schooling himself in the
rhythmic rotes of 'amo, amas, amat. . .', like one of the children of the
court.") Moreover, Leonardo studied Latin because he yearned to gain
full access to the scholarship of classical and medieval sources. He built a respectable
library for the time--Italian translations whenever possible, but original
Latin sources when necessary. He read particularly widely and deeply in this essay's
subject of paleontology and the structure of the earth. Kemp writes: "He
was taking up questions which had provided considerable bones of contention in
classical and medieval science. An impressive roll-call of classical authorities
contributed to his education in physical geography. . . There probably is no other
field in which Leonardo's knowledge of classical and medieval sources was so extensive."
He read the Greek masters Aristotle and Theophrastus on geology; he owned
a copy of Pliny's encyclopedic Natural History; he studied the views of
the great Islamic scholars Avicenna and Averroës (mainly via medieval Christian
sources). He listed parts of what he had read and owned on the inside front cover
of his Manuscript F: Aristotle's Meteorologia, Archimedes on the center
of gravity, "Albertuccio and Albertus de coelo et mundo." (The
last comment is particularly sweet, as Leonardo follows medieval conventions in
distinguishing his sources as "Little Al" [the Italian diminutive Alberruccio]
and "Big Al." Little Al is Albert of Saxony [ca. 1316-1390], the German
Scholastic philosopher and physicist. Later scholars frequently confused him with
Big Al, or Albertus Magnus [ca. 1200-1280], Albert the Great, the teacher of Thomas
Aquinas. Both Als wrote extensively about the form and behavior of the earth,
and Leonardo probably learned the views of Jean Buridan [1300-1358) by reading
Albert of Saxony's discussion. Buridan's views became the basis of the theory
of the earth that Leonardo defended with his observations on fossils.) What
theory of the earth, then, did Leonardo seek to support with paleontological data?
Simply stated, Leonardo was vigorously promoting a common and distinctively premodern
view that could not have been more central to all his thought and art: the comparison,
and causal union, of the earth as a macrocosm with the human body as a microcosm.
We tend to regard such comparisons today as "merely" analogical or "purely"
metaphorical--more apt to promote a deluding sense of false unity than any
genuine insight into common causality. Leonardo's premodern world viewed such
consonances as deeply meaningful, in part by invoking the same general theory
of symbolic correspondence across scales of size and realms of matter that Leonardo
(ironically) had rejected so vigorously in denying the Neoplatonic idea that fossils
might grow within rocks as products of the mineral kingdom. No theme recurs
so incessantly, and with such central import, both in the Codex Leicester
and throughout Leonardo's writing, as the causal and material unity of the body's
microcosm and the earth's macrocosm. Leonardo also knew the ancient pedigree of
this doctrine, from classical antiquity through medieval Scholasticism. In the
A Manuscript (now in the Institut de France), Leonardo stated that he would
begin his "Treatise on Water" (never completed or published) with a
statement that he later repeats almost verbatim in the Codex Leicester.
Man has been called by the ancients a lesser world, and indeed the term
is rightly applied, secing that if man is compounded of earth, water, air and
fire, this body of the earth is the same; and as man has within himself bones
as a stay and framework of the flesh, so the world has the rocks which are the
supports of the earth; as man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs
as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean, which
also rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world [the tides];
as from the said pool of blood proceed the veins which spread their branches through
the human body, in just the same manner the ocean fills the body of the earth
with an infinite number of veins of water. A close
look at the background and details of the Mona Lisa affirms the centrality
of the same analogy in Leonardo's art, as many scholars have noted, and as Martin
Kemp describes particularly well. La Gioconda stands on a balcony overlooking
a complex geological background of flowing waters that complete a full hydrological
cycle just as blood moves through the human body. Kemp notes:
The processes of living nature are not only mirrored by anatomical implication
within the lady's body, but are more obviously echoed in the surface details of
her figure and garments, which are animated by myriad motions of ripple and flow.
The delicate cascades of her hair beautifully correspond to the movement of water,
as Leonardo himself was delighted to observe: "Note the motion of the surface
of the water which conforms to that of the hair." . . . The little rivulets
of drapery falling from her gathered neckline underscore this analogy, as do the
spiral folds of the veil across her left breast.
We
now reach the central dilemma and resolution that make the paleontological observations
so crucial to the argument of the Codex Leicester. This notebook, as scholars
have always recognized, is primarily a treatise on the nature of water in all its properties, manifestations, and uses. So why does Leonardo devote
so much apparently subsidiary space to the nature of fossils and the reason for
their situation in mountain strata, far above present sea level? The key to this
problem lies in Leonardo's almost heroic struggle to overcome a central difficulty
in validating his crucial analogy of the body's microcosm to the earth's macrocosm.
Most scholars have missed this theme and therefore do not grasp the union of the
hydrological and paleontological passages of the Codex Leicester. Leonardo
recognizes only too well--for he has struggled with this problem for |