Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci 1352 The Black Death kills 60 percent of the population in Italy. The Little Ice Age continues across Europe, causing widespread famine. 1452 Leonardo is born. 1452 The Second Great Fire of Amsterdam destroys three quarters of the city. 1452 Painter and mosaicist David Ghirlandaio born (d. 1525). 1453 Eruption of Kuwae in the Pacific. 1453 Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Turks. 1453 Hundred Years' War ends. 1454 Gutenberg prints his first Bible. 1455 Sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti dies in Florence (b. 1378). 1455 Sculptor Donatello's Penitent Magdalene installed at Florence Cathedral. 1456 Hurricane sweeps Vinci, Tuscany. 1458 Pitti Palace in Florence begun. 1460 Portuguese explorer Pêro de Sintra reaches Sierra Leone. 1461 Sarajevo founded by the Ottomans. 1462 Vlad III, also known as Dracula, attempts to assassinate Mehmed II. 1465 Massive flooding in central and southern China. 1466 Donatello dies in Florence (b. 1386). 1467 The polyalphabetic cipher invented by Leon Battista Alberti. Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci CHAPTER 1 KING DEATH Ages 0-15 MOST OF HIM is lost to us, of course. The timbre of the voice, the thoughts visible in his eyes, the physical gestures when happy or sad, the way he walked, his smell, his hands, the habitual grimace his friends knew all too well but no one bothered to record--all that is lost. When he was young there was no reason to write any of it down, and when he was old he became too hard to describe, too strange. What to do with Leonardo? It's helpful in terms of myth building to have fewer facts rather than more. Were Leonardo born today we'd have hospital records, blood types of both parents, genealogies going back to Charlemagne, not to mention the views of his neighbors there in the tiny tourist town of Vinci. Fortunately, for the sake of romance and myth, we have none of that but for a single scrawled entry in a family ledger by his grandfather Antonio: "1452. There was born to me a grandson, the son of Ser Piero my son, on the 15th day of April, a Saturday, at the 3rd hour of the night. He bears the name Lionardo." Swaddled and lying there in the straw-stuffed cradle, a couple of early spring flies buzzing his face (one perhaps landing on his lip and beating its wings) that little red baby started life with one large problem: He was, by the rules and customs of the day, illegitimate. Outside the law. His parents were not married. They apparently were not even properly introduced. Traditionally it was thought his mother was a local girl who let the neighboring notary--Ser Piero--get too close in a dark place. New evidence suggests that Leonardo's mother Caterina may have been a house slave brought to Italy from elsewhere. Which means, it might have been rape. Because of the plague and such massive death, Florence--the city-state that ruled Vinci, the tiny village beside Mount Albano where Leonardo was born and which gave him his name--had permitted the importation of slaves, provided they were infidels and converted immediately to Christianity and took Christian names, most often young women from Turkey and North Africa. Caterina was a popular name and it so happened that a wealthy client of Ser Piero's named Vanni di Niccolo owned a slave named Caterina. Niccolo died in 1451 and as executor of his estate Ser Piero would've had to deal with his property, including Caterina. The next year a Caterina appeared in Vinci, pregnant by Ser Piero. Nothing is known of her past. Which would mean little or nothing but for the evidence of Leonardo's fingerprints on a few of his paintings, fingerprints that reveal the same dermatoglyphic structure--that is, the same pattern of loops and whorls--as people of Middle Eastern origin. If true, it could mean Leonardo grew up not just a bastard son living with a weak claim on family, but of mixed race as well. Not obviously so, as it was not remarked on by Vasari or anyone else, but it would've been part of his own identity and well-known while growing up in the village. It meant he was two things, not one. And perhaps later this was even a part of his "mysteriousness," something ill-defined about him, something he hid. And if so, then it suggests two more possibilities. One, that if Caterina had a hand in raising him or saw him frequently, and told him stories, both to entertain him and make him proud, then what kind of stories might those be? Fantastic? Heroic? Self-justifying? Stories from her home country? Or perhaps stories she made up? An important question. What kind of cross-cultural tall tales was the little kid hearing? There was at the time a cult of the Magi which had wisdom coming from the east. And two, notice that as an adult his sense of fashion seemed rather more Turkish than Italian: the long hair and beard curled, the purple cloak, the rings and such. He rather resembled an Ottoman Pasha out for a stroll. This was a deliberate adult identity that may well have started as youthful fantasy and wishful thinking. Caterina may be the key to understanding Leonardo's unique identity in later years, but in truth we have nothing but a few fingerprints and a couple of indirect references to guide us. Much later, in 1503 when he was fifty-one, he made an effort to move to Constantinople, writing to the Sultan Bayezid II and offering his services, all while praising Allah. -- THE ADULT IS formed in childhood, and Leonardo's childhood is a factual blank. What were his shaping forces? It's generally thought that he was raised by his grandparents and uncle Francesco in Vinci, assisted perhaps by Caterina just down the road in Campo Zeppi, while his father built his notary business in Florence, roughly thirty miles away and on the other side of Monte Albano. Leonardo as an adult certainly seemed a willful person (to say the least) who expected to get his own way, so how might an eighty-year-old grandfather have influenced that? Likewise, an uncle only sixteen years older than Leonardo himself? The suggestion is of a clever boy doted on by his grandparents and uncle while his less-engaged father is away. One also imagines a childhood free to roam the countryside and eat bugs and drink from the streams. No doubt five-year-olds perished quickly in those days, and no doubt a curious boy would get into trouble rather more often than not. But the rocks Leonardo fell off of and the streams that nearly drown him and the mule that threw him twenty feet into the weeds--none of those hypothetical events seemed to have harmed him much, or left visible scars. But how could we know? Scarring was common in the age before antiseptics. So common that it would not be remarked on unless it was a defining feature of some kind, or prompted a nickname perhaps. Back then the whole of humanity was covered with scrapes and scars. It was evidence of being alive. Yet Leonardo was described by Vasari and others as attractive and well-coiffed, so the inevitable accidents of childhood left no mark that can be seen from this distance. The village of Vinci is located on a high hill, above the valley but still beneath Monte Albano. It is pock-marked with hundreds of gullies and low places where, lying down, a boy can see nothing but the sky above. Visually it's a place of contrasts, but what dominates the surrounding area is not even visible from Vinci, and that's the city of Florence on the other side of Monte Albano. It cannot be over-stressed what the presence of a city nearby means to a child growing up isolated in the country--especially an important city where amazing things were to be seen and marveled at. It was a place he heard about each time his father returned, and from every passing visitor, and perhaps a place he'd visited as a boy, but he was fifteen or so before he moved there and growing up in the vicinity of such a place magnetized his life. It had to. He had the long view, and in the distance, on the other side of the mountain that blocked him, was something glorious. And because he couldn't see it, mysterious as well. Such things shape the mind and dreams. Other than his grandfather and mother Caterina, the other large but unaccounted influence in Leonardo's young life was his uncle Francesco. Uncles can be a good thing. When all else fails, sometimes it's the uncle who steps in to save the day. Biographer Serge Bramly describes Francesco as a "gentle and contemplative man of independent character, who surely knew the names and qualities of plants (the region is rich in medicinal herbs), the signs of bad weather, the habits of the wild creatures, and the superstitious legends that govern country people's acts." Leonardo would've acquired in Francesco's company a love for the outdoors and a curiosity about the natural world. It seems they were always close, even as Leonardo grew older. When Francesco died childless in 1506, it was to Leonardo, and not to his legitimate nephews, that he left his possessions. The likelihood is that Francesco visited Florence on occasion, and likely took little Leonardo along with him once the boy was old enough to travel. To prime the pump of Leonardo's imagination there had to be examples for him to mull over, experiences to re-inhabit and embellish, and the village of Vinci offered little in the way of cathedrals or libraries or aesthetic thrills beyond those of nature. Other than Caterina, I think his uncle was the major influence in his young life. What I could never prove but strongly suspect is that Leonardo learned from the personal example of his uncle Francesco to take your time and get it right . This craftsman's code is so embedded in Leonardo, so idiomatic of his personality, I think it had to have been learned early and repeated often. There was a "go slow" movement at the time that reflected a very real need of some to live quietly, rejecting the quick pace of the marketplace. Think of Montaigne a hundred years later, or Epicurus seventeen hundred years before. Unlike his brother, Francesco lived in the country, forswearing the city. Why? Might the pace of the country be more congenial to him, and might this in turn have influenced Leonardo in the same quiet and contemplative way? Leonardo grew in response to what he knew and heard from others. To aspire you first have to see, to take aim, and Leonardo had an imagination that clearly turned toward art. So what did he see that turned him? Francesco likely took Leonardo along with him on business trips to Florence where they stayed with Ser Piero and saw the sights. Thirty miles isn't that far. No doubt he'd seen the occasional icon or statue in a local church near Vinci or Empoli, but that's clumsy devotional art and not likely to set the mind on fire. My guess is Leonardo was already throwing off sparks, and it was his uncle Francesco who saw it first and fanned it into flame. One item of his childhood rarely remarked on is that the village of Vinci is on top of a rather high hill, meaning little Leonardo would've grown up with a line-of-sight of twenty-two miles or more to the distant horizon. Perhaps only an urban flatlander can appreciate this, but most people's field of vision growing up can be measured in tens of feet, up to a half mile perhaps. An ordinary horizon on flat ground out in the open is three miles. Leonardo grew up with a bird's-eye view of the countryside that was panoramic, a view that surely worked its way into his dreams as childhood landscapes often do. How different would he have been if the family had lived in Venice instead of Vinci? Hilltops also have considerably more wind, which suggests the flying of kites and the gathering of birds. A flatland Leonardo, like a watery one, would not have been quite the same boy. He was a child of the hill country who grew up with a little thinner air and a longer view than most. This shaped him--especially once he got into the thick atmosphere and narrow streets of Florence. How did children grow up in the fifteenth century? Mostly, I'd say, thanks to a certain amount of luck. Hilltops attract lightning strikes. Storms are worse. Likewise, a stranger passing through and sneezing could result in you breaking out in pustules. The average lifespan was a bit under forty, but you had to survive childhood first. Leonardo knew people who died young. Everyone did. Death was everywhere. In 1456, a hurricane ravaged Tuscany. Leonardo was four years old and heard it from inside the house--assuming the roof stayed on. Periodically, as a result of drought, there were severe famines where cannibalism was not unheard of. Between the ages of ten and fifteen there were also outbreaks of plague in his area. And plague appeared again when he was twenty-seven and living in Florence, and again at age thirty-two for three long years in Milan, when nearly a third of the city's population died. For Leonardo, epidemics were a fact of life. Death, everywhere, always. Even the murder rate in Europe then was more than thirty times what it is today. One key to understanding Leonardo is to see the brutal chaos he came out of, the chaos he tried to separate himself from, the noise on every side. It was not an easy place to think a straight thought. People could die of a small cut or broken bone, and people he knew surely did during his fifteen years growing up in Vinci. Animals were slaughtered and he watched this closely, as any country kid would. Chickens plucked, necks rung, heads boiled and skinned--any child with imagination and empathy would twitch ten times a day just being out of the house. Either that or turn into a tough guy who was impervious to the pain of others. We see evidence of both later on. Both together: the exterior remove, the interior churn. From his drawings and sensibility we know he loved animals and knew them well. He would later write fables where the animals spoke and gave humans wise advice. He also had a fable where a rock did the same. A talking rock. These were his friends growing up. He talked to them and they talked back. He became a vegetarian after all, and collected interesting rocks all his life. Maybe for companionship. How much pain and misery did he witness in his early years, and what effect did it have? I would imagine any Renaissance imagination must have been framed by death, and spurred on by it. Memento mori . He learned to distrust life early on, I suspect, probably one day at a time. The family dog, the favorite cat, his grandfather, his father, here today and gone tomorrow, catch what you can. Francesco's advice: Slow down, breathe deeply, Leonardo. Take your time and think it through . Without a doubt his drawing was a source of solace, of tuning out the world, and of capturing it as well. Consider those early lost drawings not for their focus on some particular thing, like a twig or a frog, as would be usual, but for what's blocked out. They are psychological documents as well as artistic. Any drawing is. Most importantly, one senses that the act of drawing became his way to learn about a thing. It was how he contemplated the world. One of Leonardo's greatest discoveries as a child had to be the power of his own left hand. It must've seemed magical to him at first--and to everyone else. Not only could it capture reality and put it on paper, but the effort of drawing a thing seemed to inform him as well, as if he knew it better afterwards. As if he owned it afterwards. As if to study something closely enough to draw accurately was to also learn it deeply all over its surface, to absorb the thing through visual touch. For him, drawing was a way of knowing the world, and he learned that as a child. Self-taught, it seems clear. And knowing the world was a defense against it. Drawing would provide him with his role and his disguise. Drawing was central to his identity all his adult life, until he lost it near the end--but by then he was living with a king and coasting, putting on the occasional pageant, otherwise studying his toes a lot. The micro events leading up to Leonardo's discovery of what he had at the end of his left arm must be one of the great untold tales of Renaissance art. In a sense, that hand led him through life and was his most valuable possession. It no doubt produced a flood of fantasies by the age of ten or twelve. My guess would be naked angels and devils and dragons. His later dragons, drawn as an adult, are terrific and show his familiarity with the genre. There were surely family stories about the first time the boy picked up a piece of charcoal and drew on a flat rock. Leonardo's life seemed to generate tales like that, but they too are lost. It's equally likely that Leonardo first saw art in the local pottery industry where his family had a financial interest as property owners. Designs on the sides of piss-pots and jars and their repetitious pattern is something even a child could learn to do--not to mention the joy of shaping the pot itself. It might've been his very first spark, watching that old potter bend over his wheel, scratching his design on the side with a stick, it all blurring together as the pot spun. Early animation. We know he loved to walk and Leonardo in his childhood rambles would've learned the nuts and vegetables growing around him, like wild asparagus and mushrooms and pears. Learning nature was a huge and complex task which required years of study. He learned that everything had its uses, and even its secrets. Foraging was part of village life then, as was collecting recipes. Herbs were collected for medicinal and maybe entertainment purposes. Did his grandmother keep a garden? Collect recipes? Caterina? Francesco? Nature was an open book of knowledge, endlessly complex and varied to him who had the eyes to read it. Leonardo learned to see by looking ever more closely at those things around him. The discovery process had to do with revisiting a thing over and over until it revealed itself. Any bee or snake was its own little world of complexity and well worth study. Vinci in the 1460s was a very quiet place at times. A lizard crossing the road could draw a crowd. We know he was curious, we know he was bright, and that he could draw like a demon, and that he lived in the country for about fifteen years, attentive to the clouds and birds around him. His was a long childhood for the time. Was this delay in becoming an apprentice a result of his self-directedness, his willfulness? His reluctance? His apparent uniqueness in all things mental, like writing? Leonardo, being left-handed and apparently self-taught, learned to write his native Tuscan from right to left instead of the traditional left to right. Not actually reversed writing so much as mirrored writing: normal writing running the wrong direction--thus readable with a mirror. He may have started writing this way as a child to keep his left hand out of the ink, and because a quill pen requires you to drag it, not push it. And probably, at some level, it just made more sense to him. It was easier. And apparently there was no teacher around to slap his wrist and make him do it right. According to some neuroscientists Leonardo's backward writing shows evidence of a rather severe dyslexia. As a solitary child he'd likely developed the habit before anyone fully noticed, and then found it impossible to change. There were consequences though, all through his life. What could he be trained to do? We also know that a fifteen-year-old without duties in a tiny place like Vinci is trouble waiting to happen, which may be why it was decided he should move to Florence and finally begin the arduous task of fitting in with the rest of humankind. His father had no doubt already warned him what was in store for him. Warned him and threatened him, probably. A man full of dry facts and grinding ambition would describe a future the teenage Leonardo would fear deeply: You won't be playing all day in a creek once you have a master. You'll learn the value of real work . The consensus view is that Leonardo stayed in Vinci until two deaths about the same time (his grandfather Antonio and young stepmother, Albiera Amadori) required his father Ser Piero to bring him to Florence to be trained in a trade or craft of some sort and made self-supporting. Apparently there was some indecision about him even at that age. What to do with Leonardo? Where to place him? Could he learn to write legibly at all? How difficult was it for him to read? What occupations were open to a child like that? It would seem Ser Piero's hand was forced. He could no longer ignore the growing problem. Left alone the boy had grown up like some weird weed out in the woods and now he needed to be trained to a discipline, to some purpose, and put to work. But there are no records of this time, no family journal detailing their decisions. What is known is what likely happened, what happened most usually in such family situations: The boy was too much to handle, he needed to be apprenticed to a craft. The decision was made and that was that, although I'm sure it was welcomed by Leonardo. To my mind, studying the fire that night, fifteen years old and bursting with dreams and desires, he was ready to get out of Vinci. What if grabbed this boy like a fever. Excerpted from Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo Davinci by Mike Lankford All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
