All our knowledge has its foundation in our senses…
Trivulzio Codex, fol. 20v
I have tried to piece together some fragments of Leonardo’s experience as a boy growing up in and around Vinci. There are the emotional currents whose patterns one can only guess at – the broken family, the absent father, the troubling dreams, the mother on whose love everything is staked – and there is the daily reality of the Tuscan countryside with which these emotions become somehow entwined, so that years later some hard-to-grasp meaning remains encoded in the flight-patterns of a kite, in the smell of freshly pressed oil, in the weave of a wicker basket, in the shapes of the landscape. These are the few recoverable parts of Leonardo’s sentimental education: things which ‘seem to be his destiny’, and which echo on through his adult life as a ‘painter-philosopher’.
Of his more formal education – or lack of it – we know very little. Vasari is the only early biographer to touch on the subject, and his comments are brief and circumstantial. He describes Leonardo as a brilliant but unpredictable pupil:
He would have been very proficient at his early lessons if he had not been so volatile and unstable. He set himself to learn many things only to abandon them almost immediately. When he began to learn arithmetic, in a few months he made such progress that he bombarded the master who was teaching him with questions and problems, and very often outwitted him.
Vasari also mentions that Leonardo studied music, and that, whatever else he was doing, ‘he never left off drawing and sculpting, which suited his imagination better than anything.’ Nothing in this suggests any specific knowledge on Vasari’s part: it conforms to a general idea of Leonardo’s personality and accomplishments. Vasari assumes that Leonardo had a teacher, but the word maestro does not convey whether this was a schoolmaster or a private tutor. There was probably a scuola dell’abaco (an ‘abacus school’) in Vinci; the conventional age to attend was around ten or eleven.
Leonardo famously described himself as ‘omo sanza lettere’, an ‘unlettered man’.66 He means, of course, not that he was illiterate, but that he had not been educated in the scholarly language of Latin. He had not received the kind of schooling or tuition which led to university, and so to the study of the seven ‘liberal arts’ (so-called precisely because they were not tied to the necessity of learning a trade) – grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. He had followed instead the course of practical apprenticeship. This was certainly an education, though it took place in a workshop rather than an ancient university, it taught skills rather than intellectual accomplishments, and it was conducted in Italian rather than Latin.67 Leonardo later embarked on a crash course in Latin – a notebook filled with Latin vocabulary dates from the late 1480s – but he remained wedded to the vernacular as a means of discourse no matter what the subject. Late in life he wrote, ‘I have so many words in my mother tongue that I should rather complain of not understanding things well than of lacking words with which to express the ideas of my mind.’68 Though he makes some excursions into consciously literary modes, the overall tone of his style, as preserved in his notebooks, is spare, practical, colloquial, laconic. In his paintings he is a master of nuance, but as a writer he tends towards the flat and colourless. He is (to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s) a ‘carpenter of words’.
This distinction between university education and artisan training should not be taken too rigidly. The whole trend of Renaissance art was to narrow the gap, to stress that the artist could and should belong to the ranks of scholars, philosophers and scientists. An early advocate of this was Lorenzo Ghiberti, the master of the Florentine Baptistery doors, who writes in his Commentaries (1450), ‘It is fitting that the sculptor and painter have a solid knowledge of the following liberal arts – grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory, design, and arithmetic.’ Leon Battista Alberti draws up a similar list of desirable accomplishments in his De re aedificatoria. Both writers are echoing the precepts of the great Roman architect Vitruvius.69All these subjects, and more, became Leonardo’s province – he is the epitome of the multi-disciplinary ‘Renaissance man’.
When Leonardo styles himself an omo sanza lettere he is being sardonic about his lack of formal education, but he is not devaluing himself. On the contrary, he is stating his independence. He is proud of his unletteredness: he has achieved his knowledge by observation and experience rather than receiving it from others as a pre-existent opinion. Leonardo is a ‘disciple of experience’, a collector of evidence – ‘better a small certainty than a big lie’.70 He cannot quote the learned experts, the retailers of ipse dixitwisdom, ‘but I will quote something far greater and more worthy: experience, the mistress of their masters’. Those who merely ‘quote’ – in the sense of follow or imitate as well as cite – are ‘gente gonfiata’: they are, literally, puffed or pumped up by second-hand information; they are ‘trumpeters and reciters of the works of others’.71
Against the second-hand he opposes ‘Nature’, which in this context means both the physical phenomena of the material world and the innate powers and principles which lie behind them: all that is studied in ‘natural philosophy’. ‘Those who take for their standard anything but Nature, the mistress of all masters, weary themselves in vain.’ The trope of Nature as female mistress, or maestra, is conventional but seems to have had a particular allure for Leonardo, who repeats it throughout the notebooks. ‘She’ has a power greater than the masculine greatness of reasoning and learning. In painting too, he says, the painter should never imitate another’s manner, because if he does he will be ‘a grandson rather than a son of Nature’.72 He commends Giotto as the classic self-taught artist: ‘Giotto the Florentine… was not content with imitating the works of Cimabue, his master. Born in mountain solitudes inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by Nature to his art, he began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats which he was tending.’73 This passage – one of the few in which Leonardo refers admiringly to an earlier artist – has resonances with his own lack of formal education.
Thus ‘unlettered’, for Leonardo, means also ‘uncluttered’: the mind is not filled with the lumber of precepts. It belongs with a crucial Leonardian idea of clarity: of seeing the visual evidence of the world before him with an accuracy and insight that lead into the heart of things. For Leonardo the key organ in understanding the world is not the brain but the eye: ‘The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding may most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature,’74 he writes in one of his many paragoni, or comparisons, designed to show the superiority of painting over those supposedly more gentlemanly arts like poetry. His thousands of pages of manuscript are written in despite of his distrust of language as something that interposes and equivocates, something that can often obscure the messages which Nature imparts. A telling comment is found in the Codex Atlanticus, discussing the design of machinery: ‘When you want to achieve a certain purpose in a mechanism, do not involve yourself in the confusion of many different parts, but search for the most concise method: do not behave like those who, not knowing how to express something in the appropriate vocabulary, approach it by a roundabout route of confused long-windedness.’75 Here language itself is associated with confusion and lack of clarity: words tangle things up, they are an over-elaborate mechanism. It is possible that this carries a social overtone of Leonardo as a man who lacks conversational facility, a man prone to gnomic utterances and discomfiting, abstracted silences. This would run counter to the early biographers, who make him a charming conversationalist, but I wonder if that was more a performance than a natural proclivity.
Vasari gives us a picture of a boy whose deep interest in art underlay his more fitful studies in subjects like mathematics: ‘He never left off drawing and sculpting, which suited his imagination.’ Again one wants to resist the idea of the genius in a vacuum, and ask what kind of artistic education he had. We have no idea of any tuition he had before his apprenticeship in Florence, though there is an interesting speculation that his grandmother Lucia may have contributed. As mentioned, her family owned a pottery at Toia di Bacchereto, near Carmignano, a few miles east of Vinci: the kiln was later inherited by Leonardo’s father. The maiolica ceramics they produced were well known in Florence; one presumes a high quality of workmanship. Some geometric patterns of Leonardo’s recall the tracery designs used in ceramics, and may hint at an early interest awoken by visits to his grandmother’s family.76
We can say something of the artistic influences that percolated into the provincial world of Vinci. In the church of Santa Croce, where Leonardo was christened, stood a fine polychrome wood sculpture of Mary Magdalene. It probably dates from the late 1450s: during Leonardo’s childhood years it would have been a recent and probably costly purchase. It is visibly influenced by Donatello’s famous Magdalene sculpture (c. 1456), and may be the work of a pupil of Donatello’s such as Neri di Bicci or Romualdo de Candeli. This powerful piece might be cited as Leonardo’s first discernible contact with High Renaissance art. Another very Donatellesque work is the Madonna of the Welcome, a marble bas-relief in the church of Santa Maria del Pruno in nearby Orbignano.77Via these provincial imitations comes the formative influence of Donatello: an ageing figure from the heyday of the early Renaissance, a former colleague of Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. His sculptures – expressive, tense, saturated in the spirit of classical antiquity – influenced all who followed, including Leonardo’s teacher, Verrocchio, who was primarily a sculptor. Donatello died in Florence in 1466, around the time of Leonardo’s arrival in the city.
Further afield Leonardo might also have seen the magnificent early-fourteenth-century bas-reliefs by Giovanni Pisano on the pulpit of Sant’Andrea in Pistoia – a city where his aunt Violante lived and where his father had business interests. It is also very likely he visited the river-port of Empoli, the nearest town of any size to Vinci, and a transit point to Florence. We know that Accattabriga’s father went there, as his debt to the town for unpaid tolls is mentioned in one of the family’s tax returns. At Empoli the young Leonardo could have seen paintings by artists of the stature of Masolino and Agnolo Gaddi.
Here too he would see the great sweep of the Arno river – an educational experience, one might say, in view of his deep interest in the principles and patterns of water-flow – and on a sandbank not far from the town the remains of the ill-fated Badalone, the enormous paddle-wheeled barge built by Filippo Brunelleschi to transport marble up to Florence.78 It ran aground on its maiden voyage, depositing 100 tons of finest white marble into the Arno silt. This occurred in 1428, thus within living memory: a resounding failure, but a heroic one. Brunelleschi was a giant of the early Renaissance, a visionary architect and engineer, and the rotting hulk on the river-bend brings a whisper of grandeur from a world far different from Vinci.
Consideration of Leonardo’s education tends away from any idea of formal schooling – he was certainly not taught Latin; he had a lifelong preference for first-hand experience over book-learning; and his first awareness of art is likely to have been gained more from looking at sculptures and carvings in local churches than from any specific training in artistic principles.
One other feature of Leonardo argues strongly for his education as informal and largely autodidactic – his handwriting. The reasons for Leonardo’s ‘mirror-writing’ have been much debated. (It is correctly mirror-script, rather than just writing backwards. Not only does the whole line of script move from right to left, but each letter is formed in reverse; for instance, a Leonardo d looks like a normal b.) There is certainly a strong psychological element of secrecy in this – it is not exactly a code, but it is a kind of veiling which makes the reading of his manuscripts an intrinsically taxing experience. We know that he was continually on guard against the pilfering of his ideas and designs.
Two signatures. ‘Leonardo Vinci disscepolo della sperientia’, written in his mirror-script; and ‘Leonardo da Vinci Fiorentino’, written effortfully from left to right.
But the root of his mirror-writing is probably very simple. Leonardo was left-handed. Writing from right to left comes naturally to the left-hander. Educational pressure normally prevails against this; in Leonardo’s case, without such pressure, it established itself as the habit of a lifetime.79 His handwriting would develop over the years, from the florid, looped style of the 1470s to the dense, minimal script of forty years later – these changes are an important tool for the dating of his manuscripts – but its direction remains the same. It moves defiantly from right to left; it is difficult, and different (and, in the typical association, ‘sinister’). This strange script is another aspect of the ‘unlettered’ Leonardo, of the profound mental independence which was perhaps the greatest legacy of his rural childhood.