The Book:
The Italian Renaissance
By J. H. Plumb
Mariner Books
First Published in 1961
The Talk:
The Italian Renaissance by J. H. Plumb has an interesting structure to it. The first half of the book covers some of the major cities and themes of the era. The second half includes short biographies of major figures, each written by a different author.
This unique structure puts in sharp relief how really different Leonardo da Vinci was from other figures of the Renaissance. In the popular imagination today, he is the prototypical “Renaissance Man”—master of all knowledge, skilled in all arts, refined in all tastes. And while there were definitely men like that during the Renaissance, it just seems like da Vinci wasn’t that kind of guy.
1. Da Vinci wasn’t obsessed with books.
Being a “complete man” in the Renaissance meant having an education in ancient literature. “Wrestling, fencing, swimming, and riding alternated with hours devoted to Virgil, Homer, Cicero, and Demosthenes,” writes Plumb.
The hunt for classical books became an obsession for Italian princes and men of all sorts. Lorenzo de’ Medici spent half the annual income of Florence on books alone.
Frederigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, aimed to build the greatest library in the world, employing thirty or forty scribes across the region to copy books. He also employed five readers to read books aloud during meals.
The poet Petrarch writes to a friend, “I have got rid of most of my passions, but I have one insatiable thirst—book-buying.”
In contrast, da Vinci did not know Latin until later in life and never learned Greek. His lack of education was apparently something others looked down on him for. He wrote:
“They will say that because of my lack of book-learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to treat of. Do they not know that my subjects require for their exposition experience rather than the words of others?”
2. Da Vinci wasn’t interested in Greek philosophy.
Aristotle was considered the authoritative philosopher of the Middle Ages. And part of the sea change that occurred during the Renaissance was the rediscovery of Plato and platonism. Being able to read, recite, and debate Greek philosophy in the original language was the mark of a true scholar, a true humanist.
It follows from his lack of education in Greek that da Vinci was not as knowledgeable about Greek philosophy, and was less interested in it than observing the natural world. In platonism, the natural world was imbued with value and meaning because it was a picture of a higher, heavenly reality. But for da Vinci, nature held intrinsic interest. It wasn’t merely a symbol pointing to something else. The details matter, and the end goal of learning was knowledge of nature.
3. Da Vinci wasn’t superstitious.
The Renaissance is often thought of as an age of reason. Part of that came from platonism, which idealized human reason’s connection to the divine—the idea that one could use reason like a ladder to climb out of the world of shadows and illusion into the daylight of eternal truth.
But that platonism was also intertwined with a interest in occult-ish Greek-Egyptian hermeticism. It seems every Renaissance ruler had a court astrologer, and magicians were often called upon. Major events, like weddings and wars, were planned with an eye to the heavens. Even popes used astrologers to decide when important meetings should happen, and astrology was formally taught in universities.
As follows from his lack of interest in books and philosophy, Da Vinci seems to have had little interest in hocus-pocus. He was obsessed with finding out why things worked the way they did, but he also seemed to have an intuitive sense that the answer would have a natural cause.
4. Da Vinci never married and had no children.
Da Vinci was an only child. It appears this was unusual at the time, for the Italians of the Renaissance were prolific. Most of the figures in Plumb’s history had multiple wives and multiple children, both legitimate and illegitimate.
In contrast, da Vinci never married and had no children. Jacob Bronowksi writes, “The evidence is that he lacked the usual sensual feelings for women, and tended rather to admire strong men.”
5. Da Vinci wasn’t cruel.
The Italian Renaissance was an era of near constant violence, murder, and torture. It was the Age of Machiavelli, who, in his book The Prince, was either celebrating, satirizing, or simply explaining the deceptive, hypocritical, cutthroat world of Italy during his lifetime. Church leaders were no less cruel than leaders in the secular realm. And the idolized, ideal leader was someone who dispatched his enemies with cunning while maintaining a nonchalant, carefree style.
Not so with da Vinci. “All his life he hated to see suffering,” writes Bronowski. “It is evident that in that rough, insensitive time he was one of the few men who could not bear to give pain to animals.” The story is told that when he was a child he would buy birds in the marketplace and set them free. And there is evidence he was a vegetarian as well.
6. Da Vinci was more interested in structures than surfaces.
Italy during the Renaissance reminds me a lot of Miami: Big, flashy, bold, colorful, overpowered, excessive, showy, sexy—all surface, all performance. The wealth of Italian merchant families spilled over into their home cities, in pageants, balls, tournaments, carnivals, and theatre. The surfaces of everything were covered in tapestries, frescoes, and reliefs, and people dressed up for masquerades and cosplayed as Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, Muses, and nymphs.
While da Vinci did create costumes and set designs for these kinds of events, it’s clear from his notebooks that he was far more interested in what was underneath the surfaces. Not skin, but the veins under the skin. Not the shape of the body, but the sinews. His interest in painting and art, so central to the Renaissance, was almost incidental at times to his deeper passion for engineering, discovering the function of things by closely observing their structures.
7. Da Vinci was interested in discovery, not recovery.
The very meaning of the Renaissance was that the past was back in style. “Classical mythology, Neoplatonism, the mysteries of the pagan world, became chic,” writes Plumb.
Of course, the Renaissance wasn’t a mere copy of the past. It was reinterpreted for a new era. But copying the books and styles and techniques of the past was clearly the way one was meant to go about achieving excellence.
Leonardo believed almost the reverse of that view. He held that imitation led to the decline of art, that copy after copy of predecessors removed the vitality from artist’s work, and that it was only by going directly to nature—by really seeing what was in front one’s own eyes—that true inspiration and the artistic spirit could be found.
Bronowski writes, “Leonardo was one of the first men in whom the Renaissance expressed itself in a new way, not as a recovery but as a discovery.”
Man out of time
“This man will never do anything, for he begins to think of the end before the beginning.” ~ Pope Leo X on Leonardo da Vinci
For hundreds of years after the Renaissance, until well into the 19th Century, the European ideal of the complete gentleman was rooted in Italy. To be educated was to know the wisdom of ancients and to wear it comfortably, confidently.
Bronowski’s portrait of da Vinci gives the impression of a genius who was awkwardly out of step with his times—who would need to wait almost 500 years to find a society that got him.
Precision. Da Vinci’s gift for precision would only be appreciated centuries later. Today precision is everything—from invasive surgery to space telescope mirrors to microprocessors.
Failure. Da Vinci would experiment with new kinds of paint, leaving some of his paintings almost immediately ruined. Many of his projects were left incomplete or untried. Today it’s almost a gospel truth that our society needs risk and failure to flourish.
Automation. Da Vinci was fascinated by inventing things that functioned automatically. It would be centuries before these ideas really took hold.
There’s also one other change that I think da Vinci would’ve appreciated—the decreased perceived value of book learning. Anecdotal evidence suggests that reading books has dropped off sharply in recent years, even among those with advanced degrees in literature and creative writing. And it has become more common for educated people to argue online that reading what “wise” people in the past thought about things is a waste of time.
Leonardo may have agreed. Then again, he exists now mostly as books.
Related:
Dante's Inferno is a video game
The Winter’s Tale and the myth of redemptive technology
The Lewis Chessmen and why we play the game
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks (V&A Museum)