express the same idea that these opposite qualities are intrinsic to one another, and they do so with an imagery that tends towards the erotic. ‘Virtue’, one remembers, does not just mean moral goodness: it means that strength (literally ‘manliness’, since ‘virtue’ derives from the Latin vir) of spirit and intellect which tends towards excellence. Virtue, broadly, is one’s higher or better self, in all its manifestations; Envy is what attacks and degrades and compromises it. Like Pain and Pleasure, Virtue and Envy are shown as two entwined bodies. The text beneath them reads, ‘The moment Virtue is born, she gives birth to Envy against herself, for you will sooner find a body without a shadow than virtue without envy.’ In the drawing, Envy is being stabbed in the eye with an olive-branch and in her ear with a branch of laurel or myrtle. This, Leonardo explains, is ‘to signify that victory and truth offend her’. Though the text describes Virtue as female (‘she gives birth to Envy’), this is not at all clear in the drawing – the figure has no visible breasts – and the choreography of the figures suggests coition as much as parturition: indeed, it is similar to a famous anatomical drawing at Windsor showing a hemisected couple in coitus.32

In another drawing two female figures are shown riding a giant toad: a caption identifies them as Envy and Ingratitude; behind them hurries the skeletal figure of Death with a scythe – again one senses the plague ethos. Envy is shooting an arrow on the point of which is fixed a human tongue: a recognized image of ‘false report’. Another drawing has Envy riding on a skeleton. In both these drawings she is depicted as an old woman with hanging breasts (‘lean and wizened’), but she wears ‘a mask upon her face of fair appearance’. This imagery of the riding woman has sexual overtones. It echoes a curious early sketch of Leonardo’s, in which a young woman with painted cheeks is riding on the back of an old man. This drawing is generally called Aristotle and Phyllis.33 It is known that the philosopher Aristotle married a much younger woman, the niece of a friend, and though he was only about forty at the time, the story was elaborated into an idea of the aged philosopher besotted by the nubile young beauty. ‘Phyllis riding on the back of Aristotle’, says A. E. Popham, is ‘one of those subjects dear to medieval cynicism, typifying the subjugation of intellect by love. It belongs to the same cycle of stories as that of Virgil in the basket and Samson and Delilah.’34 On the back of the sketch Leonardo writes a string of words: ‘mistresses pleasure pain love jealousy happiness envy fortune penitence’.

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Allegory of Envy riding on Death.

This sketch of Aristotle and Phyllis may be a few years earlier than the Oxford allegories, but we are in the same mental terrain. The subject-matter of the sketch is intrinsically erotic; the allegories are more tortuously eroticized. In these drawings there is a sense of entrapment or entropy – all momentum will be nullified by its opposite; everything put together will fall apart; the gold will return back to mud. A man strives upward, but he is always dragged back by the contrary pull, which may be the envy and malice of others, but which is more critically something inside himself: the fatal, guilty, energy-sapping weakness or ‘infection’ of his sexuality.

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