Part 11

10 Shattered Hopes

Before Leonardo could return to the problem of flight, however, he was again faced with the necessity of supporting himself and his growing household. The small fees he received for taking on apprentices hardly covered the cost of housing and feeding them. Moreover, the equipment he had to buy for his scientific researches added further to his strained budget. So, when a servant from Francesco del Giocondo, a rich Florentine merchant, presented himself at the gate with the request that Leonardo accept a commission to paint Francesco’s wife, Leonardo was only too glad to accept. The name of Francesco’s wife was Madonna Lisa, or Mona Lisa for short. Leonardo painted her portrait on and off for the next three years. Thus, what started as a minor commission ended as the one painting—in addition to the “Last Supper”—that most people today associate with the name of Leonardo da Vinci.

Having secured this work, Leonardo turned back to his studies of birds in flight and the nature of air. The soaring wings of eagles and hawks and the way they rode the currents with hardly a dip of their spread wings guided Leonardo’s thinking from pure mechanics to machines that act more on the principle of the glider. He proposed to write a treatise on the nature of birds’ flight, and, with his usual thoroughness, he began to weigh, dissect, and reconstruct various types of birds and their wing structure. He realized that one of the main difficulties of gliding was maintaining balance, or, more accurately, maintaining the center of gravity. From previous observations Leonardo had noted that man is capable of making the same motions that a bird does. He had also measured the strength of a man’s legs and had calculated that man has twice the power in his leg muscles that he needs for standing. Consequently he began to redesign his machine making use of man’s arms and legs to operate or “flap” the wings instead of standing him on a platform.

The first of Leonardo’s new designs was a sort of harness apparatus strapped across the shoulders of the flyer who was supposed to be able to keep himself balanced by moving the lower part of his body. He could manipulate the flight by handles that were connected to the flexible, outer parts of the wings. These wings were designed from the webbed wings of the bat. Surprisingly enough, this device closely resembled the experimental gliders used by Otto Lilienthal almost four centuries later in Germany.

Leonardo was now approaching other solutions to pure flight when further hostilities interrupted his work. Florence and Pisa were in bitter rivalry, and their struggle had assumed the proportions of a major war. The Florentine army was now practically at the gates of Pisa. Niccolò Machiavelli urged the Signoria to enlist the help of Leonardo da Vinci, who might be able to think of an immediate plan for destroying Pisa and her army. Never one to think in terms of an immediate battle or a temporary success, Leonardo put forth a daring and sweeping plan that would forever reduce the power of Pisa. The plan was as simple as it was monumental—divert the Arno river from its course into two canals that would empty into the sea at Leghorn south of Pisa. In this way, Pisa would lose her water supply and her opening to the sea.

The plan met with immediate approval and by the end of July 1503, Leonardo was sent out to survey the entire course of the river. He was accompanied by Giovanni “the Piper,” a man who was frequently employed on minor engineering projects and who was the official player of the pipes to the city of Florence. Giovanni was also the father of Benvenuto Cellini, who became the most famous goldsmith of the Renaissance. As they made their way to Pisa, Leonardo made some more of his extraordinary maps of the area, paying particular attention to the course of the Arno and its tributaries. These maps later inspired him to plan a whole series showing the main watersheds of Italy.

When he rode into the Florentine camp drawn up before Pisa, Leonardo designed from his observations and maps, a dam on the Arno to regulate the course of the river. This bird’s-eye view map is a marvel of exactness. It shows the flow of the river hitting the dam with its swirling backwash and overflow. Leonardo’s knowledge of the movement of water was so great and his craftsmanship in drawing so fine that the water in this map seems to flow before one’s eyes. One of the main problems in regulating the Arno was its tendency to continually be shifting its bed by the deposits of new sediment, and Leonardo realized it would be a long time before this project could be completed.

When he returned to Florence he presented to the Signoria, as part of his survey, various machines to hasten the excavation of the Arno. He had designed a crane that would assist in the digging out of two different levels at the same time. He also submitted the results of his calculations on the saving of muscular energy by the use of such machines. In addition, Leonardo proposed to use the water in the canals for irrigation purposes and had even calculated what the volume and velocity of a jet of water would be if projected from an opening in the bottom of the canal wall into an irrigation ditch. As if this were not enough, he had invented a practical method of piling as a foundation for the lock-basins to protect them against the dangers of erosion.

A separate map of this period on the flow of rivers in general was intended to relate to his treatise on the nature of water. In this treatise is the first outline of the fundamental principles of hydrodynamics, as for example:

The velocity of a current increases with the slope and decreases with the winding of the riverbed.

The volume of a river is in proportion to the width of its bed, the slope and the depth of the water being equal.

The slope and width being equal, the speed of the current is greatest in the deepest part of the river.

The excavation force increases at the narrowest section of the river.

Because of the grumbling of the military commanders at what they considered a waste of time, Machiavelli had to intervene with the Signoria before Leonardo was sent out again with documents of authority to continue with his plans. He spent well into the fall surveying the Arno and in October he was back in Florence.

Meanwhile the fighting between Pisa and Florence had been lessened by two political changes. In August Pope Alexander VI had died and his son Cesare Borgia became seriously ill. The Republic of Florence was now free of its most dangerous enemies—the Borgias. The city relaxed in its new security and the hostilities between Florence and Pisa died down to an uneasy armed watch.

Leonardo quickly took advantage of the situation to present an early dream of his to the Signoria. He again put forth his idea of a commercial canal to the sea and made mention of the great advantages there would be for all the mills, lumber yards, forges and other commercial interests in utilizing the water power that would be available from his project. Piero Soderini, the governor of the city-state of Florence, was impressed and thought of the glory it would bring to Florence and himself. He told Leonardo he would present it to the Signoria.

Leonardo now plunged into a winter of great activity. Forced to draw from his savings, he had rejoined the guild of painters in October of 1503, and then applied for the commission of painting the murals in the council chamber of the Palace of the Signoria. It had been planned to decorate this great hall with scenes commemorating famous Florentine victories, and Leonardo chose the battle of Anghiari where the soldiers of Florence defeated the Milanese in 1440. In addition to working on the “Mona Lisa” and continuing with the canal project—for which he was now designing great suction pumps to lift rivers from one level to another—he turned again to astronomy and geology.

Leonardo, while investigating the course of the upper Arno, had come across much evidence that the land there had at one time been completely under water. Various types of ancient ocean life and vegetation lay scattered in layers along the ridges of the mountains, and these Leonardo collected and brought back to his studio. He wrote, “above the plains of Italy where now birds fly in flocks, fishes were wont to wander in large shoals.” He reread Ptolemy, the ancient Greek geographer Strabo, and even Sir John Mandeville, an English author of travel books, in his quest for knowledge of distant places. He talked to travelers, sailors, and wrote to friends to send him information about the countries they had seen or lived in. Strabo, in particular, had set forth the doctrine that the earth’s transformation had taken place by the forces of volcanoes and water, but the wisdom of these early men had been obscured by the closed minds of the Middle Ages.

Even in his own time of reawakening knowledge—the Renaissance—Leonardo had to contend with the combined superstition of the Church and the ignorance of misguided scholars. For example, the Church believed in the great flood, as described in the Bible, and the scholars claimed that if what Leonardo said were true—that the earth was the result of an evolutionary process—there would have been written records. To this latter Leonardo responded, “... sufficient for us is the testimony of things produced in the salt waters and now found again in the high mountains far from the seas.” But Leonardo’s conception of the evolution of the earth was mistaken in one respect. He regarded the earth as organic—living—and the flow of water he believed to be like the flow of blood in man. Indeed, according to Leonardo, all living creatures were reflections of a living, breathing earth. It was only when he again turned his eyes inquiringly toward the moon and the laws of the universe that he began to realize his error.

It had been the idea that the earth was the center of the universe which supported Leonardo’s theory of an organic earth. Yet after years of observation and study he abandoned this theory and, with the eye of a man centuries ahead of his time, he wrote in his notes, “The moon has every month a winter and a summer. And it has greater colds and greater heats and its equinoxes are colder than ours.” He went further and identified the elements existing on the moon such as “water, air, and fire,” and described them and their functions as being like those on our own earth. In so doing he recognized the existence of the moon as a solid in space, reflecting the light of the sun—one of many “stars” in a universe. With his acceptance of this concept he realized that the earth could not be organic.

In May of 1504, the Signoria complained to Leonardo that there had been no progress on the proposed paintings for their council chamber, even though he had already been partially paid for them. Accordingly, he was forced to sign a document that he must be finished by February of next year or refund all monies paid him. As was his custom he had made many preliminary drawings. Although he was well acquainted with horses he had again researched their anatomy and actions. Pages of rearing, frightened horses and men in combat covered his studio tables. On one of these pages there are sketches of the heads of a lion, some horses and a man—all with fierce expressions on their faces. Here Leonardo hinted at the comparative anatomy of expression in man and animal that Darwin was to write about almost four hundred years later.

But the paintings could wait, for now the Arno River was in spring flood. The time had arrived to make the first attempts at diverting the river into its new course. Leonardo was again in the field supervising the work. There had been much opposition to Leonardo’s canal from both the army captains and the Signoria. It was called a whim and a crazy idea, but Piero Soderini and Niccolò Machiavelli were stubborn in their defense of Leonardo’s plan and they overcame all opposition to it. And indeed, the raising of the sluice gates was successful and the Arno actually flowed into its new bed. The tensions in the camp and in the Council of Florence were eased. The only sad person was Leonardo, for he had just learned of the death of his father.

Leonardo felt the loss deeply. Outwardly, however, he only acknowledged the death of his father at a distance. Not only had Leonardo and his father drifted apart over the years, Piero left nothing to Leonardo in his will. His father’s other children quarreled among themselves over what money he did leave. Leonardo’s one friend in the family was Uncle Francesco, who was still living in Vinci. When he heard of his brother’s will, Francesco made out a will of his own and left everything to the nephew he loved—Leonardo.

After having successfully diverted the Arno river, it was now necessary for Leonardo to return to the painting commissioned by the Signoria for its council chamber. But recently, Leonardo had suffered a rebuff in this work. Originally he had been given the whole room to do but now the opposite wall had been assigned to another man—Michelangelo Buonarroti. Leonardo had first met the young Michelangelo when he helped to judge the best location for Michelangelo’s monumental statue of David. The two men were opposites in every way. Leonardo, fifty-two years old, carefully dressed, cool and detached, was a man whose every action was the result of a thoughtful and analytical mind. Michelangelo, twenty-six years old, his clothes rumpled and covered with marble dust, was passionate and moody—an impulsive youth totally dedicated to art. They did not like each other, and now Leonardo was forced into a rivalry for which he had no heart.

The duel between these two giants of art aroused the whole of Florence and there was a constant stream of people watching them at work. Michelangelo was given a studio in the hospital of Sant’ Onofrio and Leonardo was working in the Papal Chamber in Santa Maria Novella. Among the many people who came to watch Leonardo was a young man of nineteen. He was already a pupil of Perugino and the experience of meeting and learning from Leonardo was to influence him the rest of his life. His name was Raffaello Sanzio—one of the great Renaissance painters of Italy and known to us by the name of Raphael.

While Leonardo worked at Santa Maria Novella he had the opportunity of continuing his studies in anatomy. Dissections at that time were novelties and when one was performed the doors were thrown open to the public. Leonardo must have attended the public dissections at the Church of Santa Croce. Now at Santa Maria Novella there was a hospital, and here Leonardo was able to continue his own dissections without interruption. In a cool room below the hospital where bodies were kept Leonardo worked late into the night. By the flickering lights of candles and in the silence of the world about him he studied, drew, and wrote in his notes of the wonders of the human body.

He performed autopsies on people who had died natural deaths—a special permission granted to him by the monks of the church, and among these autopsies are the first written reports of some of the diseases that are the causes of death. Arteriosclerosis, or stony growths in the blood vessels, and pulmonary tuberculosis, a nut-like growth in the lung, are among the discoveries Leonardo made in his lonely searches, although he did not use these medical names for them.

Above all Leonardo was attracted to the function of the muscles, especially those in the arms and legs. So faithfully, in fact, did he record the origin and insertion of all the various muscles that these drawings can be used as anatomical models today. Moreover, he believed that a good drawing was worth pages of words describing human anatomy. The muscles were rendered as cords so as to better understand their function. He described this function as one of pulling instead of pushing and he noted that for every muscle there is an opposing muscle. When one contracts the other expands. For example, when you tighten the biceps in your arm you can feel the looseness of the triceps, the muscle on the opposite side.