A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [47]
Leonardo, sui generis, questioned everything. Rather than accept the world God had created, as Christians had always done, he probed endlessly into what human ingenuity could achieve by struggling against it. So mighty was his intellect and so broad the spectrum of his gifts—he was, among other things, a master of engineering, biology, sculpture, linguistics, botany, music, philosophy, architecture, and science—that presenting an adequate summary of his feats is impossible. However, it is worth noting that at a time when Europe was mired in ignorance, shackled by superstition, and lacking solid precedents in every scholarly discipline, this uneducated, illegitimate son of an Anchiano country girl anticipated Galileo, Newton, and the Wright brothers.
He did it by flouting absolute taboos. Dissecting cadavers, he set down intricate drawings of the human body—God’s sacred image—and wrote his Anatomy in 1510. Meantime he was diverting rivers to prevent flooding; establishing the principle of the turbine by building a horizontal waterwheel; laying the groundwork for modern cartography; discovering screw threads, transmission gears, hydraulic jacks, and swiveling devices; creating detailed, practical plans for breech-loading cannons, guided missiles, and armored tanks; building the world’s first revolving stage; developing a canal system whose locks are still in use; and, after exhaustive research into water currents and the flight of birds, designing a submarine, then a flying machine, and then—four centuries before Kitty Hawk—a parachute. Along the way he left an artistic heritage which includes The Adoration of the Magi, the Mona Lisa, and the Last Supper.
Medieval minds retained the orbs and maces of authority, yet they could not cope with men like Copernicus and Leonardo. Of course, that did not prevent them from trying. Leonardo was lefthanded; his notes, seven thousand pages of which have been preserved, were written in mirror script. Though quite legible, they can be read only by holding them up to a looking glass. In the sixteenth century that was enough to envelop him in suspicion. The existence of Satan and his extraordinary powers was believed to be irrefutable. Leonardo was capable of marvels, men whispered, but—and here they would nod knowingly — his inspiration was anything but divine. They knew where and how he would spend his afterlife; it had been memorably described two centuries earlier in the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, which had included hell’s terrible warning to immigrants: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”
Among the attentive listeners to this rubbish—predicting that upon his death the most gifted man in the pope’s realm would be told to abandon all hope before entering what lay beyond—was the new pontiff. In secret audiences Pope Leo X received the whisperers, nodded thoughtfully, and sent them away with expressions of gratitude. These smears came late in 1513, the worst possible time for Da Vinci. He was sixty-one years old and in straits. Encouraged by the Vatican’s patronage of Michelangelo and Raphael, and told that he could expect support from Giuliano de’ Medici—a brother of Leo—he appeared in Rome to ask the Holy See for support. He didn’t get it. The Holy Father not only denied him alms but decreed that his future research —particularly his sacrilegious mutilations of the divine image—would be either restricted or proscribed. Luckily, the French crown, not for the first time, came to the rescue of Italian genius. Francis I invited the great pariah to Paris as “first painter and engineer to the king.” He left his native