Renaissance Italy in the Time of Leonardo da Vinci

please join me in welcoming professor John carton welcome thank you for that introduction I teach at Clark University a Liberal Arts & Sciences Research University in Worcester Massachusetts where I occasionally offer a seminar on Leonardo da Vinci and Clark's robust motto is challenged convention and change our world and Leonardo is a great case study in fulfilling that model because he did challenge convention routinely in his notebooks he admonishes himself and his reader not to trust the authorities but rather to study things directly especially nature like his contemporary Florentine niccolò machiavelli Leonardo was a proponent of watching and studying actual events rather than accepting old cliches leonardo rights of nature quote all those human ingenuity makes various inventions corresponding by various machines to the same end it will never discover any invention is more beautiful more appropriate or more direct than nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous Leonardo often eschewed regular clothing and at least one early biographer reports that he wore tunics of his own design slightly shorter and more versatile than the fashionable tunics that were in style among the Florentines Masari records that he would enter the marketplace Leonardo where birds were kept and sold in cages and would buy ones only to immediately set them free now we might fancy that he was studying the flight of the birds but he was the type of artist to have released him in a large room if they were to be drawn models and Leonardo's other studies of a type of bird called the kite are clearly from the wild perhaps nowhere does Leonardo better test the conventions of his time than in the field of medical and scientific illustration this woodcut was the title page of Monte know the Lutz's Anatomy ax and this edition was published by Muller shot in Leipzig in 1493 after the initial publishing in Padua in 1478 the text was originally written in 1316 by Mundi no deluzy an Italian physician and anatomist who was said to be or to have been the first since ancient times to carry out human dissection this was one of the only Anatomy books available in Leonardo's day and yet visually it conveys very little most of Mundi knows precepts were laid down by the ancient Roman anatomist Galen whose portrait is shown here at top Galen studied the anatomy of humans by clandestine dissection of dead gladiators and by analogy with a Barbary ape and hints his Roman treatise was full of many errors yet Galen was the unquestioned authority for almost 1,400 years the painted anatomy page by an anonymous artist shows a dissection and process and being directed but the removed organs convey off only the most rudimentary information leonardo pioneered a new branch of visual study with his careful drawings of the human hand and other parts of anatomy the first to write of Leonardo's anatomical innovation was the physician and art collector Paolo Jovi Oh in 1527 and that a physician should be interested in Leonardo comes as no surprise and it is Joao via who writes that Leonardo quote dissected the corpses of criminals and the medical schools indifferent to this inhuman and disgusting work Leonardo then tabulated all the different parts down to the smallest veins in the composition of the bones with extreme accuracy in order that this work on which he had spent so many years should be published from copper engravings for the benefit of Arts in quote here we are looking at a page on which leonardo has issued a challenge to all those area dice authors and indeed he pioneered new or he pioneered new forms of medical illustrations such as rotated vantage points and sectional views even exploded details where things are subtracted to clarify focus to some of us the bottom two drawings might resemble plumbing under the bathroom sink but Leonardo is here drawing the brachial plexus and in the lower drawings he has subtracted the other cervical vertebra to clarify what they encircle and how the individual parts relate to the whole in the accompanying words we can sense Leonardo compensating to some degree for not having learned Latin very well a language his father had studied as a notary and a language that would have helped him gain immediate acceptance among intellectuals the medical school dissections recorded in jovial probably refer to Leonardo's collaboration with a young University of Pavia professor Marc Antonio della Torre and here we should note that for all Leonardo's talk in his notebooks against academics he enjoyed a remarkably close collaboration with one of the most influential professors of the day unfortunately della Tori's untimely death in 1511 may be one of the reasons that the artist did not succeed in publishing his intended treatise on Anatomy instead the honor of publishing a great illustrated treatise on Renaissance Anatomy fell later to the salience nonetheless by Leonardo's own declaration during his lifetime he witnessed and would perform no fewer than 30 human dissection this in an age when outside the university dissections were a hush-hush affair requiring the greatest discretion and usually performed on deceased criminals or unclaimed corpses there was real danger one could be accused of necromancy or sorcery by violating the body of the deceased the illegitimate son rather unschooled in Latin lived his entire lives with the view that curiosity and experience common for far more than with the reading of authority and let us turn to the world in which Leonardo entered this historic place which we call Renaissance Italy now when I told my nine-year-old daughter I was going to give a talk about Renaissance Italy to you today I added rather pedantically you know the word Renaissance means rebirth to which she responded is the elder of my two daughters what is so great about a second birth and indeed what we might well wonder what is so great about this epoch which was first called Renaissance in 1855 by the French author Jules Michelet well not much actually if it remains only a distant and dry story but here we are reexamining it seriously and the MFA offers us opportunities to build bridges from history to our modern lives although Italians occasionally used the term Renacimiento or rebirth and might even speak of a city as a second Athens what made the time period momentous was the degree to which history was a living tradition continually being reexamined so that it might inform the present in that same spirit today let's rethink our own culture by Rhea Pro Qing Italy's and I propose three areas by which we can examine Leonardo's context the first is an overview of the domestic sphere matters of the home things such as births and deaths and how men and women conducted themselves and when possible we'll anchor our views and some of Leonardo's own biography our second sphere is to consider Renaissance politics and modes of power especially in Florence Milan and Rome the Italian cities in which Leonardo's spent most of his life in these city centers we will consider Leonardo's patrons and writers and thinkers who exerted influence within that circle and finally we'll examine workshops and Renaissance notions of the artist focusing specifically on how Leonardo fits within new ideas about an artist's education skill and social position I'll end today with a few words about Leonardo da Vinci as draftsman as a way of offering a transition to your second lecture by Helen Burnham the Pamela and Peter Voss curator of drawings who was both a lively speaker and the long-standing friend from our shared graduate school days in New York on to the Renaissance home I direct your attention to the timeline in the second page of your handout where you will see that Leonardo was born in 1452 Leonardo was born in the small town of Vinci outside of Florence a love child between a peasant woman named Katarina and a man of higher social standing Piero deantonio a notary but Piero soon married a woman of a respectable family leaving Caterina however the newlyweds remained childless much to their chagrin and this paved the way for the illegitimate son Leonardo to be later brought into his father's house by the age of five as the census documents record as to what their separations meant alia Nardo we are not sure but it has been the subject of much speculation from the time of Sigmund Freud's 1910 essay on Leonardo published in the same year Freud made his only visit to America to deliver lectures at my current institution Clark University in 1910 William James and others turned out to listen to Freud's lectures on psychoanalysis delivered in German on Clark campus today we have a bronze statue of Sigmund and I was recently told by two of my students that were that there is an informal tradition now that psychology students must rub the statues crotch for good luck on exams now what whether this is true I responded as an art historian that they should be careful because such practice would actually polish the patina to a sort of golden shine after which they both marched off with a new enthusiasm for this this tradition but anyway back to Freud's essay on Leonardo as you might expect Freud is out the cycle analyzed the artist Leonardo for Freud is a sublimating workaholic whose childhood and developmental circumstances particularly that original maternal bond with Katrina being broken abruptly by his father Piero generated a passive homosexuality in the artist but one apparently suppressed and this seems to be a homosexuality firmly repressed and sir Freud the closest evidence of passion he can find in Leonardo is the Masters heartfelt soliloquy is about the pursuit of knowledge or the marvels of nature and for his own words quote Leonardo represented the cool the cool repudiation of sexuality he had merely converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge in quote and indeed the approximately seven thousand two hundred pages notebook pages surviving from Leonardo's hands revealed surprisingly little about the personal Leonardo and almost nothing about his social life and personal sexuality but as I would answer Freud today where he here why should we expect Leonardo's notebook to reflect much about his personal life the pages were written as functional notes and some passages seem to have been written with an eye towards publishing he kept all his personal feelings private and off of the page as it were in fact Leonardo would be a man out of step with our current ages obsession to update Twitter and to post things on Facebook repeatedly as an illegitimate son Leonardo could never become a notary a sort of proto law clerk like his father because the guild forbade it sometime at an early age Pierre decided to apprentice his son in art but to look more widely at conceptions of Florentine home life and men and women I propose first we explore the wider possible considerations of the human situation visa vie standing in the overall universe and here I'll direct you to the top of the back page of your handout and ask you to take a few minutes to quietly read the two quotes there they're reproduced on the screen but they may be fairly small for some of you but they are on the back page of your handout take a few moments to read those and then we'll discuss them so I'll now ask you to consider a question which is to try to find something wrong with both of these quotes I suspect one of these is easier to find fault with than others but think a moment about problems with each and now to do something very unorthodox and challenging convention in the grand spirit of Clark University I'll ask you to uncomfortably turn to apartment next to you and share your response as to what is wrong with Pico della Mirandola which is the more positive of the two I'll give you a minute or so you can be in groups of three if you need but please do turn and try to formulate some responses to what's wrong with what Pico is telling us well mutton I hate to interrupt lively conversation and debate I did over here a few discussions and as the root I guess of some of the complaints about Pico della Mirandola and it's a very positive passage I just opposed what is a passage of denial it's not limited to the medieval epic and the Pope who said it of course I mean there were zealots in the Renaissance who said very similar things and even in the Baroque Cardinal Borromeo ran through the streets of Milan walks through the streets of Milan hitting himself with a cat of nine tails and denying his flesh but we tend to gravitate towards the almost empowering self-help language of this new renaissance spirit one of the weaknesses though that was pointed out to me is a version of a bigger one which is that this for a Chinon the dignity of man may plant false hope for one's willpower in a society and in an environment and in particular what was brought up was humans dominion over nature being somewhat unchecked and unlimited and yet here we are in an age where we're coming to very real terms with our environment being in a state of crisis and defend human degradation in his day of course the environment was not quite so ravaged but there were there was a highly stratified social class there were all sorts of prejudices there were all sorts of very real systemic boundaries towards one establishing one's own place we'll look at a few exceptions or expectations in the domestic sphere that might have interfered with a Renaissance man or woman called finding a new place on the great chain of being and by that latter I mean the medieval notion that we each have our place and God wants us to do just what our parents have done or to analogize with nature some are born sparrows some pigeons some Falcons or Eagles to explore some of the basics of rental life let's consider the painting by FRA Filippo Lippi of a woman and a man at a window the dates from sometime between 1438 and 1440 for the subjects are Richard Leeds she appears in a fashionable purple Chapa the fur line dress with embroidered gown beneath and the man wears a stylish red hat beretta he leans over his coat of arms which we can identify with the Scolari family in Florence and this is probably a betrothal portrait she has the plucked forehead and the white skin that were deemed beautiful in her day in seed-pearls on her lower sleeve you can just barely make out the word lay out paw or loyalty and purl in seed-pearls and the pearls at the time were associated with purity and thought to have been ancient Greek wedding gift and here they spell out one of the expected traits of a noblewoman namely faithfulness her rings like her Brut her brooch were probably part of her dowry and family heirlooms and though they are harder to see their precious stone carries symbolic as well as economic importance rubies were thought to show fiery love and passion blue sapphires symbolize the celestial blue of heavenly grace and in a rather mean and sexist turn of mineralogy emeralds were equated with chastity and the breaking of an emerald was a bad time I say mean and sexist because of you know about emeralds and most in this epoch came from Egypt they cracked naturally and easily an unscrupulous Goldsmith's might even oil an emerald to hide its flaws and only later to have the cracks show a higher a woman social standing the more she was expected to stay inside the palace venturing out to church only an accompaniment with service in sleepies sitter is indoors while the scolari gentleman is not a French visitor to Florence writing in 1610 commented quote the women are more enclosed here than in any other part of Italy they see the world only from their windows in quote in this early use of linear perspective we see that especially this couple does not quite connect but seem to be passing ships as it were Lorenzo de'medici sister wrote to him in a letter bemoaning quote if you want your own way in Florence don't be born a woman in quote these Mekons Memling portraits of italian sitters remind us of the age difference in Renaissance marriage in most cases the male was about twice the age of the female here the Florentine Tommaso Portinari a Medici banker in Bruges Belgium is shown with his Florentine wife Maria Maddalena baron celli around the Year 1470 when they were are just married and he is 42 and she was 14 or 15 years old at their wedding once married and then a primogeniture system in which hereditary wealth generally went to the firstborn son women were expected to become pregnant with a son in short order but the infant mortality rate was around 1/3 or 33% of infant's not making it past the age of two years old there were also many mothers who died during childbirth as did this noble woman Francesca PT who died while Leonardo was in his twenties and her grieving husband commissioned this relief from Leonardo's teacher's workshop Andrea del Verrocchio you see a detail of his wife carved and with allegorical figures as well as mourners surrounded even before a woman gave birth certain high birth related gifts would arise such as this my Allah cup plate and I apologize for the black-and-white image but you can see it as an example of a sect of hoping to affect the womb through suggestion because written across it is the Italian mask EO meaning a boy child this is a birth tray by Bartolomeo Dario see me painted in 1428 and meant to be ceremonially laden with nourishing foods and sweet meats at the time of a woman's birth this particular example is inscribed quote may God give health to every woman who gives birth and to the child's father may the child be born without fatigue or danger I am a baby who lives on a rock and I make urine of silver and gold in quote taken to be a sign of health and good fortune if your baby peed so many of these birth trays show male twins together with emerging families coats of arms this one showing twins engaged in a rather underhand tussle some florentine painters including Gilliland IO in the torna blown a chapel chose to restage the birth of the Virgin Mary and a sumptuous florentine palace interior with the wet nurse actually present and you'll note the decorative frieze that runs around the birthing room it's a band of nude boys or putit classical pootie one final Florentine detail about birth there was a type of gambling or speculation involving the purchase of wedding dresses that went something like this if the buyer wanted to gamble on whether the bride's first warn would be a male then the dress would be sold as slightly cheaper price but if that firstborn turned out to be a girl the purchaser had to then ante up an additional sum higher than the dresses average price for a garment that had already been delivered and worn Florentines love to have the portraits painted and one of the most talented portraits was Leonardo's younger contemporary Raphael here on yellow domion is rich Weiss Madalena estrosi appear in their luxurious fashions sitting for Raphael probably sometime in 1506 theirs was an arranged marriage and one cannot help but wonder is tetrarch's love sonnets and love verses remain so popular in the Renaissance precisely because the reality of arranged marriages looming so heavily tetrarch's beloved Laura may never have known as the poet's fascination actually and the fact that she died suddenly along with over one-third of Europe during the years 1346 to 1351 memphis he would sing on and on of his unrequited love this contagion brought in by fleas on the backs of asian rats continued in steady outbreaks right through Leonardo's lifetime the bubonic plague but to return to this to portraiture Leonardo's efforts of 1503 painting the Florentine wife of Francesco Giocondo Lisa Gherardini were sketched in this drawing by Raphael influencing the composition of later works as we compare these two works Leonardo and Raphael we are struck by Leonardo's natural hues the somber costuming the animation of his sitters that famous smile and the summa of the natural world displayed rather asymmetrically in the background of the Mona Lisa and as frittered Ultron speaks to you about Leonardo you will hopefully discover just how fossil and innovated his female portraits could be switching to the topic of men boys from the age of 5 to 6 tended to be raised and tutored mostly by men in hopes that they would attain greatness at a young age some fathers were more vigilant in grooming their sons than others Lorenzo de Medici shown here in a painted terracotta bust in the National Gallery probably after a model by Andrea del Verrocchio I was certainly a proud father when his fourteen-year-old son Giovanni became the youngest person ever raised to the rank of Cardinal Lorenzo wrote a letter to his son and counseled Giovanni to avoid vice and luxury Lorenzo tells his son quote on public occasions let your equipage and address be rather below than above mediocrity silk and jewels are not suitable for persons in your situation let your food be plain and take sufficient exercise in quote he goes on with a list of advice that sounds a bit like helicopter parenting today but Lorenzo is obviously anxious that his youngest Hartnell live by virtue and make modest a favorable impression in a Rome that was rife with opulent display with the mention of the Medici let us shift to the politics in Italy we may begin with the medieval and gothic vestiges of Leonardo's boyhood Florence such as this family tower and a few like it scattered about the city Florence and the 1200 s was ruled by an oligarchic collection of noble families each of them built their own Palace complex with a tall tower from which they could fire crossbows or bombard rival or ristic rats in the many skirmishes that periodically flared up around the city most of the fights among Florentines were started by seemingly petty issues of dishonour or public challenges or sliding in a strong chivalric code led many Nobles to request duels or declare battle against a rival since aristocrats could not be trusted non noble leaders of the wool dyeing trade and leading merchants began to be given or trusted with more and more government duties the Florentine merchants class and bankers became even more participatory and running the city while the nobles who were often interested only in their own affairs and vendetta's when about trying to operate above and beyond the law without being burdened by the duties of government during this period florence like other European cities began incremental steps that eventually eliminated serfdom that is people bound to the land and indebted to the noble landowners and by the 1300s eventually succeeded in passing legislation that resulted in the mandatory lopping off of the fifty or more private towers scattered throughout the city this one in fact has been cut both a ceremonial castration of the architecture of the feuding families and a pragmatic way to move towards more peaceful and communal policing and defense the central government the so called Signoria was allowed to build an even taller and more majestic Tower and we're looking here at Arnold cambios palace de priori or palace of the priors which is now called Palazzo Vecchio influence it was begun in 1299 here are some shots of the Palazzo Vecchio or this one-time Palace of the priors in terms of the prior six of the nine priors of the Signoria were selected from the major guilds and two were selected by the minor guilds or organization the ninth became the gonfaloniere a or standard-bearer and the way the process worked the names of all the guild members over 30 years old were put in leather bags called Borgia and every two months these bags were taken from the Church of Santa Croce where they were ordinarily kept and then a short ceremony they were drawn out at random and only men who are not in debt had not served a recent term and had no relation to the names of men already drawn would be considered eligible for office immediately after they were elected the nine were expected to move into the Palazzo della signoria where they would remain for the two months of their office and there they were paid a modest sum and to cover their expenses and were provided with service they could not meet with fellow citizens or even foreigners for fear of corruption and influence-peddling we're in an age right where it's harder and harder to find out how the tens of millions of dollars are flowing into Washington actually we have term limits today but the fact that the Florentine Republic had limits of only two months speaks to the factionalism and the favoritism that must have been rampant and the priors actually did stay up and that crenelated the widest part of the tower and where their movements were restricted for the two months in that area indeed after several revolts and uprisings among the smaller City guilds and the wool workers by 1400 an old oligarchical clan the LBG family were in charge and when a non noble banker calls him o de Medici began gaining power the LBC sent him into exile in 1433 Cosimo had maintained a humble error assisting all classes of Florence by loaning them money in exchange for whatever they had to barter even as his banking empire groom to the outreaches of the world his was one of the first multinational banks and using double entry accounting here is a portrait of Cosimo and his retinue has painted in the Medici palace he famously wrote around Florence on modest and sure-footed mule rather than a fancy horse so he was a real everyman in the public's eyes being so beloved by the Florentine populace and professing himself to be a staunch protector of the Florentine Republic against the albiet see and similar oligarchs Cosimo returned triumphant to Florence in 1434 when the forces throughout the LBCC during Cosimo's generation a Florentine notary was travelling all over Europe working as a papal secretary in a career that spans seven different popes pojo broccolini was a renaissance intellectual whose greatest love was scouring through remote and dusty libraries and rediscovering texts by Cicero Lucretia and others these were reported with great fanfare in Florence and enrolled while in the monastery of st. gall broccolini discovered the most complete edition of the ancient writer of Vitruvius whose 10 books of architecture would inspire Brunelleschi and later Leonardo's own vitruvian man of course pojos sale of a single rare manuscript by the ancient author Livy earned him enough money to buy a villa in the bald Arnhem where he would later host Donatello to study his collection of ancient statuary as we think of Renaissance humanists such men from Cosimo's epoch come to mind but Leonardo came slightly later as Leonardo launched his artistic career in Florence called the Moe's grandson Lorenzo de Medici was de facto ruler of Florence's Republic together with his more handsome brother Jew it was not pictured here Leonardo was influenced when both the Medici brothers were the subject of a life-threatening attack by a rival banking clan the Pazzi together with the Archbishop of Pisa and with the backing of Pope Sixtus the fourth who's shown here who stood the games both debt forgiveness once the Medici were exterminated and could get further loans with epoxy as bankers on Easter Sunday when all Florence nobility were to turn out in the cathedral Lorenzo was ill but a member of the popsie faction actually roused him out of the Medici Palace on the grounds that the public would be awaiting him for the for Easter Mass and we just asked as over in eastern once in the Cathedral and as a signal of the presiding Archbishop of Pisa the raising of the host actually assassins emerged killed Giuliano but missed Lorenzo who escaped after only a stab wound the top two conspirators tried to storm the Pryor's Palace but became inadvertently locked in a chamber meanwhile Lorenzo emerged above in the Cathedral and waved to the crowd to signal that he was still alive and the Medici supporters rallied and the cotton and the poppy conspiracy was defeated the archbishop was eventually killed the Pope excommunicated the Medici and tried to encourage Naples actually to join forces and attack Florence but quick diplomacy on the part of the Lorenzo avoided this events of the failed conspiracy were not forgotten in fact commemorative coins were struck one what you see here and even one of the conspirators Bernardo de bunda no baron celli was sketched here by Leonardo after having been hunted down in Istanbul and turned over to operatives of the Medici bank there then brought back and summarily hanged in a public execution in Florence amid such political violence Lorenzo continued his interest in poetry humanism and the arts with his palace in its garden being a site for the gathering of cultivated men I show you here in the top drawing how the palace used to be when that corner section was still open and one could actually sit inside the kind of darkened doorway of the corner of the palace Marcelino said chinos Neoplatonism continued to rouse Florentines to a love of higher thought and the pursuit of knowledge and leonardo absorbs some of this Neoplatonism as when later in the Codex travelled via travel Co he writes quote if the thing that is loved we base the lover becomes based when the thing taken in the union is in harmony with that which receives it that follow rejoicing and pleasure and satisfaction when the lover is united to that which is loved it finds rest there the thing is known with our intellect in quote so it's very much in the tradition of plato's speaking of a loved or beloved and speaking really about the pursuit of truth or knowledge while neoplatonism was all the Vogons Florence in 1480 things were changing politically in Milan the patron of the Arts Ludovico Sforza shown here is known as ill Morrel had become after the murder of his elder brother Galeazzo maria sortsa the rightful heir of the founder of the ruling dynasty and he was the guardian of his brothers his murdered elder brother's son and in that way he managed to seize power over Milan in 1480 like his brother before him let avika wanted to justify his rulership by donating an equestrian monument in honor of his father Francesco Sforza who himself was in need of public legitimacy in bolstering the artwork since the Swartz ax had only recently come from military ranks when Francesco had overthrown the long ruling ruling and noble family of the Visconti in fact when Leonardo moved to Milan in the early 1480s the fortified walls of the Costello courts ESCO which you can still see today were rising in Milan and he clearly wanted to offer his services as a military engineer the Florentines and Sienese were well respected in the Italian peninsula as expert military engineers a letter drafted by Leonardo da Vinci applying to the Duke of Milan still survives and I'll read a little part of it now having and this is in translation that quote having most illustrious Lord seen and considered the experiments of all those who posed as masters in the art of inventing instruments of war and finding that their inventions differ in no way from those in common use I am emboldened without prejudice to anyone to solicit an appointment of acquaintance your excellency with certain of my secrets so this is his cover letter to the Duke of Milan as a young man and he then outlines his talents that he actually numbers them off takes them off one through ten number one I can construct bridges which are very light and strong and very portable with which to pursue and defeat the enemy another is more solid which resists fire or assault yet are easily removed and placed in position and I can also burn and destroy those of the enemy number two in case of siege I can cut off water from the trenches and make pontoons and skate in ladders and other similar contrivance --is number three if by reason of the elevation of the strength of its position a place cannot be bombarded I can demolish every fortress in its foundations if its foundations have not been set on stone and so it keeps going right for is all about cannon how we can design new cannon so the by number nine in the last V right and if the fight should take place under the sea or upon the sea I can construct many engines most suitable either for attack or defense and ships which can resist the fire of the heaviest cannon and powders or weapons finally number 10 in time of peace quote I believe that I can give you it as complete satisfaction as anyone else in the construction of buildings both public and private and in conducting water from one place to another a hydrological engineer and so ends his list of tins to the Duke he doesn't add a little addendum he says I can further execute sculpture and marble bronze or clay also in painting I can do as much as anyone else whoever he may be moreover I would undertake the commission of the bronze horse which shall endure with immortal glory and eternal honour with the auspicious memory of your father and of the illustrious house of Sforza and so ends the letter and so artistic Tavern is his afterthought right in his job application if you will Leonardo actually arrived at this court looking more or less as it does now maybe some of the walls weren't finished with letters of introduction but also with a very fancy lire a musical stringed instrument that he had had fashioned by a silversmith in the shape of a horse's skull and we are told that he played the instruments wonderfully the Duke seems to have been favorably impressed with this debut musical performance and in short order Leonardo begins making designs for military equipment this drawing shows the artist visualizing for his viewer the possible art of mortar fire along different trajectories part of Leonardo's success in these weapons is his convincing pending execution that makes even this improbable sized chariot spinning cherries seem like it will chop one's enemies to bits with the efficiency efficiency really is like Cuisinart so it's in even in ones that don't work there's a captivating reality to his execution when he wasn't drawing weapons Leonardo was often out with the Dukes headed greed horses or making armature sketches and preparations for the largest equestrian monument Europe had ever seen Leonardo was probably commissioned to produce the monument in 1485 and worked on it continually over the next decade and your fourth lecture will consider that moment more closely but we do know that the full scale model of the horse and clay was unveiled in November of 1493 in the courtyard of the Milan fortress but in 1499 French occupying forces destroyed the clay model using it as target practice Leonardo also spent time in Milan creating splendid best day or pageants diverting himself with Jess and we can assume playing the lyre playing music we can get a sense of Leonardo the musician in this rare line of musical notation on the sheet that's now in the Windsor collection to read this line you must know that the first character is a fishhook not correct or not it's official and in Italian official is called by the word amo amo and the picture of the fishhook has been followed by musical notes ray Sol la me Fabray me and then the written word Rara I spelled like Rare and then more musical notes lost soul me lost soul and in writing at the end Italian script let's Utah so what we have here is Leonardo composing a little musical melody in the form of a rebus it transformed itself into this poetic rebus the line of which he actually writes out not in mirror script but in regular script on the phrase below and this produces the lyrics amor de sola me fairy Morales ole miss awfully cheetah only love makes me remember it alone fires me up and so here we catch a glimpse of the smart and courtly Leonardo the musical performer who first grabbed lot of egos Schwartz's attention by playing this most creative and bizarre silver instrument and another one love keeps me amused these light-hearted and amorously place the lines of music come from a man that Freud characterized as cool and incapable of feeling strong emotion or affection now granted Freud would point out how in the end this is just a kind of cerebral game but I think we should accept Leonardo's jovial spirit and sociability that is so documented actually in 16th century sources as your timeline points out 1494 was a tumultuous year for the italian peninsula owing to one of europe's largest players france under the rule of charles the 8th sweeping down into italy with the help of Lud of eco sortsa on his bid to reclaim naples the French encountered barely any resistance on their way to Naples and even the newly established Borja Pope Pope Alexander at first threw his support behind the French but as the French and then all their Swiss Britons and Scots and other mercenaries horribly ravaged one Italian city after another in their movement southward eventually the Pope the Republic of Venice and even a lot of equal Schwartzel made an alliance with the king of Spain and the German Holy Roman Emperor and by 1495 they had succeeded in driving the French back to France in 1490 Lorenzo de Medici had invited a well-educated Dominican theologian back to Florence to preside over the monastery of San Marco which was near the Medici Palace as a young man Savonarola had lived in Florence actually for five years but Lorenzo de Medici died in 1492 and his successor Piero de Medici proved a weak leader who when the French invaded in 1494 rather than striking a diplomatic bargain wound up simply giving away Pisa and three other Florentine strongholds to the advancing French army when the Florentines were furious and the Medici were expelled Savonarola came to power as the de facto controller of the Florentine Republic but he was deeply despised by the Borgia Pope Alexander against whom Savonarola would eventually preach after a few years of religious fervour and fanaticism and Florence Savonarola was arrested he was subjected to torture and eventually with two other friars was publicly hanged and burned right in the central Piazza in the audience of that grueling execution was a 27 year old Florentine named niccolò machiavelli we have that adjective even today right Machiavellian and so at the risk of myself being an idol in some ways Machiavelli I'd ask you now to turn once again to your discussion your neighbor with whom you've discussed and say what you think the adjective Machiavellian means if we use it today so take a moment okay you probably came up with the definition there's something hopefully like coming or scheming unscrupulous maybe in politics or maybe in wider life yeah I'm not sure that the frequent charges against Machiavelli's book the prince charges that declare the book immoral or irreligious are completely true since Machiavelli never actually advocates for cruel to you deception or violence per se the prince he writes quote should not deviate from what is good but know how to do evil when necessary include but it gives an example he witnessed in 1501 of the Florentine people refusing to do anything during a factional bloodbath in the town of pistoia when Florence Florence's brief violent intervention would have prevented greater loss of life Machiavelli writes in that context quote Cesare Borgia was actually more compassionate than the Florentine people who in order to avoid being called cruel permitted pistoia to destroy itself in quote in a different instance Machiavelli famous soundbite that is quote better for a prince to be feared than to be loved in quote it's followed immediately in many other places in the book with the admonition that a ruler should never make himself hated or act with senseless cruelty but in an age of the Borgia and a French mercenaries and of a struggling Florentine Republic remember we may never know entirely what boundaries Machiavelli perceived in his practical guide to politics and was there an undercurrent of cynicism man who lived in an extremely violent and politicized age the Medici for whom he seems to have written a book mostly scorned him and Machiavelli died working on his farm in relative obscurity and seclusion in 1527 but back to an earlier political moment unfortunately for Milan Charles the eighth died without a male heir and so his cousin came French King Louie the twelfth shown here on the left and Louis grandmother had been a Visconti when that family had ruled the law this gave the French King a legitimate claim to Milan which was currently held by Leonardo's patron Ludwig Oh sorta sports assume the other Italian states would not allow the French back into the peninsula but when Venice the Republic of Venice was eager for Milanese a territory decided to back the French the French once again invaded Italy and took Milan thanks to the leadership of the ruthless Cesare Borgia and this is thought to be a portrait of him on the right an illegitimate son of the then Pope Alexander the 4th Borja the portrait we see Cesare Borgia who does look like a man of determination he assisted the French to capture Milan he married into the French royal family and obtained feast ins in the Romagna Leonardo worked briefly as a military engineer under the ferocious military leader yet Cesare Borgia even menaced Tuscan territories and threatened Florence itself in fact a few years later when Leonardo is painting a battle scene in the Florence council hall with Michelangelo painting a rival battle scene opposite Michelangelo purportedly complains that Leonardo had been working for Florence's enemy Cesare Borgia and yet now was being celebrated in her council Hall and we see here at the bottom of other artists drawings of the now lost frescoes the Battle of Anghiari the Florentine battle this is the only are the best surviving detail by Rubens actually was painted by Leonardo begun left unfinished and also begun but left unfinished by Michelangelo on the right hand side we see a drawing after his Battle of Cascina and there is a difference in the representation of violence in these works despite Leonardo having quotes in his right about the bestiality of war in the years 1506 1508 Leonardo is traveling between Charlevoix French Court of Milan and Florence but eventually his second Milanese a period includes some of his best anatomical work and his continued fixation on hydrology and the nature of swirling water let's consider the intricate paths of Leonardo's mind when jotting down notes on something like fluid dynamics specifically water our tests Florian Martin Kim notes that Leonardo plan to treat us on water and when about outlining its structure and medieval encyclopedic fashion one part of this involves Leonardo listing sixty-four terms descriptive of water in motion and the list begins REBOUND circulation revolution rotating turning Reaper cussing submerging surging declination elevation depression are you directed consumation percussion and destruction and so it goes sixty-four turns and another point in the Codex leister he announces that he has outlined 730 conclusions on water from his study of turbulent motion if you've ever set out to draw moving water with a pen you know the impossibility of the challenge it takes a very quick eye the phenomenon of the vortex held great interest for Leonardo and he looks for its presence almost ubiquitously in his natural pursuits including the phyllotaxis of plants or in the swirl of the Star of Bethlehem plant which he could tuck into a religious painting he even thought in the curls of human hair he writes quote note the motion of the surface of water which conforms to that of hair which has two motions one of which responds to the weight of the strands of the hair and the other to the direction of the curls this water makes turning Eddie's which in part respond to the impetus of the principle current while the other responds to the incident motion of deflection in quote just as his notes playfully jump from water to human hair so to his drawings can in one place put helical configurations to work in hydrology and in another earlier context use them to make more perfect curls in the painted hair of a figure such as this Archangel Gabriel in the Annunciation on a nearby page in the Codex leister Leonardo demonstrates how an effective engineer works with the natural forces of fluid dynamics rather than against them in this drawing Leonardo shows how inserting a weir upstream from a house suffering erosion uses the vortices of nature rather than teams of men to do the work of depositing silt and protecting the homes foundation even as an anatomist while studying the heart Leonardo seeks to understand how the organs design relates to the fluid of the blood coursing through it in this drawing he is studying the heart actually of an ox for it is a close parallel actually to the human heart in its bowels and its tetrapeptide structure as he just enjoys sharing them before the lecture began that when teaching at Case Western Reserve I went out to a private butcher and got a bovine heart accounts heart you can cook these things at Ethan and brought that in and had my seminar students in Leonardo do a kind of impromptu looking at this heart and cutting it and then looking at his drawings of an ox heart and what so hubristic has to brag to biology colleague case about what I had done and he proceeded to tell me that I violated every rule in the book about using animal tissue and and was aghast at this self learning but as Leonardo discovers the odd triangular geometry of the tricuspid valve which is at the lower right of that big sheet towards the bottom um he starts to try to imagine how the blood must move through it he circles back to the issue as a vortex and on the nearby sheets sketches out a theory that the squeezing of the valve creates vortices whose trajectory aids the valve enclosing each of its three sides only in the last few decades with new imaging technology as cardiologists been able to see these vortices in action and confirm the highly efficient system of the tricuspid valve that Leonardo had suspected since Leonardo could not see it firsthand he records in his notes how he paid a glassblower to create part of a special model mimicking the valve shape and then added water and millet seeds the latter aided him to see how the water was moving and in this way witnessed the vortices he sketched and for an exhibition about nine years ago Martin Kemp had this working model recreated based on that description so our way to Center number so our tour of the vortex led some turbulent pool of water to beautiful coiours for female figures to the phyllotaxis of plants to protecting a rivers homes foundations to the vortices within the tricuspid valve of each of our hearts it's a dizzying series of connections and it's just one thread of many that weave throughout this masters what we could call lateral thinking yet not all of the Masters analogies with animal Anatomy worked out as well as his bovine heart studies while this is a remarkable drawing of the fetus and shows that he did dissect a female probably someone abandoned I mean no not even a working class female would have been subjected to an anatomical dissection and she had any family she was clearly pregnant probably died in childbirth now while this is a remarkable drawing of the fetus his attempts to visualize the placenta including a blow-up view of one of the cotyledons those button-like changes in the wall of the birth sac turns out to be misconceived the coachee laDawn line placenta is true of cows but not found in humans and that's you see the kind of velcro like the cotyledon structure interacting there is a blowout on the right and then you can see it in the placental sac those places where it's stuck together it seems that this study of an aborted calf which you can just make out of the calf it's a little as the son of the veterinarian I can instantly see the cast but it's at the bottom and let me get my handy dandy pointer and here are its front legs and the little clothes and it's in the head in its body but these are the cotyledons on the placenta it seems this bovine study supplied the info for Leonardo's drawing of the human sac and the lateral is perhaps already missing when he dissected the cadaver of the pregnant woman but let us leave the Leonardo dissecting in return to politics talking of Machiavelli earlier it should be noted that he observed the actions of one of the most violent and ruthless popes the world has ever known Julius the second he was known as papa terrible a terrible Pope or the infamous Pope for his berating of his staff his mistreatment of others and his willingness to take part in battles and lead the papacy to war here he is in Raphael's portrait having done what no Pope in anyone's memory or any historical knowledge had ever done namely grown a beard and in fact canon law of the 11th century had explicitly forbade a pope to grow a beard Pope Julius did this an emulation of the earlier general Julius Caesar Julius Caesar had grown a beard and refused to shave until vengeance on the Gauls was achieved in the case of the Pope he refused to shave until the French and their forty thousand troops were driven from the Italian peninsula prior to that resolve however he had also made life hell for the son partly I grew up very close to President Truman's hometown and once in a while I slipped into his expletives had made life very difficult for the Venetians who had tried to claim people's State Territory Julius helped lead forces and the League of Cambrai which really crippled Venice only to have Venice joining forces with the Vatican and with Spain the following year in 1510 to drive the French from Naples and by 1512 the French were also driven out of the wall eventually though a Medici Pope came to power and this led Leonardo pickup residents in Rome where he seems to have been on friendly terms with Bramante and with Raphael the painter of this portrait of the new Pope Leo the 10th with Cardinals Giulio de Medici and luigi de Rossi this was Lorenzo de Medici son right that 14 year old Cardinal Giovanni now all grown up as Pope and did he listen to his father's advice in that letter about avoiding vice and luxury jewels and silk no not at all he spent more money on finery than any Pope previous as you might have guessed from his silk robes and the silver bell that's on the table beside that very lavishly illustrated manuscript he was one of the popes that increased the printing press output of selling indulgences something Martin Luther would quickly come to denounce but with the emergence of Martin Luther and with Leonardo spending his last years even out of the Italian peninsula up in France at a chateau compliments of the French King I want to spend our remaining moments on the changing status of the Renaissance artists during this period and it's another illegitimate son Leon Battista Alberti that I want to focus on he had published his treatise on art by mid-century and of the treatise it was a big departure from earlier how-to manuals written by artists such as Janine OCHA Nene who had counseled exactly how to mix one's colors how exactly to apply goldleaf and in what steps Alberti's track instead was classically formulated even as his emblem which we see here in his Latin model on his portrait metal commission from matteo de pasti was a classical formulation and we're looking at at the bottom that both the recto and verso of the same metal and then i just brought in the caesar augustus coins to show you how Renaissance metals are essentially a rebirth of a form of the Romans didn't use metals right this is an enlargement essentially of the Roman coin we see on the posses medal of Leon Battista Alberti from around 1450 that on the verso of it is Alberti's emblem the winger died with eagle's wings that was princely of birds and the eye itself being the highest of one census according to Albert II it has light rays shooting out of it are the tunnel underneath it is a Latin model might be hard to see it's Quinn tomb very enigmatic quid tomb could mean what's what next or what then it has that kind of dangling within quality about it Albert Diaz writer declared quote I take the foundation of art to be prudence and mature deliberation in quote experience should inform knowledge now there's a part of Albert II that Leonardo lives out experience should inform knowledge judgment should inform choice study shouldn't inform composition perfection shouldn't inform completion and Albert Lee also advised quote follow the example of those that apply themselves to letters meaning the study of the classics education one point that seems highly relevant is Albert his notion of a new artist who is far less the craftsman and more an intellectual he advises or counsels the use of wit he states that which should inform inventions whether it's a visual or whether it's literary and this is something else that Leonardo took much to heart Leonardo seems to have tried to live by this and even test his inventive wit in various jokes and riddles but he was also very fond of what I would call humorous prop prophecies there's sort of riddles but they're about prophecies of things that come true here's one in translation the skins of animals will make men arouse from the silence with loud cries and ODEs and in his notebooks any scribbles the answer to this sort of jeopardy like question underneath them he writes under it of balls for playing games so it's a very witty type of thing he's writing now when you think of the Patriots and pigskin they made balls out of animal skin even in the Renaissance and so these prophecies are about things that have already come true but the jest or the game is in trying to decode what they are and he writes them down very methodically in the way that castile Yellin a that later writes the courtier tells advise of certain jokes in polite company and that you don't want to fear a peer affected you want it to be spontaneous and yet it gives you such giving writes down all these kind of precepts of how it should be done here's another one by Leonardo the Masters of the estates will eat their own laborers it's of oxen which are eaten and other parts of the notebooks suggest they might have been a vegetarian by reason of the Stars you will see men moving as swiftly as any Swift animal it's on the stars that are on Spurs and so in an age before cars when you rode horses the stars of your Spurs spend you a long now when you leave here today try your hand at writing your own prophecy style riddle to make a game of it maybe with a friend although I must confess that I devoted some time to this exercise in a college seminar and was surprised by one of the prophecies offered by a relatively quiet student here's is what she wrote and we all took time guessing at what it could be teeth will open and a national scandal will ensue I called out Oliver North's testimony in the iran-contra affair to which my younger students stared uncomprehending as though I had invented some sort of bogus historical moment one student did offer Mixon and Watergate but the author's answer was actually Bill Clinton's zipper so so be very careful with this witty game that is this in fact with that I probably violated violated kept still you'll need his mandate about proper jokes for the appropriate company I don't want to end today though without mentioning Brunelleschi and his example because he came about when Florence was trying to figure out their greatest architectural challenge which was how to span and how to build a dome for its Cathedral the dream had grown so large that they had built a footprint of a cathedral building to which they had no solution as to how to build the dome across its crossing in fact when they started tallying up the amount of timber that would be required to build up that dome they realized that the scaffolding itself what we call sintering for an arch my collapse under his own way to a ditka forest of lumber you know here's yours truly inefficiently trying to master Photoshop and try to reimagine what the cathedral might have looked like the facade of the florence cathedral with that in the 19th century in this is a historical but not it's more of a pastiche but if you can imagine this they they literally had to leave it you know open for decades and they had multiple competitions and it was little Eskie of course who won out in these competitions and created the great solution Leonardo's master Verrocchio's was in charge with actually gilding the huge golden award the ball that sits on top of Brunelleschi's company lay which is what this children's book drawing actually attempts to show but off to the right here the lower right is an actual Leonardo drawing of a hoist a moveable hoist that he had was sent by burro Keo over to draw it was in the works of the duomo other globo's story hard and it was a one on regionally designed by Leonardo he had to make his own equipment actually to to rotate and to be able to build the dome now we're drawing mirror at the end of our time and so I'll end with with one final painful exercise with your now nearest and dearest acquaintance and a seat next to you it involves a visual comparison so I'm going to give you a couple of images and then we'll focus on the good old art historical compare and contrast these two things the first one the best image is this one which is a series of drawings that we now attribute to a northern artist probably German it used to be North Italian or bergomask or somewhere in that zone but I think now maybe it's north of the Alps and these drawings are a series of animals but also a series of head types I don't know if the leather case in which they're held is actually from the 15th century or if that was from a later century but here's a detail of some of those heads in black and white and I apologize for not being able to find a color reproduction but I set it against a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci and I'll ask you to turn to your neighbor and try to compare and contrast the differences of drawing and I'm doing this in a way to set up your second lecture with Helen Burnham who will talk extensively about the drawing practices of Leonardo but take a moment or two and look at these two images and offer your thoughts about how these two artists go about drawing in very different fashion you given that loud discussion you are all welcome to enroll at Clark University we we do try to foster this level of engagement I don't want to say too much about is drawing because of course Helen Burnham will go into depth about it but I will say that this master we don't even know this artist name let's call him master Hans since I now think he is German in closing today he's very much trying to create a repertoire of imagery that can be guarded like the product of his workshop can be circulated and copied by his apprentices and their version or their mandate was to learn master honza's style so efficiently that they could complete subsidiary passages of the painting and have it passed off as the master hans of style a very different approach not by leonardo but by his master Andrea del Verrocchio this is a drawing by Verrocchio's of studies of an infant now he flips the paper around because you know artists did that in paper wasn't super expensive but you use the whole sheet if you could that words here from a different context what a great quick series of sketches those of you have done drawing know about contour drawing capturing the the basics of outline and contour this is remarkably fluid and efficient for pen and ink we turned into Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of an infant with a cat he was so lucky to have studied under a great teacher Andrea del Verrocchio bucked the tradition and taught that the world was one's workshop and he started his apprentices at a very young age sketching from life which most masters didn't they had them copied the Masters drawings and so if you think in your own minds what could be more difficult to get the stand still and to do a study of then infant well how about an infant with a cat right so this rapid pending sketch is of a fundamentally different character than what most Renaissance artists continue to practice and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes we'll have some question answer but it reveals something of Leonardo's modus operandi writing in the Codex travolt Co he observes as a day well-spent procures a happy sleep so a life well spent brings a happy death we will never know if Leonardo truly died happy in 1519 or if he wished he could have accomplished more all we can say with certainty is that the French King made sure Leonardo was comfortably provided for in a villa in the law Valley but the fact that 900 496 didn't I just yeah for my math is a humanities verses meant that four hundred and ninety six years later you and I can gather here in Boston to explore this man from Vinci surely that's proof enough that his life was a life well-lived [Applause] so we have time for a couple of questions we have a microphone on either side of the auditorium please raise your hand and we'll bring the mic to you and if you're leaving please do so quietly [Music] could you explain what the codex's are ah if they they're a mixture actually of some of them are still in folios that seem original and were bound there were small folios that the artists could use in his lifetime understand some of them even have the original binding others like the Codex atlanticus has been renamed that one in Milan which is the biggest collection of his drawings was assembled later francesco melt see the artists trusted studio mates and he was much more than an apprentice because they were more similar in age but Leonardo entrusted him with his drawings at his time of his death in France and so melt C was one of those we think who helped to assemble that collection of drawing so the codices are both what his successors stuck together on pages and also some of them seem to have been original manuscripts that are still in sequence and we have one of those in this country of Bill Gates has a manuscript that has images of flight but it's a lot of words actually visually it's maybe not quite as arresting in some I was under the impression that there were no verified self-portraits of Leonardo and so I'm wondering what this is oh yeah this is by francesco Melfi that pupil if you want to call them that you're exactly right in terms of we don't know for sure there's the most common one that you see is a of that looks sort of like this guy turned facially and has kind of a long nose and it's I should have brought that in the style of the drawing looks slightly earlier so that it looks very aged if it were a self-portrait and I for example assisted Carmen Bomb bog who's the curator of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum when I was a graduate student on the show Leonardo master draftsman which is still was the biggest show of drawings recently in this country and she took it to be more an image of a wizened magic Magus figure like a kind of older wizened trope of a man than a actual self-portrait others you see it's reproduced in textbooks all the time as is self-portrait it's perhaps the best candidate but she has a very keen eye on as do several other scholars on dating the hand of Leonardo and when drawing should be and so it seems to me we may not have a self portrait that we could say was but this one is both labeled but it was also done by pupil and is perhaps a good likeness and on those that Carmen Bombeck will be joining us for a lecture on May 6th on Leonardo and his drawing oh now she is taking the place of help or are there yeah yeah yeah okay sorry I clearly need to bone up on line programming here - Museum I remember reading a quotation and I didn't have time to look this up before today from Leonardo going along the lines of late in his life saying tell me if anything was ever done meaning he was he had so many drawings with so many inventions and they hadn't all been built and of course some of them didn't work as she pointed out but the impression that he was frustrated in his later life but there was so much less to do and was concerned about this I'm glad you brought that comment up because it is true and he did have that sentiment and he wasn't alone in terms of aging Renaissance artists in that but it does make us wonder as we re-examine the tradition of Leonardo today I mean I've had students of mine that have gone on to one of them worked in animation Pixar studios and things doing visual work that was oddly seemed almost a legacy sometimes of what Leonardo might have enjoyed and I was privileged to go on a national and balance with humanities overseas grant $2,500 of taxpayer money sent me to Italy for five weeks I had to raise my own eye you know that those have you been to Italy that didn't quite cover everything but it was it was a combination of Americans we had two anatomist we had a poet laureate we had a geologist we had all these people approaching Leonardo from these different vantage points and talking about his living legacy and in terms of the work never being done and I'll make one political plea which is if any of you have any ties to Alabama or know of anybody who lives in Alabama tell them that their that their congressman senator sessions Geoffrey Bogart Beauregard sessions has to go because unbeknownst to most people last year he made a quip to the news media about the overseas programming of the inny age and how it was really just a free ride for high school teachers to kind of go overseas within a week the neh shut down the entire 40 year program of sending American scholars abroad to study things like Leonardo da Vinci and ensure they do have some high school programs that they're they have to be equally as competitive it's not more than the one that I had applied for out of the nation so send this backwards lawyer who is now by the way I think he's the reigning person on the budget means the Ways and Means Committee he's he's holding the purse strings this is a there's a reason that his informal comment led to a form of censorship where he didn't have to raise a finger you know the neh just changed it I think we're out of time thank you for joining us today thank you [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 37,428

Rating: 4.7319036 out of 5

Keywords: Leonardo da Vinci, renaissance, renaissance art, italy, italian art, european art

Id: yZj0t8vV94w

Length: 84min 41sec (5081 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2017