Da Vinci's Ghost

Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image

Toby Lester

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439189252
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester tells the story of the world's most iconic image, the Vitruvian Man, and sheds surprising new light on the artistry and scholarship of Leonardo da Vinci, one of history's most fascinating figures. Deftly weaving together art, architecture, history, theology, and much else, Da Vinci's Ghost is a first-rate intellectual enchantment." — Charles Mann, author of 1493 Da Vinci didn't summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was inspired by the idea originally formulated by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who suggested that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was to imply that the human body could indeed be a blueprint for the workings of the universe. Da Vinci elevated Vitruvius' idea to exhilarating heights when he set out to do something unprecedented, if the human body truly reflected the cosmos, he reasoned, then studying its anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been attempted before—peering deep into body and soul—might grant him an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world. Written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester's award-winning first book, the "almost unbearably thrilling" (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World, and beautifully illustrated with Da Vinci's drawings, Da Vinci's Ghost follows Da Vinci on his journey to understanding the secrets of the Vitruvian man. It captures a pivotal time in Western history when the Middle Ages were giving way to the Renaissance, when art, science, and philosophy were rapidly converging, and when it seemed possible that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of the universe.

1

BODY OF EMPIRE

I have gathered what I observed to be useful, and brought it together as a single body.

—Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture (c. 25 B.C.)

MARCUS VITRUVIUS POLLIO was an army man, a cog in the great lumbering Roman war machine.

For years, assigned to the staff of Julius Caesar and other generals, he rumbled around Italy and the provinces, transporting equipment, fording rivers, pitching camps, digging ditches, sinking wells, constructing catapults, fighting battles, repairing siege engines, surveying captured land, laying out towns, founding colonies. Toiling away behind the scenes, he saw to it that everything worked. His efforts helped ensure victory and prosperity for Rome, and allowed his superiors to bask in fame and glory.

That seems to have struck him as not quite fair. In the mid-20s B.C., having retired from active duty, he looked back on his career and found he had almost nothing to show for the labors of a lifetime. “Little fame has resulted,” he lamented. “I am unknown to most people.”

But his working life wasn’t yet over. He still had time to make a name for himself and had even decided how he would do it. He would write a book—a how-to guide to the building of empire.

VITRUVIUS DIDN’T MAKE that decision in a vacuum. In the early 20s B.C., he and other Romans had watched with a mix of apprehension and pride as a canny new consul named Gaius Octavius Thurinus had asserted his grip on their capital city. In the previous decade Octavius, not yet forty, had avenged the murder of his uncle Julius Caesar and defeated his own archrival, Mark Antony, in Egypt, at last bringing to an end years of devastating civil war. Not long after returning home he had assumed a grand new name, Caesar Augustus, and had dedicated himself to the restoration of Rome. And then, as Vitruvius no doubt observed with delight, he had proceeded to launch the greatest building campaign the world had ever known, one that would fundamentally remake the city of Rome, transform the nature of Roman power and government, and redefine the very idea of empire. It was a campaign that in many ways gave lasting shape to what is today often described as the Western world.

Alive with resonances, the name Augustus inspired confidence. It meant “stately,” “dignified,” and “holy”: in a word, “august.” It implied an association with augurium (“augury”), the art of interpreting divine omens, which had long formed the bedrock on which Roman political, civic, and religious life was built. It also broadcast connections with augere (“to increase,” “to grow,” “to prosper”), the meanings of which were embedded in auctor (“originator,” “founder,” “author”) and auctoritas (“authority,” “power,” “the one in charge”). Augustus was Rome’s new augur, founder, and chief authority—and he would use his powers to bring a new age of prosperity to his people.

Augustus loved order. But what he found when he returned to Rome from Egypt in 29 B.C. was just the opposite: a decrepit megalopolis ravaged by years of war, political chaos, and administrative neglect. The city that Augustus came home to, wrote Suetonius, one of his first biographers, was “not adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded.”

That was putting it mildly. Most of Rome was a sprawling warren of precariously built multistory houses that pressed in along the sides of small, unpaved roads, creating suffocatingly close quarters where shopkeepers, street vendors, beggars, day laborers, prostitutes, unemployed soldiers, immigrants, foreign slaves, and beasts of burden all jostled together. Wheeled carts were banned during the day to reduce congestion, which meant a constant clatter at night. Public spaces were few and far between; temples and monuments revealed shocking signs of neglect; and the city’s once vaunted sewer system had fallen into disrepair. From the upper stories of their houses, home owners routinely dumped the contents of their chamber pots into the streets—and pedestrians routinely found themselves on the receiving end of this practice. To walk through much of Rome was to pick one’s way through a morass of garbage, animal refuse, human waste, and even the occasional corpse. Holding his fingers to his nose, one Roman chronicler of the period described the city as a giant “disease-ridden body.”

Rome was sick—but Augustus had the cure. He turned his attention first to the city’s physical infrastructure, launching a major effort to restore its public buildings, renovate its roads, repair and expand its aqueducts, and clean out its sewers. He also organized the citywide distribution of free goods and services: salt, olive oil, theater tickets, and even, at festival times, haircuts. The point of all this was clear: the hard times were over. Romans now could—and should—clean themselves up, rebuild their city, and enjoy a new era of peace and prosperity.

Augustus and his followers attributed the decline of Rome to one cause above all others: the neglect of the gods and their temples. Direct communication with the gods, the Romans believed, was what had allowed them to amass wealth, political power, and military might over the years, but now, with the temples falling into disrepair, and religious traditions with them, this hotline to the heavens, as one scholar has called it, had been severed. Right relations with the gods had to be reestablished if Rome was to thrive and rule the world. “Roman, you will remain sullied with the guilt of your fathers,” the poet Horace had written not long before, “until you have rebuilt the temples and restored all the ruined sanctuaries.”

So down they came, countless dilapidated structures of timber, mud, and brick. In their place, up rose magnificent new temples and monuments of gleaming, expensive marble, built in a style that deliberately harked back to the classic temple designs of the Etruscans and Greeks: a classical Renaissance that took place in Italy some fifteen hundred years before the one so often discussed today. Augustus devoted himself with astonishing energy to the task, setting into motion a flurry of construction the likes of which no city had ever experienced, and earning himself a reputation, according to the Roman historian Livy, as “the founder and restorer of all sanctuaries.” At the end of his life Augustus himself blandly but proudly catalogued the remarkable fruits of his labors.

I built the Senate House; and the Chalcidicum adjacent to it; the temple of Apollo on the Palatine with its porticoes; the temple of the divine Julius, the Lupercal, the portico at the Flaminian circus . . . a pulvinar at the Circus Maximus; the temples on the Capitol of Jupiter Feretrius and Jupiter the Thunderer; the temple of Quirinus; the temples of Minerva and Queen Juno and Jupiter Libertas on the Aventine; the temple of the Lares at the top of the Sacred Way; the temple of the Di Penates in the Velia; the temple of Youth; and the temple of the Great Mother on the Palatine. I restored the Capitol and the theatre of Pompey . . . . In my sixth consulship I restored eighty-two temples . . . . In my seventh consulship . . . I built the temple of Mars the Avenger and the Forum Augustum . . . . I built the theater adjacent to the temple of Apollo.

And that was just Rome. He also set his sights farther afield. Armies of Roman soldiers, engineers, and bureaucrats now began marching out in all directions into the provinces, making war, “pacifying” rebellious tribes, annexing territory, building roads, founding colonies, establishing new cities, and erecting monuments, all in Augustus’s name. “In cities old and new,” one observer wrote, “they build temples, monumental gateways, sacred precincts, and colonnades for him.” It was happening even in the distant eastern provinces, at the edges of the Roman world. “The whole of humanity, filled with reverence, turns to the Sebastos,” wrote one Syrian citizen of Rome, referring to Augustus by his Greek name. “Cities and provincial councils honor him with temples and sacrifices, for this is his due.”

Romans now encountered the name and image of Augustus everywhere in his growing sphere of influence: on coins and statues, on milestones and monuments and temples, in the names of roads and towns and colonies. In the middle of Rome—at the center of the world—he placed the milliarium aureum (“golden milestone”), the starting point for all roads leading out of the city. Naturally, it bore his name. Similarly, the place where a road reached its end at the outer limits of Roman territory sometimes bore his name: the terminus Augusti.

Something remarkable was taking place. At its center and circumference, and everywhere in between, Augustus was beginning to embody Rome—a metamorphosis that the Roman historian Florus, writing in the following century, claimed was his defining achievement. “By his wisdom and skill,” Florus wrote, “he set in order the body of empire, which was all overturned and thrown into confusion, and would certainly never have been able to attain coherence and harmony unless it were ruled by the nod of a single protector: its soul, as it were, and its mind.”

The body of empire. The very concept was an Augustan innovation. Before Augustus the Latin word imperium (“empire”) had signified an abstract power—a right of command held temporarily by an elected official or military commander. Many people had been able to possess this power at once, much as today many people can be said to possess media “empires.” The related term imperator (“emperor”) described nothing more than a commander’s fleeting status as a victor and could be used only between the time of a great victory and a return home in triumph. To claim it after that, he had to return to the battlefield and earn it again.

Augustus changed all that. By the time he took power Romans had already begun to imagine that their imperium, won year after year on the battlefield with the help of the gods, might allow them to become masters of the world. But they hadn’t thought of this imperium as something innately geographical or physical—as a world body, that is, made up of different member provinces, all set permanently in their rightful place and controlled by a single head of state. But that’s exactly what Augustus wanted Rome to become: a perfect body—his perfect body—of empire.

AS A PHYSICAL specimen, Augustus fell considerably short of anybody’s ideal.

Small and lame, with bad teeth, a crooked nose, and eyebrows that had grown together, he suffered from kidney stones and bladder trouble. Spots, birthmarks, and ringworm scars covered his body. Coins struck early in his career, when he still called himself Octavius, probably preserve the best surviving image of what he actually looked like—and they appear to depict a real person, imperfections and all (Figure 4). But coins struck after he renamed himself Augustus, in 27 B.C., present him with a bold new look (Figure 5).

Figure 4. Octavius, the individual, before 27 B.C.

Figure 5. Caesar Augustus, the ideal, after 27 B.C.

It was all part of his larger campaign of transformation. He had succeeded in bringing an end to civil war because, the story went, he was divi filius: the son of a god. The title derived from his uncle Julius Caesar, who, two years after having been murdered in 44 B.C., had been the only Roman other than Romulus ever to be officially deified by the Roman Senate. Not long before his death, Caesar had secretly adopted Octavius as his rightful heir, which in the eyes of the law did indeed make him the son of a god—and after consolidating power Augustus seems to have decided he should look the part.

Coins offered Augustus a way of introducing himself to Romans all over the world, literally by putting his new image into the hands of the people. A mint, it’s easy to forget, was an early version of the printing press, and it made possible for Augustus a feat that Johannes Gutenberg often is mistakenly given credit for: the cheap and easy distribution of the exactly repeatable image. Coins, Augustus and his supporters realized, were a powerful means of broadcasting his new look and all that it symbolized. As citizens carried his likeness all over the Roman world, they would spread the message that prosperity and increase derived from one source alone: Caesar Augustus. No longer would the forces of ugliness, imperfection, disease, and disorder tear Rome apart. Just as Octavius had remade his own body in an august new form, he would now remake his body of empire. And its coherence and harmony would derive from one source above all: the ideal human form.

Augustus turned to the art of ancient Greece to find models of that ideal. “He was interested in Greek studies,” his biographer Suetonius wrote, “and in these he excelled greatly. . . . There was nothing for which he looked so carefully as precepts and examples instructive to the public or to individuals.” The most celebrated model appeared in the work of the sculptor Polykleitos, revered by the Greeks and Romans alike as one of the greatest artists ever to have lived. Some four centuries earlier, Polykleitos had written a book titled the Canon, now lost, in which he laid out the mathematical—that is, “canonical”—proportions of the perfect human figure. Needless to say, it was male.

Polykleitos had done more than codify those proportions in writing. He had embodied them in a statue. Also called the Canon, the statue took the form of a nude athlete holding a spear and resting his weight on one foot, in a position of perfect equipoise: a pose designed to suggest a combination of tranquillity and strength, motion and rest (Figure 6).

The Spear Bearer of Polykleitos,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• Prologue: 1490
• Chapter 1: Body of Empire
• Chapter 2: Microcosm
• Chapter 3: Master Leonardo
• Chapter 4: Milan
• Chapter 5: The Artist-Engineer
• Chapter 6: Master Builders
• Chapter 7: Body and Soul
• Chapter 8: Portrait of the Artist
• Epilogue: Afterlife
• Photographs
• Reading Group Guide
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Permissions and Credits
• Index
• Copyright