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| Da Vinci Notes |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
23 September 2006
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Asked to say a few words about Leonardo the
other day, at Christ Church in Oxford, I thought I might try
one of his jokes. Leonardo wrote down a few, and it is interesting
to see whether they still work (it's the same as asking whether
his flying machines work). I had a kindly audience of Leonardo
experts, some of whom laughed before the punch line, which comes
rather before the end of the joke. The experiment passed off
without undue embarrassment. Here is the joke I chose, in Leonardo's
own words.
"A priest going the round of his parish
on Saturday before Easter, sprinkling holy water in the houses
as was his custom, came to a painter's room and there sprinkled
water upon some of his pictures. The painter, turning round
somewhat annoyed, asked him why this sprinkling had been bestowed
on his pictures; then the priest said it was the custom and
that it was his duty to do so, that he was doing good, and that
whoever did a good deed might expect a return as good and better;
for so God had promised that every good deed that was done on
earth shall be rewarded a hundredfold from on high.
"Then the painter, having waited until
the priest had walked out, stepped to the window above, and
threw a large bucket of water on to his back, saying: Here is
the reward a hundredfold from on high as you said would come
from the good you did me with your holy water with which you
have damaged half my pictures."
There's a splendid show of Leonardo drawings
at the V&A, which includes handsome models - modern realisations
of the artist's sketches. One shows a plan for a single-span
bridge over the Golden Horn. Surprisingly, both Michelangelo
and Leonardo were approached in connection with this project.
Michelangelo later confirmed that he had not only been asked
- he himself had made a model of such a bridge, probably some
time around 1504-6. The Ottoman sultan making the request would
have been Bajazet II.
Leonardo's drawing of the bridge, which is
in a manuscript in Paris, is normally dated 1502. It is labelled
"Ponte da Pera a Ghostantinopoli" (bridge from Pera
to Constantinople). And in case the reader thinks this was just
a daydream of Leonardo's, there is a letter from Leonardo in
the Topkapi archive, translated into Turkish, discussing this
bridge and some other projects.
Leonardo's single-span bridge has apparently
been made out of wood in Norway, and seems to have been practicable.
The chapter on models in Martin Kemp's V&A catalogue points
out that, when you try to build one of Leonardo's designs today,
your craftsmen may well lack the knowledge and experience of
the behaviour of different kinds of wood. It is very hard to
be sure you have executed a model in the way Leonardo would
have intended. Failure of your model does not necessarily imply
failure of the inventor's conception. But it is true that some
of these drawings might have been executed more in the spirit
of boasting - designs to wow a group of courtiers - than as
credible projects for immediate realisation.
With the flying-machine designs, there being
no single definitive drawing of such a machine extant, the best
option would appear to be to build something in the spirit of
what he was thinking about, and to use modern materials. After
all, if Leonardo himself were on site, he would be (one assumes)
continually modifying his instructions and experimenting with
available materials.
In Oxford there are currently five small Leonardo
shows. Christ Church is displaying its collection of drawings
by Leonardo and his contemporaries, including the famous grotesque
head that is sometimes called "Scaramuccia, King of the
Gypsies". These bizarre faces were for a long time all
that most people knew of Leonardo's drawings, because they were
engraved in the 17th century. At that time, very few of Leonardo's
paintings were on public display, with the exception of the
already damaged Last Supper in Milan. It wasn't really until
the Louvre opened to the public, after the French revolution,
that it became possible for the public to get an idea of Leonardo
as a painter.
For many years, students at the Royal Academy
could study Leonardo's drawing technique from the famous cartoon,
now in the National Gallery. It wasn't famous back then. It
simply hung on the wall of the Cast Gallery, one of many teaching
aids. There was also an early copy of the Last Supper fresco,
and this has been placed on loan in Magdalen College Chapel,
where it hangs in the antechapel.
There is a show for children at the Botanic
Garden, opposite Magdalen. In the Museum of the History of Science,
an exhibition draws your attention to mathematical books and
instruments of Leonardo's day. When I dropped in, the museum's
director was demonstrating some instruments, including a quadrant
made by the abbot of the San Miniato monastery in Florence,
a man of noble family whose name was Miniato Pitti. He was a
friend of Michelangelo, and apparently well known for making
his own scientific instruments. Michelangelo saved the tower
of San Miniato during a siege by cunningly having mattresses
hung all over it, to deaden the impact of projectiles.
Christ Church Picture Gallery and the Ashmolean
Museum are where you will see original works by Leonardo - at
the Ashmolean in an exhibition about the creation of the reputation
or legend of the artist. I was reminded how recently this took
its present form. For instance, the first anthology of Leonardo's
literary works wasn't printed until 1883. Before then, he had
been known for a treatise on the theory of painting which seems
to derive indirectly from his teaching.
Until photography, it would have been hard
to form any impression of a Leonardo drawing, apart from those
that had been engraved, and the process of engraving would anyway
have given the drawing its own engraved character. At the Louvre
in the 19th century, the drawings department acquired a great
album of over 300 drawings in the belief that they were by Leonardo.
It took them around 20 years to admit that these works were
not by Leonardo (1452-1519), but by a significantly earlier
artist, Pisanello. That was not a matter of ignorance, but simply
the state of knowledge at the time. And that knowledge is always
changing.
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