(MUSIC) GlOVANNI GABRIELI: Sacrae Symphoniae
The scene has changed from Florence to Rome,
from the city of hard heads, sharp wits, light feet, graceful movement
to a city of weight.
A city that is like a huge compost heap of human hopes and ambitions.
A wilderness of imperial splendour, despoiled of its ornament,
almost indecipherable.
Only one bronze emperor, Marcus Aurelius,
who was above ground in the sunshine throughout the centuries.
And, as you see, the scale has changed.
This is part of the courtyard of the Vatican,
at the end of which, the architect, Bramante has built a suntrap, known as the Belvedere,
from which the Pope could enjoy a view of the ancient city.
And it's in the form of a niche.
But instead of being designed to hold a life-size statue
as it would have been 50 years earlier, it is enormous.
In fact, it has always been known as Il Nicchioni
The Monster Niche.
It's the outward and visible sign
of a great change that overcame the civilisation of the Renaissance in about the year 1500.
This is no longer a world of free and active men,
but a world of giants and heroes.
A world of giants.
This bronze pine cone, and it really is a big pine cone,
came from that earlier world of giants - antiquity.
It was supposed to have been the point at which the chariots turned,
in their races round the hippodrome.
Since, in that hippodrome, many Christian martyrs were put to death,
it was here that the Christian Church elected to make its headquarters.
Huge, cloudy concepts,
compared to the sharp focus of Florence.
But in Rome, they weren't so cloudy, after all,
because the huge buildings of antiquity were there
very much more of them than we have today.
Even after three centuries in which they were used as quarries
and in which our sense of scale has expanded, they still are surprisingly big.
In the Middle Ages, men had been crushed by this gigantic scale.
They said that these buildings must have been the work of demons
or, at best, they treated them simply as natural phenomena, like mountains,
and built their huts in them, as who should take advantage of a ravine or sheltering escarpment.
Rome was a city of cowherds and stray goats,
in which nothing was built except a few fortified towers
from which the ancient families carried out their pointless and interminable feuds,
literally interminable, because they're still quarrelling today.
But by 1500,
the Romans had come to realise that these mountainous ruins had been built by men.
The lively, intelligent individuals, who created the Renaissance
bursting with vitality and confidence,
they weren't in a mood to be crushed by antiquity.
They meant to absorb it, to equal it, to master it.
They were going to produce their own race of giants and heroes.
(Bell tolls)
The scene has changed to Rome also for political reasons.
After years of exile and adversity,
the sovereign pontiff has returned to his seat of temporal power.
Temporal powers that meant so much to the popes of the 16th century,
but, of course, are completely abandoned today.
Now the Pope is solely a religious leader.
(Applause)
(Bell rings)
(Blesses crowd)
In what is commonly described as the "decadence" of the papacy,
the popes were unusually able men, who used their international contacts
their great civil service, their increasing wealth in the interests of civilisation.
And even Sixtus IV, who was as brutal and cunning as he looks, founded the Vatican library
and made the great humanist Platina its first prefect.
And here we see, for the first time the splendid head of the young cardinal,
who, more than any man, was destined to give the High Renaissance its heroic direction,
Guiliano della Rovere.
What a lion he looks compared to the donkeys of the papal secretariat.
And when he became Julius II, he was able by magnanimity and strength of will,
to inspire and bully three men of genius,
Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael.
This programme is about a few individuals of genius.
And two of them, Michelangelo and Raphael,
were, to some extent, the creation of Julius.
Without him, Michelangelo would not have painted the Sistine ceiling,
nor would Raphael have decorated the papal apartments.
And so we should have been without two of the greatest visible expressions
of spiritual power and humanist philosophy.
Well, this splendidly over-life-sized character
conceived a project so audacious, so extravagant,
that, to this day, the very thought of it makes me feel slightly jumpy.
He decided to pull down old St Peter's.
It was one of the largest and most ancient churches in the world
certainly the most venerable,
because it stood on the place where St Peter was supposed to have been martyred.
Julius decided to pull it down
and put in its place something even larger and more splendid.
In his thoughts for the new building, he was influenced by two Renaissance ideals.
It must be based on perfect forms, the square and the circle,
and it must be on a scale that surpassed even the grandiose ruins of antiquity.
He called on Bramante to provide a plan.
He didn't get very far with it.
You know, great movements in the arts, like revolutions
don't last for more than about 15 years.
After that, the flame dies down and people prefer a cosier glow.
Julius II was pope for only ten years.
St Peter's wasn't completed till almost a century after his death.
But the first step in this visible alliance between Christianity and antiquity
was taken when Julius decided to pull down the old basilica
and rebuild it in rivalry with the enormous remains of Roman architecture.
In the 15th century, Graeco-Roman sculpture
had become a shining, almost inaccessible model to the more adventurous artists
and collectors had begun to compete for fine examples.
The greatest prize in the papal collection was the Apollo of the Belvedere,
an ideal of godlike beauty.
But for some time, these discoveries didn't influence their mental picture of antiquity.
They read the ancient authors with passionate attention,
they wrote to each other in Latin,
but although their minds were full of antique literature,
their imaginations remained entirely Gothic.
When the average painter set out to depict a scene of ancient history or legend,
as in this picture of the Rape Of Helen, he did so in the costume of his own time
with dainty, fantastical movements,
which show not the slightest consciousness of the physical weight
and the flowing rhythms of antiquity.
Well, these are not ancient Greeks but 15th-century Florentines,
and the funny thing is that the humanists,
who took such trouble about the text of an author like Livy
accepted a picture like this of the death of Julius Caesar
as a correct representation of the event.
As long as there was this rather comical discrepancy
between the written word and the image,
antiquity couldn't exert its humanising power on the imagination.
I suppose that the first occasion
in which the dream of antiquity is given a more or less accurate visible form
is the series of decorations representing the triumph of Caesar
done for the court of Mantua by Mantegna in about 1480.
It's a piece of romantic archaeology.
Mantegna has rummaged passionately in the ruins of ancient Roman towns
to find evidence for the shape of every vase or Roman trumpet,
but he has subordinated all his antiquarian knowledge
to a superb feeling for the drive and discipline of Rome.
I said that the gigantic and the heroic spirit of the High Renaissance belongs to Rome
and it's true
but there was a sort of prelude in Florence.
(Bells ring out)
The Medici, who had been the rulers of Florence for the last 60 years
had been kicked out in 1494 and the Florentines had established a republic.
They made speeches full of the noble, puritanical sentiments
which pre-Marxist revolutionaries used to dig up out of Plutarch and Livy,
and to symbolise their convictions they re-erected two statues by Donatello,
the lion of the republic, called the Marzocco,
and Judith, the tyrant slayer,
two figures belonging to an earlier period of Florentine liberty.
The city fathers also commissioned various works of art on heroico-patriotic themes.
One of them was a gigantic figure of David,
the free, pure-hearted youth who had killed the giant of corruption.
The commission was given to an alarming young man,
who had just returned from Rome to his native city, Michelangelo.
Only 25 years separate this marble hero from the dapper little figure,
which had been the last word in Medician elegance,
the David of Verrocchio
and you see there really has been a turning point in the human spirit.
The Verrocchio is light, nimble,
smiling and clothed.
The Michelangelo - this is the original, the one you saw in the Piazza was a copy -
the Michelangelo is vast,
defiant, nude.
It's rather the same progression that we'll see again in music,
between Mozart's Figaro and Beethoven's Fidelio.
What a man!
Everyone who met Michelangelo
recognised that he had an unequalled power of mind and skill of hand.
Even as a boy, his spiritual energy terrified people.
Personally, I believe that this small figure,
which he carved in Bologna when he was under 20, is a self-portrait.
It shows that he never changed, except that he grew sadder, like the rest of us.
It has the indignant singleness of purpose that alarms ordinary accommodating citizens.
In a way, his art never changed.
This relief of a battle is certainly one of his earliest works
and, already, one sees the same expressive poses
that reappear on the Sistine Ceiling, even in The Last Judgement.
It's inspired by a Greco-Roman relief.
Antique art was always to Michelangelo a kind of quarry from which he dug out his ideas of form,
but, of course it's still rather a rough version of antiquity.
When he went to Rome
he was able to make much more finished versions of antique sculpture,
some that were actually passed off as originals.
This one even achieves some of the unpleasant smoothness of a Roman copy.
But when he returned to Florence
he was able to charge this worn-out style with his own vigour and potency.
Seen by itself, the David's body might be some unusually taut and vivid work of antiquity.
It's only when we come to the head
that we're aware of a spiritual force that the ancient world had never known.
I suppose that this quality, which I've called "heroic"
isn't a part of most people's idea of civilisation.
It involves a contempt for convenience
and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we usually call "civilised life".
It's the enemy of happiness.
And yet we recognise that to despise material obstacles
and even to defy the blind forces of fate
is man's supreme achievement.
After all, we see that he's expressed this by the body, no less than by the head.
By this living cage of ribs.
By those tense, architectural muscles of the pelvis.
Above all, by this huge Florentine hand,
so far from the antique tradition of ideal beauty.
Since, in the end
civilisation depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost,
we must reckon the appearance of Michelangelo's David
as one of the great events in the history of Western Man.
And this brings us back to Rome and to the terrible Pope.
In fact, I'm sitting in the papal garden in the Vatican.
Julius II wasn't only ambitious for the Catholic Church.
He was ambitious for Julius II.
In his new temple,
he planned to erect the most grandiose tomb of any ruler since the time of Hadrian.
It was a staggering example of "superbia", what we call "megalomania".
Michelangelo, at that time, wasn't without the same characteristic.
I needn't go into the question of why the tomb was never built. There was a quarrel.
Heroes don't easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
Nor does it matter to us what the tomb was going to look like.
All that matters is that some of the figures made for it survive
and they are something new to the European spirit,
something that neither antiquity
nor the great civilisations of India and China had ever dreamt of.
As a matter of fact, the two most finished of them were derived from antiques.
But Michelangelo has given them a complex inner life
that was almost unknown in antiquity
and he has made them convey their emotional conflicts by the action of their bodies.
They're conceived as captives,
bound captives,
one of them struggling to be free.
From what? From mortality?
From the weight of his muscle-bound body,
derived, as we know from a Roman figure of a boxer?
And the other
sensuously resigned.
"Half in love with easeful death".
Michelangelo had in mind a Greek figure of the dying son of Niobe.
These two are carved out in the round.
The others, assuming they were part of the same set, are unfinished.
Their bodies emerge from the marble
with the kind of premonitory rumbling that one gets in the Ninth Symphony
and then sink back into it.
(MUSIC) TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA: Responsories For Tenebrae
To some extent, the rough marble is like shadow in a Rembrandt
a means of concentrating on the parts that are felt most intensely.
But it also seems to imprison the figures.
In fact, they're always known as The Prisoners, although there's no sign of bonds or shackles.
As with the finished captives,
one feels that they express Michelangelo's deepest preoccupation,
the struggle of the soul to free itself from matter.
(MUSIC) TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA: Responsories For Tenebrae
I'm standing in the Sistine Chapel.
Above my head is one of the greatest works of man.
Michelangelo's Ceiling.
People sometimes wonder
why the Italian Renaissance didn't make more of a contribution to philosophy.
The answer is that the most profound thought of the time
wasn't expressed in language, but in painting,
just as in the early-18th century, it was expressed through music.
Ofthis truism
the chief example is Michelangelo's Ceiling.
We owe it to Julius II.
Ever since Michelangelo's earliest biography,
the Pope has been blamed
for diverting his energies from the tomb on which he'd set his heart
and putting him to work on the painting of the Sistine Ceiling.
It was even said to be a plot devised by his enemies.
Well, I think it was a stroke of inspiration.
The original project of the tomb included almost 40 marble figures over life-size.
How could Michelangelo ever have done it?
It's true that he carved marble faster than any mason,
but even with his heroic energy, the tomb would have taken him 20 years,
during which time his mind was changing and developing.
The very fact that, in the Ceiling,
he decided to depict scenes, not simply to concentrate on single figures,
allowed him a range of experience,
which would hardly have been possible in the more concentrated medium of sculpture.
Look at this woman holding her child in front of her,
and these piled-up men Looking across the flooded landscape...
..and this wretched woman
lying there in misery,
abandoned.
All these show a human side of Michelangelo, which will scarcely appear again.
The ceiling also allowed him to express his thoughts about the divine plan,
but were they his thoughts?
In most philosophical paintings of the Renaissance
the ideas were suggested by poets and theologians,
but in one of Michelangelo's letters,
he says that the Pope had told him to paint what he liked.
So I suppose that the subject of the ceiling was largely his own idea.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to interpret.
It's an extremely complex work.
Viewed from the ground, there is an acute, physical difficulty in concentrating long enough
to relate the scenes and the individual figures to each other.
Some scenes are clear.
The contrast between the confident sensual twist of Eve's body before the Fall...
..and the huddled, desperate animal after.
As for the general scheme, I think at least one thing is certain.
The Sistine Ceiling passionately asserts the unity of man's body, mind and spirit.
You can admire the ceiling from the point of view of the body,
as 19th-century critics used to do, who looked first at the so-called "athletes"
or from the point of view of the mind,
as one does when one looks at those great embodiments of intellectual energy,
the prophets and sibyls.
But when one looks at the sequences of stories from Genesis
I think one feels that Michelangelo was chiefly concerned with the spirit.
As a narrative, they begin with the Creation and end with the drunkenness of Noah
but Michelangelo compels us to read them in reverse order
and, indeed, they were painted in the reverse order.
Over our head, as we enter the chapel, is the figure of Noah,
where the body has taken complete possession.
At the other end, over the altar, is the Almighty, dividing light from darkness,
in which the body has been completely transformed into a symbol of the spirit
and even the head, with its too-evident human associations has become indistinct.
In between these scenes comes the central episode,
the Creation Of Man.
It's one of those rare works which are both supremely great
and wholly accessible, even to those who don't normally respond to works of art.
Its meaning is clear and impressive at first sight
and yet the longer one knows it, the deeper it strikes.
Man, with a body of unprecedented splendour,
is reclining on the ground in the pose of all those river gods and wine gods of the ancient world,
who belonged to the earth and did not aspire to leave it.
He stretches out his hand
so that it almost touches the hand of God
and an electric charge seems to pass between their fingers.
Out of this glorious physical specimen,
God has created a human soul.
Behind the Almighty, in the crook of his arm, is the figure of Eve,
already in the Creator's thoughts
and already, one feels, a potential source of trouble.
It's possible, I think, to interpret the whole of the Sistine Ceiling
as a poem on the subject of creation,
that godlike gift, which so much occupied the thoughts of Renaissance man.
After God has brought Adam to life come those scenes of the Almighty in the act of creation,
which form a sort of crescendo, the movement accelerates from one scene to the next.
First of all, God dividing the waters from the earth.
"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
I don't know why these words give one such a feeling of peace, but they do.
Michelangelo has conveyed it by a tranquil movement
and a gesture of benediction.
In the next scene the Creation of the Sun and Moon
he doesn't bless or evoke, but commands
as if dealing with these fiery elements required all his authority and speed,
and, to the left, he swishes off the scene to create the planets.
Finally, we're back at the separation of light and darkness.
Of the rare attempts of finite man to set down an image of infinite energy,
this seems to me the most convincing, one might even say the most realistic,
because photographs of the formation of stellar nuclei
show very much the same swirling movement.
Michelangelo's power of prophetic insight gives one the feeling that he belongs to every epoch,
most of all, perhaps, to the epoch of the great romantics,
of which we are still the almost-bankrupt heirs.
It's the quality that distinguishes him most sharply from his brilliant rival,
the second hero of this programme, Raphael.
Raphael was, above all, a man of his age.
Even in his early work, still painted in the clear, self-contained style of the 15th century,
he's begun to absorb and harmonise
all that was being felt or thought by the finest spirits of his time.
He is the supreme harmoniser.
That's why he's out of favour today.
One couldn't write a bestseller about Raphael.
I suppose one must allow that, as works of art, Raphael's frescoes aren't all that easy to enjoy.
Even in the 18th century, when Raphael stood at the summit of an established Olympus,
Sir Joshua Reynolds warned young artists not to be disappointed by their first visit to the Stanze,
but to go on looking and looking,
until, finally, they understood the restrained,
but perfectly-balanced language in which he expresses his ideas.
I've tried to follow his advice over the last 40 years
and, I promise you, it's been worth the effort.
Raphael came from Urbino, where his father was court painter,
and it's reasonable to suppose that he was introduced to the papal service
by his compatriot, Bramante, who was not only the architect of the new St Peter's
but seems to have been on relatively intimate terms with Julius II.
At the time, Raphael was 2?r.
He had only once tried his hand at mural painting.
He'd shown no evidence at all that he could cope pictorially with great ideas
and yet Julius had the insight
to commission this young man to decorate the library and study,
which was to be the centre of the Pope's life,
where he was to meditate on theology and decide on action.
The decorations must, in some sense project and harmonise his thoughts.
No doubt, Raphael had passed much of his boyhood in Urbino in the palace library,
where paintings of poets and philosophers and theologians
were placed above the shelves containing their books.
And when he came to decorate what, in effect, was a branch of the papal library,
he determined to carry the same idea further.
He would not only portray the figures whose books were in the shelves below
he would relate them to each other
and to the whole discipline of which they formed a part.
He must have had advice from the learned, cultivated men
who made up about a third of the papal curia,
but that sublime company wasn't assembled by a committee.
It represents Human Reason.
It's always known as the School Of Athens.
On the opposite wall is Divine Reason, known, for some reason, as The Disputa.
On the subsidiary wall, the window wall,
is Poetic Inspiration, Apollo and the Muses, known as the Parnassus.
Everything in the groups is thought out.
For example, of the two central,figures in the School Of Athens
Plato, the idealist, is on the left
and he points upwards to Divine Inspiration.
Beyond him, to the left, are the philosophers who appealed to intuition and to the emotions.
We recognise Socrates.
But many of the others can't be identified.
We can be certain only
that these noble human beings are passionately engaged in the search for truth.
To the right is Aristotle,
the man of good sense, holding out a moderating hand,
and beside him are the representatives of rational activities
logic, grammar and geometry.
Curiously enough, Raphael has put his own portrait in this group,
next to a bearded philosopher,
who seems to be an ideal portrait of Leonardo da Vinci
perhaps intended to represent Pythagoras.
Below them is a group of beautiful, young men,
looking over the shoulder of a baldheaded geometrer.
Euclid, I suppose.
He is certainly a portrait of Bramante and it's fitting that he should be there,
because the noble piece of architecture,
in which these representatives of Human Reason are assembled
must, I think, represent Bramante's dream of the new St Peter's.
Raphael, himself, was later to become an architect, and a very fine architect,
but, in 1510, he couldn't possibly have conceived a building like this,
one of the most life-enhancing effects of space in art.
It may have been designed by Bramante,
but Raphael has made it his own.
Like all great artists, he was a borrower,
but he absorbed his borrowings more than most.
One has a vague feeling
that these figures are inspired by Hellenistic sculpture.
I suppose that's one of the things, that makes him distasteful to us
but every figure in this picture is pure Raphael
or every figure but one.
This morose philosopher
does not occur in the drawing,
the full-size drawing for the fresco, which, by a miracle, has survived.
We can see where he comes from. The Sistine Ceiling.
Michelangelo wouldn't let anyone in there while he was at work
but Bramante had the key
and, one day, when Michelangelo was away,
he took Raphael in with him.
Who cares?
The great artist takes what he needs.
(MUSIC) HEINRICH ISAAC: Proprium Missae In Dominica Laetare
While Human Reason is rooted to the earth
Divine Wisdom floats in the sky
above the heads of those philosophers, theologians and church fathers
who have tried to interpret it.
(MUSIC) HEINRICH ISAAC: Proprium Missae In Dominica Laetare
For all these figures, Raphael made studies,
which are models of the academic style of drawing.
He even made nude studies of whole groups
to get the underlying structure solid and real enough.
How Michelangelesque that left-hand figure is.
Then other studies of the flow of drapery,
but when he came to the final design,
all these ideas are enriched and developed.
The seekers after revealed truth
are arranged with the same regard for their relations with each other
and with the philosophic scheme of the whole room, that exists in the School Of Athens.
In so far as civilisation consists in grasping imaginatively
all that's best of the thought of a time,
these walls represent a summit of civilisation.
(MUSIC) HEINRICH ISAAC: Proprium Missae In Dominica Laetare
If only, we feel, Raphael had more often allowed himselfthis vein of sensuous poetry,
which, in its way, is quite as civilising as his intellectual abstractions.
Michelangelo took no interest in the opposite sex,
Leonardo thought of women solely as reproductive mechanisms,
but Raphael loved the girls as much as any Venetian.
Soon after this portrait was painted, Julius II died
and his successor, Leo X doesn't look at all like a hero.
I suppose Raphael tried to make this portrait as flattering as possible,
but what a contrast to the old warrior.
Raphael remained on in the papal service
and was asked to do everything, from the rebuilding of St Peter's
to the decoration of a very pagan bathroom for Cardinal Bibbiena.
Of course, he couldn't do it all himself.
For such a project as the Loggia of the Vatican,
one must imagine him making dozens of slight sketches,
handing them out, right and left, to his brilliant young pupils.
Giulo Romano was only 16.
Someone said of Courbet that he produced pictures as an apple tree produces apples.
The same is true of Raphael,
except that his apples were fruits of the imagination
and, sometimes achieved such grace and finality
that they stamped themselves on the European mind for 300 years.
However, one of the commissions of this period had a more questionable influence.
This was a series of designs for the tapestries which were to be hung in the Sistine Chapel.
With the thought of Michealangelo's Ceiling above them
Raphael took a lot of trouble about them and, of course, they are masterpieces.
Masterpieces of composition in the tradition of the early Florentines.
Masterpieces of elevated imagination.
But their very nobility was dangerous.
They're concerned for the lives of the apostles, Peter and Paul.
Well, St Peter was a poor fisherman.
Raphael has made him and all his companions uniformly handsome and noble.
Where can one find more impressive human types
than in the group of apostles who listen to Christ's charge, "Feed my sheep"?
It may be good for us to leave our daily chores
and move in high company for a short time,
but this convention, by which the events in biblical or secular history
could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens,
handsome and well-groomed,
went on for too long, till the middle of the 19th century, in fact.
Only a very few artists, perhaps only Caravaggio and Rembrandt, in the first rank
were independent enough to stand against it.
I think that the convention, which was an element in the so-called "grand manner",
became a deadening influence on the European mind.
It deadened our sense of truth even our sense of moral responsibility
and led, as we see in modern art
to a hideous reaction.
In the autumn of 1513 soon after the death of Julius
there arrived in the Belvedere almost exactly where I am now,
one more giant.
Leonardo da Vinci.
Historians used to speak of him as a typical Renaissance man,
a kind of successor to Alberti.
Well, that's a mistake.
In fact, he belongs to no epoch,
he fits into no category
and the more you know about him, the more utterly mysterious he becomes.
Of course, he had certain Renaissance characteristics.
He loved beauty and graceful movement.
He shared or even anticipated the megalomania of the early-16th century.
The horse that he modelled as a memorial to Francesco Sforza was to be 26 feet high.
He made schemes for diverting the River Arno,
that even modern technology couldn't accomplish.
Then, of course, he had, to a supreme degree,
the gift of his time for recording and condensing whatever took his eye.
But all these gifts were dominated by one ruling passion,
which was not a Renaissance characteristic.
Curiosity.
He was the most relentlessly curious man in history.
Everything he saw made him ask why and how, particularly how,
and he's left his answers in thousands of sheets of paper and scores of notebooks.
I've got in my hands the facsimile of one of these, Manuscript B.
It deals with practical problems.
Millwheels, toothed wheels, ratchets.
Architecture.
A tower.
For the Ducal Palace in Milan the Castello Sforzesco.
A church, in the style of his friend, Bramante.
Leonardo was obsessed with the idea of putting a round dome onto a square base.
And a stable
for the Duke of Milan's famous horses.
A very grand stable.
The hayloft above,
the feeding bars on either side
and a drainage system down the middle.
And then, the other aspect of Leonardo's mind,
his interest in theoretical and mathematical problems.
This you see in a manuscript called Manuscript A,
where he's studying the light falling,
the action of light falling on a sphere,
and the interruption of light forming this continuous modelling.
It looks abstract enough,
but, in fact
it was the theoretical study of light falling on a sphere
that enabled Leonardo
to achieve the incredibly precise,
scientifically precise,
continuous modelling of the head of the Mona Lisa.
You can see from these manuscripts
that Leonardo's curiosity was matched by an indefatigable energy.
He's never satisfied with a single answer.
He goes on asking the same question again and again,
worrying it, restating it,
countering imaginary antagonists, till the reader is absolutely worn-out.
Fortunately, he also left answers in the form of drawings,
which are, or appear to be, easier to take in.
One can enjoy them for the way in which his eye grasps each form
and his hands set it down with a unifying rhythm.
But one mustn't forget
that they are all, or nearly all, answers to questions.
How does one stream of water deflect another?
What is the cause of whirlpools?
How are rocks formed? What is the reason for stratification?
How do storm clouds build up?
How do trees mass together?
How does a twig support its load of acorns?
How do blackberries mass on a branch?
Why do the leaves of a star-of-Bethlehem resemble the movement of water?
What is the structure of a bird's wing? How does a bird fly?
Of all these questions,
the ones he asks most insistently concern man.
Not the man of Alberti's invocation, "with wit reason and memory, like an immortal god,"
but man as a mechanism.
How does he digest?
How does the heart pump blood?
How does a child live in the womb?
How does he speak?
ls it by using his throat muscles or his tongue?
And, finally, why does he die of old age?
Leonardo discovered a centenarian in a hospital in Florence
and waited gleefully for his demise, in order to examine his veins.
Every question demanded dissection
and every dissection was drawn with marvellous precision.
And at the end, what does he find?
That man, although rem,arkable as a mechanism
is not at all like an immortal god.
He's not only cruel and superstitious, but feeble.
If Michelangelo's defiance of fate was heroic,
there is something almost more magnificent in the way that Leonardo,
that great hero of the intellect,
confronts the inexplicable, ungovernable forces of nature.
It was in Rome, in the very year that Raphael was celebrating the godlike human intellect,
that Leonardo used his scientific knowledge of the movement of water
to express his feelings of human insignificance.
The painstaking way in which he depicts these disasters
shows a strange mixture of relish
and tragic indignation.
On the one hand, he is the patient observer of hydrodynamics.
On the other hand he is King Lear defying the deluge.
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!
Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes sprout
till you have drencht our steeples, drown'd the cocks."
We are used to catastrophes.
We see them every day on film and television.
They contribute to our pessimism.
But coming from a perfectly-end, owed man of the Renaissance
these extraordinary drawings of the world destroyed by flood are prophetic.
The golden moment was almost over.
But, while it lasted
man achieved a stature that he's hardly ever achieved before or since,
because to the humanist virtues of intelligence
was added the quality of heroic will.
For a few years, it seemed that there was nothing
which the human mind couldn't master and harmonise.
(MUSIC) TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA: Responsories For Tenebrae