Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design
Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7
In 15th-century Florence stories were told of a fascinating young man who, strolling the streets in his brightly-coloured clothes, would sometimes pause at a market stall to buy a caged bird. As soon as he had purchased it, he would set it free.
This young man, it turns out, was Leonardo da Vinci. And what does it matter if the tale is apocryphal? It has a symbolic appeal. Leonardo — “the most relentlessly curious man in all history”, as Kenneth Clark called him — was not the sort to accept restrictions. He obeyed no boundaries and saw no impossibilities. Traditional teachings were not truths to him; they were ideas to be tested.
Those who studied the ancients, he declared, were “the stepsons, and not sons, of Nature”. And it was to Nature, “the mother of all good authors”, that he himself turned. “The grandest of all books, I mean the Universe, stands open before our eyes,” he insisted. And placing his trust in experience and the direct evidence of sight, he set out to read it.
His observations in all their intricate, teeming multiplicity are recorded in his extraordinary notebooks. And it is a thoughtful selection of pages from these (from the British Museum’s Codex Arundel, only recently unbound to create a facsimile, from the Royal Collection’s great treasure-trove of drawings and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s almost unknown Codex Forster) that the V&A now puts on display in an inspiring new show.
Leonardo: Experience, Experiment and Design, curated by Martin Kemp, professor of art history at Oxford and a world-renowned authority on Leonardo, sets out to focus on the role that drawing — disegno in its most expansive Renaissance sense — played in the vision of this astonishing uomo universale.
Those hoping for some block-busting display of “most famous” drawings will be disappointed. Though included among some 60 notebook pages are such supreme images as the famous anatomical study of the “irrigation systems” of the female body and an extraordinarily dramatic deluge drawing, there are also an awful lot of pages labelled with such titles as: “Determining the volume of pyramidal and rectangular solids” or “Studies of centres of gravity and compound balances”. And yet perhaps in their mathematical purity they lead us more nearly to Leonardo than any of the more easily appealing images. They take us back to the fundamentals of his design.
Leonardo’s notebooks work like a forum for brainstorming sessions. To visit this show is to step into the laboratory of his thought. It is to enter the world of a creature of ideas who seems to have felt compelled to record everything that he observed, every problem that he encountered, every possibility that he explored, in all their proliferating diversity. Peer into the hotchpotch of diagrams and you will find anything from a tiny study of a water outlet to a carefully paced-out scale plan to reroute the River Arno.
Never stopping for long enough to organise what he has found, Leonardo persists with the enthusiasm of an amateur and the skill of a professional to explore anything from engineering to anatomy, from geology to astronomy, from military ordnance to the drainage of swamps. Here is the work of a man whose vision is so broad that he can contemplate building a flying machine capable of carrying a person (and which when built and tested for a TV programme four years ago made a flight that exceeded the Wright brothers’ epoch-making 1903 journey), and yet who, at the same time and with an extraordinary shift of focus, can plan in cross-section the detail of the groove in the handrail that runs down a spiral staircase. As the spectator peers into these pages (and remember to bring a magnifying glass) he will discover anything from designs for a duchess’s bath (they veer in style from pizza oven to blast furnace) to doodles of a man’s penis as gradually it droops and deflates.
But how do you make sense of this befuddling fluidity? Of course this great master can still keep even such aficionados as Kemp (whose beautifully produced publication is far more than a catalogue and presents a wonderfully lucid accompaniment to the show) arguing and debating and guessing. And yet as this show constantly stresses, for the Renaissance man everything was somehow linked. Hair and water share the same sort of motion. A water-clock recalls the human oesophagus. A heart is compared to a seed. Ideas interlink and strange and unexpected connections emerge.
And yet, at the root of everything lies a fundamental discipline: that mastery of disegno that is based, Kemp explains, “upon the due measure of things according to their form, number, proportion, motion and harmonious composition”. For Leonardo, mathematics was the ultimate key to the understanding of nature. “Oh students, study mathematics and do not build without foundations,” he implored.
Inexorable geometries underpin his discoveries. A ribcage, for instance, can be turned back into pure mechanics. A tricuspid heart valve (exactly the sort that is now used in surgery) is a piece of pure geometry. The flow of a river can be plotted with numbers.
This show is accompanied by projected animations that help the spectator to make three-dimensional sense of Leonardo’s dynamic visions. They explain how the stellated dodecahedron assembles itself, for instance; or show how Vitruvian man stands up and measures his perfected proportions. Tiny pen-studies of people in motion come to life and sprint across the page. A tank (though a drawing of it isn’t actually included) rumbles off across a battlefield, flattening little figures and presumably deafening the poor crank operators inside it with every smoky cannon puff.
Leonardo, whose mind far outstripped the supporting technology of his era, may well have appreciated the animations. If he had been alive today he would probably have been a computer nerd. And the show’s animations, though sometimes more amusing than illuminating, are certainly helpful for spectators who want something to look at while they await their turn at a dimly-lit display case.
But don’t let the projections distract you from the manuscripts. Don’t let them draw you away from the superlative talent of the original drawings, from the man’s breathtaking skill. He captured the tug and flow of a swirling river current in red chalk and investigated the relation between the tongue’s musculature and articulation (he promises on the verso to squeeze the lungs of a dead animal, playing it like a bag-pipe, to understand how the lungs, bronchi and voice box produce their music). He draws a tongue as strongly muscular as some slimy mollusc. His studies of a bird’s wing are about the most accomplished drawings of non-human anatomy in the entire Renaissance. These are the images that make you feel so close to the master that sometimes you can almost imagine him breathing beside you.
Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design is at the V&A, SW7 (0870 9063883, www.vam.ac.uk), from Thursday
WHAT TO SEE AND HOW TO SEE IT
Take a magnifying glass
The script in the notebooks is super-tiny. You may also want to take a mirror to read his mirror scripts (you’ll need to understand medieval Italian to make sense of them). Expect to queue to see the contents of the many glass cases.
Don’t miss
The “Irrigation System” of the Female Body, his drawings of detumescing penises and reconstructions of his flying machines, hanging in the atrium of the V&A.
