Leonardo da Vinci, Pathfinder of Science

2 Florence

The Italy of Medieval and Renaissance days was not a unified country as it is today. It was, of course, part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the main governing forces in the land were in the city-states, of which Florence was one of the most powerful. A city-state was much more than a city—it was almost a kingdom in itself. Each had its own army, and very often there were large-scale wars between such city-states as Milan, Naples, Rome, Venice—and of course Florence. The Italians of those days considered themselves citizens—not of Italy as a whole—but of their particular cities; people coming from other cities were looked upon as “foreigners,” even though they looked the same, wore the same style of clothing, and spoke the same language!

All the power, influence, and ideas of this period in history were concentrated within the city-states. A man might be a very fine artist, engineer, or philosopher, but unless he managed to bring his work to the attention of the ruler of one of the cities, he was likely to remain in obscurity. Thus it was that Piero da Vinci, knowing that his son would have to have a powerful patron if he was to succeed at all, brought Leonardo to Florence.

In 1467, when the da Vinci family entered Florence, the city had been under the rule of the Medici family for some thirty-three years. As it was in most of these city-states, the head of the ruling family—at this time Piero de’ Medici—was in charge of the government of Florence and the surrounding countryside. But Piero was fifty-one years old and ailing, and he had only two years of life left at the time of Leonardo’s arrival.

None of this was in Leonardo’s mind as he rode with his father through one of the great, guarded gates of the city. He was thinking, not of politics, but of the fabulous sights that awaited him in this rich center of commerce and activity.

The narrow streets of the city were so crowded that is was necessary for the da Vinci family, together with their servants and the donkeys laden with household effects, to go single file. Leonardo rode behind his father, shouting questions, and, at the same time, turning his head from side to side so as not to miss a thing. Brought up in the solitude of mountains and valleys, and accustomed to the quiet life of a village, the boy of fifteen was overwhelmed with the excitement of the city.

Leonardo rode behind his father, turning his head from side to side so as not to miss a thing.

The party was now making its way past the booths of hundreds of shops, past magnificent palaces built by wealthy merchants, and across squares filled with the produce from hundreds of farms. Every now and then, Leonardo caught a glimpse of the cathedral dome, one of the architectural marvels of its day. He had seen the cathedral with its bell tower and also the towering spire of the Palazzo della Signoria—which means the Palace of the Lords—from a hill as they approached the city. This palace still stands and today it is called the Palazzo Vecchio or Old Palace. But now these sights were lost to view in the midst of the narrow streets, other churches, flags, and the lines of washing that seemed to hang everywhere. Frequently, Piero’s party was pressed against a wall as a procession shoved its way through a street. Sometimes it was by armed horsemen escorting a rich banker to some appointment; other times it was a file of cowled monks observing some saint’s day and carrying huge wax candles before them.

After they had crossed the magnificent square of the Signoria, in front of the Palace of the same name, Piero leaned down from his horse and asked a blacksmith where Verrochio’s studio might be. The man shouted above the din of clanging hammers:

“Everybody knows that shop, Signor—it’s down that street and to the right! You can’t miss it—ask anybody!”

The man was right, for the workshop of Verrochio was not hard to find. Verrochio was considered one of Florence’s finest artists and everybody knew of him. He was a short, broad-shouldered man of thirty-two with a round face, shrewd eyes, a thin mouth and dark curly hair that reached almost to his shoulders. In his workshop were two other apprentices—young Pietro Perugino, who was six years older than Leonardo, and Lorenzo di Credi, a boy of eight. They all lived in the house together and, after Leonardo was shown where he would sleep and had put away the few things he had brought with him from Vinci, he was taken to the place where he would work.

Verrochio, whose real name was Andrea di Michele di Francesco de’ Cioni, had taken the name of his teacher, a renowned goldsmith, as was the custom in the shops at that time. Verrochio himself was a skilled goldsmith. But to be an artist and to have your own workshop in the year 1467 meant being a specialist in many things. Into Verrochio’s place came a great variety of artistic work—painting pictures, sculpting and architecture, goldsmithing, designing and making armor, creating decorated furniture, designing mechanical toys, and even preparing stage scenery.

Verrochio, of course, would attend to the greater creative tasks, while his apprentices did the chores of grinding colors, preparing panels for painting, making armatures for his sculpture, hewing to size the marble for a statue, preparing molds for casting, building models for a new palace or church—in fact, all the countless number of preparations to the finished work. Sometimes, if an apprentice showed extraordinary talent, he would be allowed to work on the finished painting or assist with the final strokes of the chisel. Verrochio was a busy man and a successful artisan. To further his own ambitions, he was now absorbed in the perfecting of mathematical perspective and the study of geometry.

The curious Leonardo had come to the right man. In Verrochio’s workshop, where so many crafts were learned at the same time, his powers of observation were able to develop; his hunger to know about mathematics was fed. In Verrochio, Leonardo found a teacher who would encourage these investigations and urge him to study a wide variety of subjects. Leonardo now felt his lack of a fuller education. He started to borrow mathematics textbooks and to seek out men who could teach him what he needed to know. After each day’s work was over, Leonardo would continue on into the night, catching up on his neglected studies and discovering for himself new areas of thought such as anatomy, movement and weight, botany, and another subject which was to occupy much of his later years—hydraulics, or the useful application of water power.

In these early years, Leonardo commenced his famous Notes. He had developed his own “secret” writing in his childhood at Vinci. These notes—consisting of observations, proportions, and reminders to himself—were inscribed on his drawings. They were, however, unreadable to the eye—until held up to a mirror. Leonardo was lefthanded and could write fluently in this strange manner. It could have been for many reasons that he did so—perhaps from a natural desire for secrecy, perhaps for reasons of safety from possible enemies. In those days, plots and counterplots of all sorts were commonplace—a rumor or a whisper in the right ear could destroy a reputation or financially ruin a career.

Leonardo was popular in Florence. He traveled with the young men of the town, and his handsome appearance and enormous strength (he could bend a horseshoe in his hands) made him a welcome figure in many houses. He continued to play the lute and the lyre. He wrote poetry, composed his own music, and sang with a pleasing voice. His blue eyes were kind and his manner gentle. He always avoided arguments and competition when he could. When he walked through the marketplace and came upon the caged birds, he would buy them—just to set them free. Indeed, his love of animals had become so great that he no longer ate meat.

During these years in Verrochio’s service, Leonardo grew in stature as an artist and rapidly developed into a scientist of promise. He amazed his master when he painted an angel in an altarpiece that had been assigned to Verrochio. He painted it in the new oil colors recently acquired from the Flemish painters. So astounded was Verrochio with its grace that the master vowed he would never lift a brush again if a “mere child” could so surpass him. In this picture there is a tuft of grass beside a kneeling figure, also painted by Leonardo, which indicates by its careful attention to detail the amount of research he did before committing it to canvas. In other paintings he made beautiful drawings of a lily and studies of animals and crabs, giving a hint of what was to come. For, in these preparatory works, Leonardo could not be satisfied until he had thoroughly studied the characteristics of plants and animals in general. Later in life, he was to become more and more absorbed in these researches until they occupied the greater part of his time.

In 1469, when Leonardo had been in Florence only two short years, Piero de’ Medici died and was succeeded by his son, the mighty Lorenzo de’ Medici—or Lorenzo the Magnificent, as he was often called. Now the city of Florence felt itself under the control of a man who really knew how to use power. Lorenzo was Florence; nothing happened without his making it happen, and he became one of the most prominent patrons of art and scholarship in all of Italy. If Leonardo was to make any headway in Florence, he would have to make himself noticed by this new Medici ruler.

But Leonardo was not yet worrying about how to make himself a success. A young man of seventeen and still an apprentice of Verrochio, Leonardo continued to meet new friends with new ideas. It was at about this time that he met Benedetto Aritmetico, a prominent scholar and mathematician. It is probable that this man drew Leonardo’s attention to the practical needs of industry and commerce so that some of Leonardo’s energy was directed toward the study and improvement of existing machinery and the invention of labor-saving devices. At any rate, during these months Leonardo was walking the streets of Florence, wandering into shops and mills, making careful observations of all the various methods of manufacturing. The more he saw, the more he thought to himself that one man could do the work of many—if only he had the proper machine. He even made drawings of laborers with picks and shovels to see if he could determine by mathematics better ways to swing and hold the tools.

In addition, the particular problems in the engagement of joints fascinated Leonardo, leading him on to the study of more general problems such as the transmission of power by gears and the strength of materials. He also spent long hours studying geometrical theories and reading Greek and Latin classical works. Laboriously, he translated these into his own formulas and made comments about them in his notebooks. He attended the lectures of John Argyropoulos, a Greek, who talked of the Aristotelian theories of natural history, and who had translated Aristotle’s Physics.

The study of physics opened to Leonardo a whole new world of ideas. He experimented with cogwheels, and with the improvement of ways to lift weights. He became fascinated with the then-known laws of friction and built a bench upon which he tested various devices for the overcoming of frictional drag; he also tested the natural power of one body to set another in motion. This bench with its rollers and weights was similar in principle to the one used by the French physicist A. C. Coulomb almost three centuries later. Leonardo was indeed growing into a man of genius. Now everything from the stars to the flight of an insect occupied his thoughts.

At the same time, he continued his studies of drawing and painting. Frequently he was seen in Florence following someone whose face had interested him—sometimes for the better part of the day—and then at night he would fill a page with sketches of this same person from memory.

By developing his powers of observation in this way Leonardo came to rely more upon his own experiences and less upon what he was told or what he read. This brought him into frequent conflict with the astrologers, the alchemists and even the Church. The astrologers were men who told fortunes by the movements of the stars. The alchemists, with their knowledge of chemistry, pretended to be able to talk with ghosts and to tell the future. These men Leonardo held in contempt. Although he was a devoutly religious man, Leonardo objected to many attitudes of the Church which he considered outmoded and which stood in the way of scientific progress; because of these objections, he was frequently called a pagan.

In this same year of 1469, Leonardo met the aging Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli. Toscanelli was a famous physician, philosopher and mathematician who, just the previous year, had marked off on the cathedral floor the famous meridian line for determining the dates of the various Church holidays. The old man and the boy became not only the famous teacher and ardent pupil, but close friends.

One evening at Toscanelli’s house, the old man showed young Leonardo a globe of the world. Much of it was marked “unknown,” but Toscanelli had filled in some areas from his own careful calculations and from the stories told him by sailors and travelers. Visions of distant lands, remote mountain ranges and vast oceans filled Leonardo’s imagination as Toscanelli spoke. Then Toscanelli tapped the globe to the westward of Spain, saying:

“Here will be found a quicker route to India than the world has ever known before.” Then, turning to Leonardo he murmured, “You will see it happen, my boy, in your lifetime.”

One by one, Leonardo’s childhood questions were being answered. Toscanelli told him much about the stars, the fossils of creatures long disappeared from the world, and how he believed the earth’s early formation took place. He also taught the boy the art of drawing a map. Not only did Toscanelli greatly influence Leonardo, but the course of history as well. Ten years after Toscanelli had died, Christopher Columbus, struggling westward over the Atlantic Ocean, was using a map that old Toscanelli had sent him, carefully notated with all his accumulated wisdom.

Leonardo, in keeping with his own philosophy, tested all this knowledge with experiments of his own. Because astronomical instruments were rare, crude, and costly, Leonardo borrowed them where he could and later set about making his own. He went on to experiment with time measurements, devising the first example of the application of a pendulum to regulate a clock; by means of two springs, it measured the minutes as well as the hours. So for the next three years Leonardo worked in Verrochio’s studio and continued his studies and experiments.

In 1472 Leonardo’s name was inscribed in the Red Book of the Painters of Florence, which was the official guild, or artists’ union of that time. But he was so poor that he couldn’t afford the dues and hardly had the money for the necessary candles to be burnt before St. Luke, the patron saint of all painters. Although his father now had a spacious apartment in a house on one of the main squares of Florence, Leonardo continued to live with Verrochio. In fact, he stayed on past his formal training period for about four more years, grateful to the kindly man for the food and bed he offered.

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