It was probably on a day in 1487 that Leonardo availed himself of some spare paper from a discarded cathedral ledger and, on a pair of blank versos, drafted a picturesque story about a giant in Africa.50 He addressed it to the traveller and epistler Benedetto Dei, one of the Florentines about the Milanese court. Dei left Milan in 1487, which is the sort of date suggested by the handwriting of the draft: the piece may have been intended as a gift or presentation to him. Perhaps it was recited at some farewell do, with Zoroastro suitably accoutred in the role of the giant; or perhaps, like so many of Leonardo’s ghiribizzi, or caprices, it never got any further than this fragmentary draft. It begins:
Dear Benedetto Dei – To give you news of things here in the East, you should know that in the month of June there appeared a giant who comes from the deserts of Libya. This giant was born on Mount Atlas, and was black, and fought against Artaxerxes, and against Egyptians and Arabs, Medes and Persians. He lived in the sea and fed on whales, sea-serpents and ships.
It goes on to describe an earth-shaking battle between the giant and the human inhabitants of the region, involving much Gulliverish description of the tininess of the people, ‘scurrying furiously over his body like ants over the trunk of a fallen oak’. Awakened by the ‘smarting’ of their stabs, the giant utters a ‘growl like a terrifying clap of thunder’ and ‘lifting one of his hands to his face finds it to be full of men, clinging to its hairs’.
Richter glosses it as a ‘piece of railery’; we would perhaps call it a ‘spoof’ – an obviously fantastical account dressed up as a traveller’s newsletter. Most travel narratives at this time were written in the epistolary form. It is thus a joke about the dubious veracity of such accounts, and perhaps a particular jibe – a good-natured one – at Benedetto Dei as a purveyor of such tall tales. The setting ties in with Benedetto’s own African travels, accounts of which he doubtless seasoned with the traditional dash of pepper and salt.
Leonardo may have had in mind the legend of Antaeus, the giant killed by Hercules, who was also said to come from Libya. More particularly, the giant is a fearsome caricature of the African Negro – his ‘black face most horrible’, his ‘bloodshot eyes’, his ‘wide nostrils’, his ‘thick lips’. There is no doubt that Leonardo is cheerfully indulging racial stereotypes here. Whether he is parodying hyperbolic travel-writers or expressing some unresolved feelings of his own is hard to tell. Black Africans were exotic but by no means unknown in Italy; they were painted by many Renaissance artists – especially in Adoration scenes, where they accompany the stranger-kings or magi – though not by Leonardo. They were associated with sexual prowess, as in the bawdy Il Manganello, listed among Leonardo’s books in c. 1492, in which a rich merchant’s wife admires her ‘Ethiopian’ servant’s gran manganello (large tool).51 The name ‘Moor’ attached to Ludovico probably included an overtone of sexual power; the word then meant black African rather than (or as well as) Maghribi Arab-African – Shakespeare’s Othello, undoubtedly black, is the ‘Moor of Venice’.
This Negroid monster ends up eating everyone, and trampling down their houses, and so Leonardo’s little spoof links to that theme of cataclysmic destruction which is one of his recurrent obsessions, most famously expressed in the ‘Deluge’ drawings. The story ends with this rather haunting sentence: ‘I do not know what to say or what to do, for everywhere I seem to find myself swimming head downwards through that huge throat and remaining buried in that great belly, in the confusion of death.’ This evokes the old short-story trick of the narrator getting finally swept up in the events he describes – in this case being devoured by the giant – but it has also a dream-like quality expressed in the floating syntax (‘everywhere I seem to find myself swimming’), and one has a sense that this is more than just a narrative device, that Leonardo is accessing something interior to him: a nightmare of being swallowed and submerged whose meaning may well be found in the last word of the sentence. One remembers that ‘prophecy’ of Leonardo’s which turns out to be a kind of dream-notebook: flying and falling, speaking with animals, incestuous desires.
There is another picturesque black giant in a later notebook. This is less interesting, because the passage was transcribed from another book, Antonio Pucci’s Queen of the Orient, though Leonardo’s desire to copy this particular passage is itself noteworthy. His transcription is not exact. I particularly like the change in the first line: where Pucci describes the giant as ‘blacker than coal [carbone]’ Leonardo alters this to ‘blacker than a calabrone’.52 A calabrone is a big black flying beetle, still common in Tuscany: within the insect kingdom it is indeed a giant. He has added a single syllable and transformed a cliché into a precise, concrete and poetically apt simile worthy of his old friend Il Pistoiese.
We have an idea of Leonardo’s growing assurance with language, with literary effects, with the nuts and bolts of narrative. The story of the giant, though a bagatelle in itself, shows these skills. It belongs to the period in the later 1480s when he begins to acquire a basic library of prose and poetry, and when he becomes a habitual keeper of notebooks. The latter are certainly not literary. The language in them is work-related – descriptions, observations, problems, solutions, lists – but has none the less an ideal of lucidity and concision, a consciousness of writing as a vital supplement to the visual language of which he was already a master. Those books of grammar and rhetoric on his shelf perhaps relate more to his scientific studies, his role as explainer, than to his altogether vaguer literary aspirations.
For Leonardo, writing in the literary sense remains peripheral. (Somewhat paradoxically, one of his favourite literary exercises was the paragone, or comparison, between painting and poetry, in which painting was always argued to be superior; this debate forms part of the introduction to the Trattato della pittura.) He cultivates literature, it seems, principally as a social or courtly skill. In Florence he keeps the company of poets like Cammelli and Bellincioni, but his own achievements in that area are confined – as far as we know – to his skills as an improvvisatore, a song-and-dance man with his lira da braccio. The letter to Dei belongs within the same sort of sphere – an entertainment, a jeu d’esprit, probably written for a specific occasion. Its beautiful last sentence is an unexpected gem: a little coup de théâtre which ends the performance on a haunting, unsettling note. I see this as the typical mode of Leonardo as writer – lowbrow formats, plain-speaking style, moments of unexpected poetry.
Leonardo’s taste for puns and word-games is part of his interestingly limited view of the writer, and there is a fascinating page of the late 1480s which belongs precisely to this stratum of literary trickery, and which again affords certain oblique glimpses into his mental processes. It is a large sheet in the Windsor collection, crammed with what Kenneth Clark rather quaintly calls ‘puzzle writing’ – what are more generally called rebuses or cryptograms.53
A rebus is a word or name or sentence expressed pictorially: a visual code. Though the game is to avoid words, it is of course a thoroughly verbal game, since the solution of the puzzle depends entirely on linguistic connections and often on double meanings. The word ‘rebus’ may be derived from carnival newsletters headed ‘De rebus quae geruntur’ (‘concerning things that have been happening’, i.e. current events), which avoided libel by using pictorial and hieroglyphic symbols in place of names; or more soberly from the explanatory formula ‘non verbis sed rebus’ (‘not with words but with things’). There had long existed in Italy a fondness for these punning cryptograms – the heraldic rebus representing the name of a family was particularly popular – though the more sophisticated rule-book for composing emblems and imprese had not yet been formulated.
Part of the large sheet of rebuses at Windsor.
Leonardo manages to squeeze a total of 154 rebuses on to the two sides of the Windsor sheet. (Some other fragments of picture-writing, of the same period, bring the total to something like 200.) 54 The pictographs themselves are hurriedly drawn: the finesse is in the mental ingenuity. Sometimes a picture alone is used, but often there is a combination of pictures and words or letters (not a ‘pure’ rebus, therefore). The sheet seems to be a working draft, in which ideas are tried out; some of the ropier ones were doubtless discarded. Beneath each rebus is written the key, the punning solution to the visual riddle. Thus the solution to the rebus showing a stook of corn and a rock is gran calamità, a great calamity, via puns on grano = grain and calamita = a magnetic stone. An o and a pear (pera) = opera, works. A face (faccia) and a donkey (asino) = fa casino, a slang phrase meaning someone is making a total hash of things. Some of the puns recur as he moves into whole sentences – thus ‘if the’ (se la) is always represented by a saddle (sella), and ‘happy’ (felice) by a fern (felce). These have become part of a reusable picture vocabulary.
There is a sense here of Leonardo as intellectual court-jester – these are party pieces, pen-and-ink entertainments. One imagines him hovering, the enigmatic quizmaster, as the courtiers struggle to guess the answer. There would also be a practical spin-off, since pictographs were popular as architectural decoration. According to the Milanese architect Cesare Cesariano, the Sforza castle was decorated with such allegorical hieroglyphs, though these are no longer to be seen. Leonardo’s friend Bramante later designed an inscription in honour of Pope Julius II for the Vatican Belvedere, in which ‘Julio II Pont Maximo’ is spelt out in carved pictographs. Thus the rebus-skill Leonardo is practising here has also a practical application for the aspiring architect of the mid-1480s.
Practical or not, there is a touch of the psychiatrist’s ‘free association’ games in the rebus. His mind is roving between different levels of meaning, between pictures and letters, enjoying the semiotic frissons out of which come strange hybrid meanings. Some of the phrases he comes up with have a certain psychological piquancy: ‘siamo scarico di vergogna’ – ‘we have got rid of all shame’; ‘ora sono fritto’ – ‘now I am done for [literally fried]’. And the psychiatrist might raise a momentary eyebrow at that tiny scribbled self-portrait I mentioned earlier, apropos the lion in St Jerome – the lion in flames = leone + ardere = Leonardo. As a self-identifying pun or hieroglyph it seems rather bleak: the lion, axiomatically noble and powerful, is consumed and destroyed. We seem to be once more in the agitated sphere of the Oxford allegories. Even here, in these courtly quiz-games, we find that words open up chinks of Leonardo’s inner life.
Also designed for courtly entertainment were Leonardo’s riddling ‘prophecies’, some of which I have already quoted. One of them has what amounts to a stage-direction added to it: ‘Say it in a form of frenzy or craziness, as if from a madness in the brain.’55They were delivered, in other words, in a kind of mock-oracular ecstasy or furor. An obvious candidate for this performance would be Zoroastro, one of whose nicknames was Indovino, ‘the Prophet’ or ‘Soothsayer’; the word has an overtone of mystic hocus-pocus (cf.indovinello, a riddle) which fits these joke predictions.
The humour of the prophecies lies in their ingeniously anti-climactic explanations. Mostly they turn on simple little twists of meaning, not unlike the visual puns of the rebuses – those who will ‘walk on top of the trees’ are men wearing wooden clogs, and those who will ‘walk on the skins of great beasts’ are men wearing shoes of ox-leather, and those who will ‘go as fast as the quickest of creatures by means of the stars’ are men using spurs, which are star-shaped. The ‘bodies’ which will ‘grow when the head is taken from them, and diminish when the head is put back’ are pillows. The animal which will be ‘seen with its tongue up another’s arse’ refers to the butcher’s custom of wrapping up pigs’ and calves’ tongues in entrails.56 These are the meanings which the audience has to guess.
But there is also an element of double-bluff: the prophecies are often pungently expressive little texts, which linger in the mind after they have been explained and deflated. Like the spoof newsletter to Dei, they stray into an imagery of cataclysm and violence. They also express an idea of Nature as the wounded, exploited victim of man’s rapacity:
There will be many who will flay their mother and turn her skin inside out. [Those who till the land]
Men will severely beat what gives them life. [Those who thresh grain]
The times of Herod will return, when innocent children shall be taken from their nurses, and will die with great wounds at the hands of cruel men. [Kids]
With merciless blows many little children will be taken from the arms of their mothers and thrown to the ground and then torn to pieces. [Walnuts, olives etc.]57
This ecologically compassionate view of nature is also found in Leonardo’s fables, which were probably also written for recital at court. As far as can be established, the thirty or so fables that survive are original compositions.58 They emulate Aesop, but are not borrowed from him. Leonardo may also have known Alberti’s collection, the Apologhi (not published till 1568, but doubtless available in manuscript). The fables are full of an animistic sense of the landscape as a living thing. It is not only animals that are given a voice, but also trees and plants and stones. They become sentient creatures, capable of feeling pain – a pain constantly inflicted on them by man. A chestnut-tree is envisaged as a protective parent whose ‘sweet children’ – the nuts – are torn from her. The ‘hapless willow’ is ‘maimed and lopped and ruined’. Harvest is wounding. Here is a very short fable about a walnut-tree, almost a gnomic little prose-poem: ‘Il noce mostrando sopra una strada ai viandante la richezza de sua frutta, ogni omo lapidava.’ (The nut-tree by the roadside showed off to travellers the richness of its fruit; everyone stoned it.) 59
Leonardo liked jokes, and he wrote down a number of them – a conventional activity to which no special significance should be attached: the zibaldoni, or commonplace-books, of the day are full of jokes. The written-down joke must be considered a pale reflection of the told joke. One imagines Leonardo’s delivery of them to be rather deadpan, false-solemn. The pleasantness of his conversation, as enthused over by Vasari, suggests a man who could be verbally entertaining. I have suggested there is also an opposite impression, of a certain taciturnity and aloofness, but for all that, being funny and making people laugh – and laughing himself – was a part of Leonardo’s life. It is perhaps no accident that his most famous painting is known in Italy as La Gioconda – The Jocund [or indeed Joking] Woman.
Leonardo’s jokes are of variable quality: some of them turn rather tediously on puns, and one or two of them seem to have lost whatever point they had down some lexical cul-de-sac. Some are satirical – particularly anti-clerical – and some are dirty, in what we would think of as a robust, Chaucerian vein. Both the satire and the bawdy have antecedents in the tales of Boccaccio and his imitators, and more immediately in the Renaissance collections of facetiae – pleasantries – pre-eminently those of Poggio Bracciolini, some of which are quite salty.
Jokes appear scattered throughout Leonardo’s notebooks and manuscripts. Here are a few.
A man was trying to prove on the authority of Pythagoras that he had lived in this world before, and another man would not accept his argument. So the first man said, ‘As a sign that I have been here before, I remember that you were a miller.’ And the other, thinking this was said to mock him, replied, ‘You are right, for now I remember you were the ass which carried the flour for me.’
A painter was asked why he produced such beautiful figures, though they were dead things, and yet produced such ugly children. To which he replied that he made his paintings by day and his children by night.
A woman was washing clothes, and her feet were very red with cold. A priest who was passing by was amazed by this, and asked her where the redness came from, to which the woman immediately replied that it was caused by a fire she had underneath her. Then the priest took in hand that part of him which made him more priest than nun, and drawing near to her, asked her very politely if she would be kind enough to light his candle.
If Petrarch was so madly in love with bay-leaves it’s because they taste so good with sausage and thrush.60
This last joke puns on lauro, the bay-tree, and Laura, to whom Petrarch’s love-poems are addressed.