Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [23]
All this time, of course, Leonardo was continuing to fill the notebooks. And he felt ever more pressure to put his work in some kind of order before he died. He was racing against time to arrange the information in one grand encyclopedia that people could read and learn from.
But the more he looked at the results of his years of investigation, the more dismayed he was at the chaos. The labor needed to sort out the bundles of unrelated papers was overwhelming.
So he put it off.
Organizing was a type of busywork that didn’t really fit his personality. He reveled in flashes of insight. The actual cataloging of his insights would have cramped his style. And it wasn’t as if the disorganization prevented him from carrying on. He had an extremely high tolerance for confusion—said to be a trait that many geniuses share.
Also, by 1515, no books could be printed in many regions without church permission, and he may have dreaded the process of censoring his notebooks in order to satisfy others.
Perhaps he lacked confidence in his ability to write proper scholarly books. He definitely wasn’t up to writing effectively in Latin. He must have been nervous about his writing in general, because he sometimes asked friends to write important letters for him. At times in the notebooks, he worried about being laughed at. Perhaps he was plagued with depression, with bouts of sadness that sapped his energy. In any case, the notebooks remained notebooks. “I have wasted my hours,” he mourned.
In 1509, Leonardo’s great friend Luca Pacioli died. From 1513 to 1516, Leonardo lived in Rome with the pope for a patron. Pope Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, installed him in a comfortable suite of rooms in the Belvedere Palace inside the Vatican. Leonardo’s duties were minimal, so he gladly occupied himself with science. The Vatican had exotic gardens that were perfect for his botanical studies.
Best of all, he was able to use his position to get church permission to do autopsies at San Spirito Hospital. He said they were necessary in the cause of improving his art. He continued doing dissections until an appalled assistant assigned by the pope accused him of conjuring spirits of the dead for evil purposes. Not wanting bad publicity, the pope banned Leonardo from the hospital.
Leonardo was bitter. By this time his eyesight was fading, he wore glasses (of his own design), and he suffered from arthritis in at least one of his hands. There may have been other, unnamed ailments. He probably was treating himself; doctors knew so little that Leonardo always advised people to stay healthy and avoid these “destroyers of lives.”
The newest pages in his notebooks were different. Now he was drawing violent end-of-the-world scenarios: huge uncontrollable surges of water, full of corpses and uprooted trees. The nightmarish images were perhaps his way of confronting his own death, his own doomed race against time.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I Will Continue”
IN 1517, LEONARDO made his last journey. To France.
King Francis I of France was obsessed with Italian Renaissance culture and art, and with Leonardo as well. The twenty-year-old new king had met the scientist-artist in 1515 when Leonardo had created a marvelous mechanical lion that actually walked a few steps. It may have been the world’s first robot.
In France, Leonardo’s pleasant new title was Premier Painter, Engineer, and Architect of the King. His chief duty was to chat with the king. It was a cushy job, including a generous salary as well as an elegant manor house called Clos Lucé near the king’s summer palace in Amboise, about a hundred miles outside Paris. On the property were