Part 14

Leonardo heeled his horse and with Francesco de’ Melzi at his side, followed by his servant and students, pushed past the crowd at the gate. To the left rose the Pincio hill with its stately pines where, in the days of Imperial Rome, Lucullus had walked in his gardens. But Leonardo had no time to look about. It was a damp December day, and rain threatened from the gray skies. He was tired, and as Francesco glanced at him he could see Leonardo pull his cape around him with a little shiver as the chill wind stirred the long, graying hair on his shoulders. They made their way through the crowded, noisy city. They crossed the Tiber and rode past Castel’ Sant’ Angelo, the papal fortress built on the tomb of Emperor Hadrian. After another inspection by the Swiss guards in beribboned uniforms of white, green and gold under their shining breastplates, they entered the walls of the Vatican. That evening after he had settled himself in the Belvedere apartments and dinner had been eaten, Leonardo, gazing into the embers of the fire, looked back over his new stroke of fortune.

The Medicis had returned to power. Pope Julius II had died, and Giovanni de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo, had become Pope Leo X at the age of thirty-seven. With his election to the head of the Christian world, the Republic of Florence became a city of the Medicis once more and Leonardo had received an appointment in Rome. Giuliano de’ Medici, Pope Leo’s favorite younger brother, in his new rise to power and wealth, became Leonardo’s patron. The two must have met sometime during the Medici’s exile. Leonardo was given the apartments in the Vatican and a salary of thirty-three ducats (approximately eighty-five dollars) a month and a workshop was fitted for him and his pupils. He was also assigned an exclusive German assistant named Georg.

The Pope’s court in the Vatican was like the Medici court in the Florence of Leonardo’s youth—multiplied by hundreds. Leo X saw himself as the center of the artistic world, and being a man of luxurious tastes with the wealth of the church behind him, the Vatican was soon filled with a mixture of the wise and foolish. Pompous classic-quoters, third-rate poets and clowns mixed with the world’s scholars and statesmen. The two greatest artists were Bramante, the architect and friend of Leonardo’s first years in Milan, and Bramante’s pupil Raphael, the painter.

Bramante was busy building the new church of St. Peter’s and, as the architect of this favorite project of the Popes, he was sole master of the Roman art world. Raphael, as his protege, was the recipient of the better painting commissions in Rome. The elderly Bramante and the thirty-year-old assistant were a famous pair in the Rome of 1513. Equally as famous, however, was Michelangelo; he was still living in Rome, but was without patronage after Julius II’s death. Leonardo’s old rival had scored his triumph with his extraordinary paintings in the Sistine Chapel.

Although the young Raphael, who owed so much to the example of Leonardo, now rode through the streets as a wealthy nobleman, Leonardo himself received no great commissions. While Pope Leo was indulgent of his brother’s whims he himself had no use for this tall, serious old man who roamed the shaded walks of the Vatican poking at the strange plants in the botanical garden or making drawings of the foreign animals in the private zoo. In reality, Leonardo’s patron, Giuliano de’ Medici was a weak man. He played at being a patron but, like his brother the Pope, he lacked the force and decision of his famous father Lorenzo. Nevertheless, he did give Leonardo one small commission for a picture. Immediately Leonardo, excited by the exotic plants in the Vatican gardens, commenced to experiment with them to find a resin to make a varnish with which to cover the future painting. Pope Leo made fun of him exclaiming, to the delight of his court, “This man will never get anything done, he thinks of the end before the beginning.”

This ridicule by the Pope made Leonardo a joke to many in the circles of the Vatican who were a little afraid of this strange man with the searching eyes. Leonardo also suffered the humiliations of a man who did not conform to the fashions of his day. His knowledge of Latin, for example, was weak and although he could read it with the help of a dictionary he could not speak it. And, among the people who surrounded the Pope, Latin was the only language allowed. Prizes of great sums of money and important positions were often granted on the strength of an improvised speech in Latin (with many quotations from the classical authors) or a flattering Latin verse. Faced with such setbacks and ridicule, Leonardo—not surprisingly—began to withdraw into himself.

And yet, Leonardo refused to remain idle—he had to work. The need for mirrors in the vast halls and rooms of the papal palace was great. Leonardo turned his mechanical skill to redesigning and improving methods of making them, and even inventing his own machines for the grinding of the glass. Also, for Giuliano, who dabbled in alchemy and magic, he made distorting mirrors and burning lenses. In addition, Leonardo invented a machine which could be run hydraulically for producing long strips of copper of equal width for use in soldering the mirrors.

But, with the making of these mirrors, Leonardo began to run into trouble with his German assistant, Georg. The boy was a loafer; he spoke little Italian and took every opportunity to spend his days with his countrymen in the Swiss guard. Leonardo tried to alter the situation by suggesting that the boy have his meals with him at his worktable, thus giving Georg a better chance to learn the language. This however did not appeal to him. Then, because Leonardo’s inventions were so extraordinary, he began to give away the secrets of their mechanisms to Johannes the mirror-maker, another German, who had been replaced by Leonardo in the favors of Giuliano. This naturally made Johannes jealous of Leonardo. Georg gossiped, too, and told stories about the old, eccentric man who lived like a miser in the midst of all the luxury and who drew crazy circles on pages of paper.

These “crazy circles” were geometric exercises that had fascinated Leonardo from the time he had wandered across Italy with Fra Luca Pacioli. Pacioli’s book De Divina Proportione, containing sixty illustrations from designs of Leonardo, had been published in Venice in 1509. Leonardo intended to entitle these geometric exercises De Ludo Geometrico. In geometry a lune is a crescent-shaped figure bounded by two intersecting arcs of circles on a plane or a sphere. Leonardo drew pages of these lunes and then proceeded to transform their curvilinear figures into squares of equal area. He also reviewed Archimedes’ method of squaring a circle and developed it into a variety of ways for cubing spheres and cylinders.

He returned as well to formulating theories of friction. He wrote in his notes, “the tallest wheel is the easiest to pull”—for example, a big wheel turning at the same speed as a smaller one has less friction to overcome because it makes less revolutions. His experiments in friction predated men like Amontons and Coulomb by two and three centuries. He established a formula for the building arch which he described as “a strength caused by two weaknesses”—if one half of an arch is removed, the other half collapses. They support and give strength to each other. In addition, Leonardo determined, before Galileo, the center of gravity of any pyramid and of a tetrahedral, or four-sided body.

As the days went by and he waited for commissions to come, Leonardo took to wandering about the streets of Rome. He stood in the half-buried Forum of the Caesars surrounded by grazing sheep and grunting pigs. Wooden shacks where crude cartwheels were made and where the marble from the ancient temples was cut and sold, were built against the sides of crumbling ruins. The old triumphal arches, now overgrown with creepers, were boarded into towers and cattle were penned between the shafts of columns that once supported the grandeur of temple roofs. Here and there a classical scholar would be sketching or writing from the worn, Latin inscriptions on a marble slab tilted crazily from the ground where it had fallen hundreds of years ago. Goats wandered on the Palatine hill, once the home of Emperors, and the great baths of the Emperor Diocletian were now a deer park and a hunting ground for royalty.

During the course of these wanderings, Leonardo became interested in the primitive methods of carpentry. Such things as screws, for example, were rare. Those that were used were either made of wood or, if of metal, by goldsmiths laboriously making each one by hand, soldering wire around a pin and another wire into the hole to hold the screw. Sometimes they were made by filing pieces of metal individually. All these methods were time-consuming and costly.

Leonardo had thought of this problem before, and now he concentrated on perfecting his ideas about it. Previously, he had thought of casting the metal in wooden molds and then turning the metal on thread-cutters. The designs he finally drew in careful detail, however, are essentially the methods used today. The new machines did with a few turns of a handle and adjustments of a few cogged wheels what it took one man many hours to perform. He also drew designs for a mechanical plane and a machine for drawing wire that worked by water power.

Leonardo now lived and worked in the Belvedere of the Vatican—more a man on exhibition than an active participant in the great artistic activities taking place around him. True, he received his thirty-three ducats a month, but Michelangelo had been paid three thousand for his work in the Sistine Chapel, while Raphael had earned twelve thousand for each room he painted in the Vatican.

Thus Leonardo drifted farther and farther away from his painting. This, in itself, caused people to talk in the papal city. For he had earned fame as a painter, but his passion for science was regarded as strange and whimsical. Occasionally, he did receive a small commission from the workshop of Raphael, yet these were like the crumbs from a rich man’s table.

Even the toys Leonardo made at this period for the amusement of his patrons were looked upon as somewhat weird. For example, he would take small pieces of wax and mold them into strange little animals and then inflate them so that they floated in the air in front of a startled guest. Once he caught a curious lizard in the garden and spent hours putting scales all over the tiny body, attached to it a little beard and horns, then let it out from a box at a banquet. The guests jumped back with fear and the women became hysterical.

One of Leonardo’s jokes that has been passed down in accounts of his life at this period must have created quite a sensation. He showed the company the cleaned entrails of a sheep resting on the palm of his hand. After telling them to wait and watch he took the entrails in another room and with a bellows inflated them with warm air. As the entrails filled with air they expanded and extended. They crept into the room where the company waited. Slowly they grew and grew until they began to fill the room. The guests overturned their chairs in their hurry to get out of the way of this shapeless, translucent creature. Then Leonardo appeared, the air-filled entrails giving way before him, and said:

“Sires, this is but an example and symbol of virtue. As you can see, the smallest virtue is capable of the greatest growth.”

The guests laughed, but it was an uncomfortable laugh. Thus another story was added to the legend of Leonardo as an odd old man.

Leonardo, whose work—particularly his anatomical studies—had constantly been interrupted by the fortunes of war, had found another hospital in Rome where he could continue these studies. This time it was his intention to write a treatise on speech. He dissected and drew the anatomy of the larynx (the voice box), the vocal cords and the trachea (the air passage to the lungs), and all the muscles that control the movements of the tongue and the lips. If you pronounce each letter of the alphabet you will feel these muscles of the lips, especially with the letters “o,” “p,” and “f.” Carefully he noted how the air vibrations from the trachea form themselves into vowels and consonants, and he drew the membrane which, when air is pressed against it, makes the sound “aah.”

At this same time he was also busy finishing a treatise on painting which he had begun when he was working on the “Last Supper” for Ludovico Sforza. But it was for his knowledge of military engineering that he was sent to the city of Parma by the Pope on September 25, 1514. Here he stayed at the Bell Inn while examining the fortifications and other defenses of the city.

Leonardo’s patron, Giuliano de’ Medici, had been appointed governor of this particular area and, since Pope Leo X was fearful of two powerful countries, France and Spain, he was preparing the papal territory against possible invasion. Another fear of the Pope—and indeed of everybody in Rome—was malaria, the disease carried by the mosquitoes that bred in the Pontine marshes west and southwest of the city. At that time, however, no one knew the cause was mosquitoes; rather, they thought it was the bad air from the marshes.

As Leonardo had already been effective in draining the pestilential marshes of Piombino for Cesare Borgia and, later, those around Milan for Charles d’Amboise, he was assigned the same task for the Pontine marshes. He surveyed the entire area to the sea and made another extraordinary aerial type map. His recommendations included draining the entire area, enlarging and regulating the Martino river and cutting an extra outlet from the river Livoli to the sea. These plans were adopted some years later and parts of the marshes were drained successfully, yielding new land for the cultivation of crops.

By December of 1514 Leonardo had finished his treatise on speech and, possibly in an effort to attract the attention of the Pope, he submitted it to the Privy-Chamberlain, Battista dell’Aquila. As Pope Leo was surrounded by an army of secretaries and assistants who passed on everything submitted, this manuscript with its beautiful drawings was mislaid and lost and only a few notes and sketches remain.

The continual discouragement of his life in Rome was offset by a visit from his half-brother, Giuliano, around Christmas. Leonardo was held in esteem by his family despite the quarrel over his father’s and his uncle Francesco’s will, and his half-brothers were pleased to tell of their famous relative who lived in the Belvedere as guest of the Medicis. Yet they knew little of Leonardo’s scientific dreams and his lack of recognition in the papal city.

Often, Leonardo’s greatest comfort was to return to his notes. The challenge of geometry and the mysteries of the movement of air and water kept him from brooding about his lonely life. Francesco de’ Melzi, Leonardo’s young friend, had more and more taken over the practical responsibilities of his everyday life. Except for his workshop, where the troublesome Georg worked at the making of mirrors, and an occasional small commission for a painting, Leonardo was free to study.

In addition to his geometrical investigations, Leonardo now experimented with the science of statics (objects that are stationary), and dynamics (objects in motion). One of his most important discoveries in the science of mechanics came about during this period. Concerning the division of weight, he wrote, “There are three conditions of gravity of which the one is its simple natural gravity, the second is its accidental gravity, the third the friction produced by it. But the natural weight is in itself unchangeable, the accidental which is joined to it is of infinite force, and the friction varies according to the places wherein it occurs, namely rough or smooth places.” Thus he realized and formulated what composes the movement of an object. He found that movement is the result of separate forces acting upon the object from different directions, as for example, the initial push, the pull of gravity and the resistance of friction. And, before Galileo, Leonardo further experimented with objects dropped from a height. As the result of repeated experiments, he noted that the fall was being affected by the earth’s rotation. That is, the object dropped always fell in a slight eastward direction rather than vertically downward—a fact later proved conclusively by Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke in the next century.

He also became fascinated with spiral motion, such as is found in a spinning top or in a whirlpool of water. Because of his interest in hydrodynamics, or the movement of water, he began to sketch imaginary “Deluge compositions.” These were drawings showing the world—probably inspired by the Bible—in a chaos of wind and floods. They were based on his years of scientific research. Indeed, his drawings of actual whirlpools are still among the greatest of his scientific art. Today, with all the latest technical aids, such as dusting a whirlpool with powdered rosin and then photographing it, an accurate three-dimensional picture is impossible. Yet Leonardo, by sheer observation and analysis coupled with his genius for drawing, could reproduce the complicated shape of whirling water.