Vasari. the Life of Leonardo
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The Life of Leonardo da Vinci, Florentine Painter and Sculptor [1452-1519] The greatest gifts often rain down upon human bodies through celestial influences as a natural process, and sometimes in a supernatural fashion a single body is lavishly supplied with such beauty, grace, and ability that wherever the individual turns, each of his actions is so divine that he leaves behind all other men and clearly makes himself known as a genius endowed by God (which he is) rather than created by human artifice. Men saw this in Leonardo da Vinci, who displayed great physical beauty ('which has never been sufficiently praised), a more than infinite grace in every action, and an ability so fit and so vast that wherever his mind turned to diffi- cult tasks, he resolved them completely with ease. His great personal strength was joined to dexterity, and his spirit and courage were always regal and magnanimous. And the fame of his name spread so widely that not only was he held in high esteem in his own times, but his fame increased even more after his death.* Truly wondrous and divine was Leonardo, the son of Piero da Vinci,* and he •would have made great progress in his early studies of literature if he had not been so unpredictable and unstable. For he set about learning many things and, once begun, he would then abandon them. Thus, in the few months he applied himself to arithmetic, Leonardo made such progress that he raised continuous doubts and difficulties for the master who taught him and often confounded him. He turned to music for a while, and soon he decided to learn to play the lyre, like one to whom nature had given a naturally elevated and highly refined spirit, and accompanying himself on this instrument, he sang divinely without any preparation. LEONARDO DA VINCI 285 Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that he worked at so many different things, he never gave up drawing and working in relief, pursuits which appealed to him more than any others. When Ser Piero saw this and considered the level of his son's intelligence, he one day took some of Leonardo's drawings and brought them to Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a very good friend of his, and urgently begged him to say whether Leonardo would profit from studying design.* Andrea was amazed when he saw Leonardo's extraordinary beginnings, and he urged Ser Piero to make Leonardo study this subject; and so Piero arranged for Leonardo to go to Andrea's workshop, something Leonardo did very willingly. And Leonardo practised not only this profession but all those in which design played a role. Possessing so divine and wondrous an intelligence, and being a very fine geometrician, Leonardo not only worked in sculpture but in architecture. In his youth, he made in clay the heads of some women laughing, created through the craft of plaster-casting, as -well as the heads of some children, which seemed to have issued forth from the hand of a master; in architecture, he made many drawings of both ground-plans and other structures, and he was the first, even though a young man, to discuss making the River Arno a canal from Pisa to Florence.* He drew plans for mills, fulling machines, and implements that could be driven by water-power; and since painting was to be his profession, he carefully studied his craft by drawing from life, and sometimes by fashioning models or clay figures, which he covered with soft rags dipped in plaster and then patiently sketched upon very thin canvases of Rheims linen or used linen, working in black and white with the tip of his brush—marvellous things indeed, as is demonstrated by some of the examples I have from his own hand in our book of drawings. Besides this, he drew so care- fully and so well on paper that no one has ever matched the delicacy of his style, and I have a head from these sketches in chiaroscuro which is divine. There was infused in this genius so much divine grace, so formidable and harmonious a com- bination of intellect and memory to serve it, as well as so great an ability to express his ideas through the designs of his hands, 286 LEONARDO DA VINCI that he won over with arguments and confounded with reasonings the boldest minds. And every day he constructed models and designs showing how to excavate and bore through mountains with ease in order to pass from one level to the next, and with the use of levers, winches, and hoists, he showed how to lift and pull heavy weights, as well as methods for emptying out harbours and pumps for removing water from great depths; his brain never stopped imagining such things, and many sketches for these ideas and projects can be found scattered about among our profession, a good number of which I myself have seen.* Besides this, he wasted time in designing a series of knots in a cord which can be followed from one end to the other, with the entire cord forming a circular field containing a very diffi- cult and beautiful engraving with these words in the middle: Leonardm Vinci Accademia* Among all these models and de- signs there was one which on numerous occasions he showed to the many intelligent citizens then ruling Florence to demon- strate how he wanted to raise and place steps under the church of San Giovanni without destroying it, and he persuaded them with such sound arguments that they thought it possible, even though when each one of them left Leonardo's company, each would realize by himself the impossibility of such an enterprise. Leonardo was so pleasing in his conversation that he won everyone's heart. And although we might say that he owned nothing and worked very little, he always kept servants and horses; he took special pleasure in horses as he did in all other animals, which he treated with the greatest love and patience. For example, when passing by places where birds were being sold, he would often take them out of their cages with his own hands, and after paying the seller the price that was asked of him, he would set them free in the air, restoring to them the liberty they had lost. As a result, Nature so favoured him that, wherever he turned his thought, his mind, and his heart, he demonstrated such divine inspiration that no one else was ever equal to him in the perfection, liveliness, vitality, excellence, and grace of his works. It is clearly evident that because of Leonardo's understand- LEONARDO DA VINCI 287 ing of art, he began many projects but never finished any of them, feeling that his hand could not reach artistic perfection in the •works he conceived, since he envisioned such subtle, marvellous, and difficult problems that his hands, while ex- tremely skilful, were incapable of ever realizing them. And his special interests were so numerous that his enquiries into na- tural phenomena led him to understand the properties of herbs and to continue his observations of the motions of the heavens, the course of the moon, and the movements of the sun.* As mentioned earlier, Leonardo was placed in this pro- fession by Ser Piero during his youth in the shop of Andrea del Verrocchio. At the time, Andrea was completing a panel showing Saint John baptizing Christ in which Leonardo worked on an angel holding some garments, and although he was a young boy, he completed the angel in such a way that Leonardo's angel was much better than the figures by Andrea.* This was the reason why Andrea would never touch colours again, angered that a young boy understood them better than he did. Leonardo was then commissioned to do a cartoon of Adam and Eve as they sinned in the Earthly Paradise for a door-curtain that was to be made in Flanders of gold and silken fabric and sent to the King of Portugal; for this he drew with his brush in chiaroscuro illuminated with -white lead a lush meadow with a number of animals, and it can truthfully be said that genius could not create anything in the divine realm equal in precision and naturalness. There is a fig tree, which besides the foreshortening of its leaves and the appearance of its branches, is drawn with such love that the mind is dazzled by the thought that a man could possess such patience. And there is a date palm the circular crown of which is worked with a great and marvellous artistry that would be impossible to achieve without Leonardo's patience and genius. The work was carried no further and so, today, the cartoon is in Florence in the fortunate house of the Magnificent Ottaviano de' Medici, to whom it was presented not long ago by Leonardo's uncle.* It is said that when Ser Piero da Vinci was at his country villa, he was sought out at home by one of his peasants, who had with his own hand made a small round shield from the 288 LEONARDO DA VINCI •wood of a fig tree on the farm which he had cut down, and who wanted Ser Piero to have it painted in Florence; he was delighted to do this, since the peasant •was very experienced in catching birds and fish and Ser Piero made great use of him in these activities. And so he had it taken to Florence, and with- out saying anything else to Leonardo about whose it was, he asked him to paint something on it.