فصل 06

CHAPTER SIX

Inventions, Games and Success

‘I cannot believe a man has ever been born who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only about sculpture, painting and architecture.’

Leonardo was a great thinker and inventor; he also liked to have fun and to stretch his mind with word and number games. His skill was to see something in nature and then think how to use that for solving human problems. A lot of his ideas probably stayed on paper, and other people only matched some of his inventions much later. Leonardo’s studies helped him to make games and machines for people’s fun and pleasure. But he had ideas for making useful machines too - machines that could work harder than humans or animals, or that could do things that humans could not do.

Birds and flying machines.

If you remember, Leonardo said that his first memory as a child was of a bird. There is also a story that he bought birds that had been caught and freed them. He continued to love birds and, most importantly, to watch how they flew and then to record what he saw in notes and drawings. For example, he drew a lot of little pictures of a bird flying, and how the bird used the air. Leonardo quickly caught the shapes of the bird’s wings, or the way that one wing was lifted higher, or how it used its tail to hold itself as it wanted in the air. Next to each drawing he made notes. He did this in a whole book that he wrote and drew in April 1505 about birds flying. All this shows how important seeing, looking and understanding were to him.

Leonardo connected his interest in birds with his interest in machines. He began to think about how a person might fly. He noted that:

The beating of its wings against the air can support a heavy bird in the thin air closer to the sun [and] from this man can learn, with large wings tied to him… how to lift himself.

He watched how birds flew and he also made careful drawings of the bones of birds’ wings. His first ideas were to make a machine with wings that went up and down. He decided, though, that a bird’s wings let air through, so were not the best idea for a man’s wings. You can see from the drawing opposite that he chose a different model - the wing of a bat. So his wings for a man were made of cloth stretched between very light and thin pieces of wood. Everything was tied together with leather. He also used pieces of curved metal, kept bent under force. But a lot of power is needed to make wings that beat up and down; in the drawing, the man is moving the wing with the power of a lever. This is much more than the normal strength of a man. But even with a machine to drive levers, it is not possible, without electricity, for a man to make a wing like this work in the air for very long. So Leonardo thought of fixed wings. This means, though, that you could only fly from a high point to a lower one.

We are not sure if Leonardo made any of these machines full-size. To test flight, he wrote:

The machine should be tried over a lake. You should carry a leather bag full of air tied to your waist, so if you fall in the water you will be safe.

We do not know if Leonardo or any of his assistants ever did try this!

This kind of fixed wing machine was not made well until 1920. In the late twentieth century, a full-size copy of one of Leonardo’s flying machines with fixed wings was made for a TV programme. The machine flew farther than the first flight by the American Wright brothers’ aeroplane in 1903! This was not very far, maybe, but it shows how nobody came close to matching Leonardo’s ideas until almost five hundred years after his death. Leonardo also had the idea of a kind of pointed cloth tent about seven metres high, underneath which a man hung, connected to it by leather belts and ties. The cloth was fixed to pieces of wood and was open at the bottom. If the man then jumped off a high place or building, the cloth filled with air and supported him so he fell gently. We now call this a parachute. The first parachutes were made in the late 1700s, although they did not follow Leonardo’s model.

Machines for moving through and under water.

Leonardo was interested in movement through air, but he was also interested in movement through water. We saw in Chapter 2 how he connected the shapes of water with the shapes of hair and knots, or the form of the veins in the body with the shapes of trees or the movement of water in rivers. He also compared the movements of birds through the air and fish through water. He thought of making a boat that was moved by wheels at the sides that had boards on them. Men made the wheels move by stepping on levers; as the wheels turned, the boards went into the water and pushed the boat forwards.

He also thought of ways that would allow a person to stay and even walk around under water. Some ideas, he said, he would not describe because they would help enemy attacks on ships at sea. But he did describe a kind of head covering to wear under the water with two breathing tubes going up to a bell shaped machine that sat on the surface of the water. One tube let air in and the other let it out. Equipment like this does in fact work in shallow water. Leonardo had an idea too for a coat that had a leather bag to hold air so you could stay under water for some time. Clothes and machines for diving under water were made and used from the sixteenth century, but they were not very safe or easy to use. A good way to control the movement of air through breathing tubes was only found in 1943.

Leonardo’s games

Leonardo loved jokes in words and pictures. He liked jokes that played with words and ideas. For example: ‘Many people will be busy taking away from a thing that will get bigger as it gets less.’ What is it? Answer: ‘A hole in the ground.’ What is a body that grows when the head is taken from it, and gets smaller when the head is put back?’ Answer: ‘A pillow.’

‘Who walks on top of trees?’ Answer: ‘A man wearing shoes made of wood.’

His picture jokes also show him playing around with ideas. On one sheet of paper Leonardo put together 154 drawings of pictures of things whose names, when read or spoken, can mean, or sound like, something else. For example in the drawing above you can see that he drew a lion (leone in Italian) in a fire (ardere means ‘to burn’ in Italian) next to a table (desco in Italian); all this adds up to leonardesco, which is the adjective for the name Leonardo. Remember that Leonardo wrote from right to left - and that is true of the pictures here as well as the words!

Leonardo also liked to play with numbers, which shows his mathematical skill as well as his taste for games. Here is an example:

Put equal numbers of beans in each hand.

Move four beans from your right hand to your left hand.

Throw away the rest of the beans in your right hand.

Throw away the same number of beans from your left hand.

Pick up and add five beans to your left hand.

At the end you will always have thirteen beans in your left hand.

His practical scientific interests and abilities also helped Leonardo in his life at court. He was asked to make all sorts of things to amuse people. He invented a machine that played bells. He had an idea for a clock run by water to help you to wake up. When it reached the right time, the feet of the person sleeping were pulled up into the air. He was a chemist because he could turn white wine into red. He also had clever ideas for hidden fountains in gardens that shot water into the air when you stepped or sat on something. People at court lived a very formal life and so they enjoyed these kinds of jokes in places like gardens where they relaxed.

Leonardo knew how to make machines that moved and he used this knowledge for special occasions. He probably made a machine in the shape of a lion that was used by Florentines in Lyons, France, in July 1515 to celebrate the arrival of the new French king, Francois I. They chose a lion because it was a symbol of Florence. The lion walked forward a few steps, which was a little frightening, but then its chest opened to show lots of fleurs-de-lys, a flower that was symbolic of both Florence and France. So the whole thing was a friendly joke.

Leonardo’s ideas - looking at and thinking about the world.

It has been suggested that Leonardo’s character stopped him from finishing anything; because he was interested in so many things, he always wanted to discover and know everything. A sign of this is that Leonardo wrote and drew different things on the same sheet of paper or in the same book, even if he started by intending to think about only one subject. In one collection of notes, he wrote: Reader, do not be surprised or laugh at me if here I jump around from subject to subject.

Leonardo did not go to university and felt the need to defend himself against people who might criticise his ideas because of this. He wrote that readers of books often know only other people’s thoughts instead of having their own:

Experience is the teacher of all who have written well, and so - as it is my teacher - I will use it and talk about it all the time.

In fact, though, Leonardo read books of all kinds, probably some in Latin but more in Italian. Around 1495 he listed about forty books that he owned - this was quite a lot for that time. He also used libraries and the collections of people he knew.

Success and rewards

It perhaps suited Leonardo to work for a court instead of painting pictures or planning buildings for lots of different people. But when he worked for Ludovico Sforza he was not always paid regularly. There are letters from him to Ludovico saying that his situation was difficult and that he had to do work for others to have enough money for himself and his assistants to live. He was always careful, though, to make this sound like the fault of Sforza’s officials and not Sforza himself. In one letter he wrote: If you were told that I had money, this was not true. I had to feed six men for fifty-six months and have had fifty ducats from your officials.

This was not enough money for all his costs.

He was not always paid on time by Ludovico Sforza, but he was rewarded by him. On 26 April 1499 Ludovico Sforza recorded the gift to Leonardo, ‘most famous Florentine painter’, of a large garden just outside the walls of Milan. It was about 200 metres by 50 metres in size. Leonardo thought its value was about 1,931 ducats. This gift was in recognition of Leonardo’s ‘wonderful and clever works’ and his ‘most unusual abilities’. Ludovico said that Leonardo was free to build there if he wanted to, or to use it as a garden. It was not far from Santa Maria delle Grazie - the monastery where Leonardo painted The Last Supper, it was also near the house of Galeazzo Sanseverino. It was perhaps in Galeazzo’s stables there that Leonardo had looked at Galeazzo’s handsome horses. Leonardo lost this garden when the French took Milan, but it was given back to him by the French in April 1507. This is the garden that Leonardo separated into two parts when he died. Salai had already built a house there, which Leonardo gave to him; the other half Leonardo gave to a servant called Battista de Vilanis. When Leonardo was working for the French in Milan, he was paid very well. Charles d’Amboise probably gave him gifts too. King Louis XII also allowed him to receive the taxes paid by the users of a canal in Milan.

When Leonardo moved to France, the French paid him even more money. By 1517 he was receiving 1,000 ecus a year and he was given the title ‘First Painter and Engineer and Architect of the king’. The French government also paid Francesco Melzi and Salai, who were living with and working for Leonardo. One clear sign of Francois’ pleasure was the gift of the house at Clos Luce, and the fact that it was close to Francois’ own house in Amboise. You can see a picture of it below. It had been built only about twenty years before Leonardo received it.

From all this we know that Francois I had a very good opinion of Leonardo and wanted to keep him in France. In the 1540s, twenty years after Leonardo had died, Francois told Benvenuto Cellini, another Florentine artist who came to work for him in France, that ‘I cannot believe a man has ever been born who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only about sculpture, painting and architecture. He was also a very great thinker.’ Francois also liked Leonardo; Cellini said that the king ‘was completely crazy about Leonardo’s abilities and took such pleasure in hearing him talk that there were few days in the year when he was separated from him.’

Leonardo, ‘Renaissance Man’

We can see that Leonardo was admired and rewarded by those who valued all his abilities as an artist, engineer and thinker. He has excited interest from the time when he was alive until today. The quality of his paintings, studies and inventions means that many people today call Leonardo a ‘Renaissance Man’. They mean that he had such great artistic and scientific abilities that he brought together in one person much knowledge and many different kinds of ideas. His ideas and interests stretched from the useful to the beautiful.

Leonardo’s work has also received unwelcome attention, though. In 1962 a man threw a bottle of ink at a very large drawing by Leonardo of The Virgin and Child with St Anne, in London’s National Gallery. Fortunately the bottle did not break, and after that a sheet of glass was put up to protect it. But in 1987 a man took out a gun and shot at the picture. At that time the drawing was thought to have a value of more than $35 million, and the man knew that it would be a big news story. The force of the bullet meant that glass damaged the picture. There were about sixty very small pieces of paper to fit together and it took more than a year to repair it. In the end only about one square centimetre of the drawing was lost.

Leonardo’s paintings, his drawings and his ideas continue to give people pleasure and to make them think. Although he only managed to paint a small number of paintings, he is still one of the most famous painters in the world. Many people even want to see works that he did not finish, like the painting of The Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which Leonardo began in that city in March 1481.

Leonardo had just turned sixty-seven when he died, but he had succeeded in doing many things during his life. In his own words: ‘Life, if it is well spent, is long.’ One can say too that Leonardo lives today in his art and his inventions.