Verwandte Artikel zu The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: Da Vinci,...

The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped - Softcover

Strathern, Paul

 
9780553386141: The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped
Softcover
ISBN 10: 055338614X ISBN 13: 9780553386141
Verlag: Bantam, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia—three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man’s perceptions—and the course of Western history.

In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering Leonardo to be Borgia’s chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages, and hill towns of the Italian Romagna—the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli’s frequent dispatches and Leonardo’s meticulous notebooks.

Superbly written and thoroughly researched, The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior is a work of narrative genius—whose subject is the nature of genius itself.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Strathern has lectured in philosophy and mathematics and is a Somerset Maugham Prize–winning novelist. He is the author of two series—Philosophers in 90 Minutes and The Big Idea: Scientists Who Changed the World—Napoleon in Egypt, and the Sunday Times bestseller The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. He lives in London.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One


Leonardo Learning

leonardo da vinci was born in 1452 in the hilly Tuscan country?side near the village of Vinci, some twenty miles west of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a twenty-six-year-old notary, who during Leonardo's childhood remained for the most part in Florence, pursuing a successful career. All that is known for certain of Leonardo's mother, Caterina, is that she was a twenty-five-year-old peasant girl, who may have been the daughter of a local woodcutter.

Few facts are known about Leonardo's early years and we have to rely upon occasional, often enigmatic, remarks made years later in his notebooks. A prime example is the comment made by Leonardo whilst he was writing on the flight of birds, in this case observing the flight of the fork-tailed kite, a bird that often flew over Vinci from the slopes of nearby Mount Albano:

Writing in such detail about the kite seems to be my destiny, since in the first memory of my childhood it seemed to me that whilst I was lying in my cradle a kite flew down and brushed open my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail on the inside of my lips.

Out of this suggestive fragment Freud would construct an entire psychological history for Leonardo, leading from the trauma of separ?ation from his mother, and his consequent ambivalent feelings towards her, to his homosexuality and his reluctance to finish projects upon which he embarked. Unfortunately the German translation used by Freud mistakenly rendered the Italian word for kite (nebbio) as "vulture," lending an altogether more lurid tone to this memory. Despite this error, Freud's claim that Leonardo's memory of the tail probing his lips was a masked image of his mother's nipple, when he was suckling her breast, seems plausible enough. And there is little doubt that Leonardo did suffer a trauma on separation from his mother. Years later he would write down a series of riddles, amongst which there is a recurrent theme of violent separation of a mother and her child. A typical example reads: "Many children will be torn from the arms of their mother with pitiless blows and be thrown to the ground to be mutilated." The answer to the riddle is in fact "Nuts, and olives and acorns," but the power of the prior image is suggestive.

In 1456, when Leonardo was four, Tuscany was devastated by a great storm, possibly a tornado. Years later he could still vividly recall:

I have witnessed movements of air so furious that they have borne away, mixed up within them, the largest trees of the forest and the whole roofs of great palaces, and I have seen the same fury bore a hole with its whirling force, digging out a gravel pit, and carrying off gravel, sand and water more than half a mile through the air.

Several years after this, the River Arno would overflow its banks, causing severe floods throughout the Val d'Arno. The power of these two natural disasters that Leonardo experienced in his youth would long remain in his memory, the latter initiating a fearful fascination with deluges and floods that would last throughout his life.

Leonardo was brought up in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, where he seems to have become particularly attached to Antonio's youngest son, Francesco, who despite being Leonardo's uncle was just fifteen years older than he. Unlike Leonardo's ambitious father, Francesco had remained behind in the country, where he busied himself looking after the da Vinci farmland and vineyards. We can imagine the impressionable young Leonardo dogging the footsteps of his uncle as he oversaw the laborers on the estate. Francesco was almost certainly the first of the several powerful figures to whom Leonardo would be drawn throughout his life. Significantly, all these figures would be young men: initially older than Leonardo, later younger—but mostly in their twenties, the age of Francesco when the child Leonardo would first have become attached to him. (For example, Cesare Borgia was just twenty-five when the middle-aged Leonardo first encountered him.)

Francesco must have passed on much country lore to his young nephew. The ways of nature—how it appeared, what was happening, what this meant—would remain one of Leonardo's constant preoccupations throughout his life. This curiosity may well have been what initially prompted him to draw.

At least temporarily, Francesco would be the father-figure who was missing from Leonardo's life. During this period the young boy was also virtually motherless, for within a year of his birth Caterina married a returned soldier, not long after which Leonardo seems to have been left largely to his own devices. Far from being lonely, he soon began discovering the joys of solitude, of which he later spoke so warmly: "While you are alone you are completely yourself; and if you are accompanied by even one other person you are but half yourself." This solitude was from the beginning associated with drawing nature: "You should say to yourself, 'I will go my own way and withdraw apart from others, the better to study the form of natural objects.'" Years later he would recall an occasion when he was walking alone in the countryside:

Driven by my eager desire and wishing to see the multitude of varied and strange forms created by nature, and having wandered some distance amongst overhanging rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern, in front of which I stood for some time, astonished, having never seen such a thing before. Bending forward, I rested my tired hand on my knee and held my right hand above my furrowed eyebrows as I peered down. I shifted from side to side, to see whether I could discern anything inside, but this was prevented by the deep darkness within. After having remained there for some time, I felt the contrary emotions of fear and desire arising within me—fear of the forbidding dark cavern, and my desire to see whether there was anything marvelous within it.

This description exhibits a riveting particularity—one can vividly picture the young Leonardo amongst the rocks, leaning on his knee, peering forward in the bright sunlight. Yet at the same time he consciously introduces elements that allude to something more: his desires, his fears, the very nature of his individuality. It is as if Leonardo is prompting us to read this passage imaginatively, as one might read an occasional poem. Under such circumstances we become aware of the sexual undertones of the cave and the primeval fear of the unknown that lurks in the darkness, as well as the longing to discover the "marvelous" truth of that very same unknown.

Soon, of course, curiosity overcame Leonardo's fears and he entered the darkness of his metaphorical cave to explore its secrets. Such curiosity suffused his dreams, which included great and strange ambitions. Later, in one of his riddles, he would describe dreaming in the following words, which reek of subjective experience:

Men will seem to see unknown destructions in the sky. It will seem that they are flying up into the sky, and then they are fleeing in terror from the flames that pour down on them. They will hear animals of every kind speaking in human language. Their bodies will glide in an instant to various parts of the world without moving. They will see the greatest splendors in the midst of the darkness. What a marvel is the human race! What frenzy has led you to this? . . . You will see yourself falling from great heights without harming yourself. Torrents will sweep you along and whirl you in their rapid course. . . .

It is as if we are seeing Leonardo's future ambitions in embryo, and yet these are the very dreams we all experience. Leonardo's life would...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Bantam
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
055338614X
ISBN 13 
9780553386141
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
455
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780553807523: The Artist, The Philosopher, and The Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0553807528 ISBN 13:  9780553807523
Verlag: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2009
Hardcover