Leonardo; The Man, The Mystery
Leonardo sat, waiting. It had been sixty-seven years since his arrival. Man was the measure of all things. It had been true in the future. But was it true now? Leonardo looked upon his corpse. Perhaps it was still just as true.
And yet, perhaps the future that had happened was inevitable. Perhaps man’s inability to recognize his own flaws had been responsible for the calculation error that had sparked the war. Despite moving beyond the frail bodies of the past and elevating the human race within a new framework of vastly complicated technology, with the flesh sitting as a crowning force behind the intelligence, as the brain within the man is service the soul, perhaps it had all been for naught. Even with all this ability, none had foreseen the mathematical error or the chain reaction of obligations and prerogatives that would equal out to the most base instincts of antagonism and war.
And yet, here Leonardo was. Ironically, perhaps he was repeating the exact same errors that had led him to the past.
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Leonardo exited the time portal. In its final calculations before destruction, Leonardo’s technological interface and external structure had found a point of near synchronization within the physical laws of a time period. The preservation of the human body, the core of any interface, was of more importance than anything else. Leonardo would slide into a given instance with the least resistance and most similarities to his human body, vaporizing whatever he replaced upon contact. The child died and Leonardo exited the mother’s womb in its stead.
But immediately and from Leonardo’s now earliest memory onward, he felt it was all wrong. These things that lifted him and took him in their arms; they were like bastardizations of the most inward, sacred flesh. Huge, wrinkled, warped. They touched Leonardo. He felt his external shell yield. And to his amazement, Leonardo found that he began to cry.
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Others would later note Leonardo’s “exquisite sensitivity, superhuman drive”, and “surpassing intelligence” as simply genius (Atalay 4). Some would say he was “a visionary, anticipating the modern era” (“Leonardo” v). But through glimpses of lingering memories, Leonardo knew the truth. He knew why his body was so beautiful, so strong. Why his mind was so much faster. In the future, every individual had been that way. They were augmented from conception to reflect the most desirable traits of body and mind. Truly, Leonardo was “one of the first representatives of what was to become the modern era… a man ‘ahead of his time’” (“Leonardo” 8). Leonardo possessed this advantage over all others and he knew from the very beginning that if anything would save him, it would be his own powers of deduction and observation. These people, living without real technology, blindly waiting for their deaths. He would believe nothing they said unless it was supported by his own experience.
And above all else, Leonardo would leave no “definitive image of himself” (Atalay 3). No visage or likeness of him would survive; for Leonardo’s body was the most effective tool and basis of appearance he held access to. Others found Leonardo to possess “‘outstanding beauty’ and ‘infinite grace’” and he knew it (Nicholl 127). In addition to unrivaled beauty, Leonardo’s body was “so strong he could withstand any violence” and “with his right hand he could bend the iron ring of a doorbell, or a horseshoe, as if they were lead” (Nicholl 127). Just as some believed man was the basis for all things, Leonardo’s body, the only surviving artifact of the future, would be a basis for his experimentation and a model for his conception of human appearance and efficiency.
Leonardo immediately set about finding where and when he had landed. Exploring a cave near his home he found a good estimate from the formations of rocks, and indeed “the peregrinations convinced him that the earth was much older than the contemporary view” (Atalay 6). “God.” He thought. “These people don’t even understand how old the earth is in their own time!”
Certainly, he would need to start constructing a means of escape. No one else would do it for him. And there wasn’t much time either. To his horror Leonardo found that this time period predated the technology necessary for maintaining the human body. The reason these people looked so off, besides lacking external shells, was due to aging. Their bodies were growing and eventually corroding. Could Leonardo really recreate a means of re-entry into the time stream within his lifetime when it had taken thousands upon thousands of years for humans to simply figure out how to not die? That would be his first priority. First and foremost, Leonardo would not fall victim to such a humiliating condition. Time travel be damned, he at least wouldn’t die!
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After years of study and apprenticeship to a local artist, Leonardo felt he was ready to make his move. He was dry on methods of transportation that could propel him to the speeds necessary for penetrating the aether of time. And Leonardo had been through attempted permutations of almost any basic invention that he could remember catalogued in the future dealing with transportation, including “among other devices, the bicycle… and the submarine” (Atalay 7). Flight would be best for reaching top speeds, but Leonardo found his mind drawing a blank for such devices. Despite this, “his lifelong interest in creating machines that could carry man aloft” would continue (Atalay 6,7). He would not give up. Countless hours of watching and studying birds yielded no pleasing results. Investigators of Leonardo’s notes in later centuries would remark, “these notes suggest a powerful feeling for the inexorable progress of time, as it strides remorselessly forward, ever in advance of the ‘immortal’ achievements with which his mind was so impatiently filled” (“Marvellous Works” 87). But Leonardo’s ultimate goals would be misunderstood. Readers of his notes would wonder if his “concerns about the nature of time may have been fueled by his desire to build an accurate mechanical clock” (Atalay 204).
It seemed to Leonardo that simply maintaining his own body was to be a difficult task in itself. Anatomy would have to become one of his highest priorities. But in any case, Leonardo would need materials to build with. And in this time the only access to enough of these materials was through adjacency to those in power. Leonardo “required a salaried appointment which would give him scope for his intellectual improvisation; as far as such a position existed at all in the Renaissance, he seemed to have found it in Milan” (“Marvellous Works” 92).
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Through his skill of observation and his reluctance to take the flawed opinions of his peers as truth, Leonardo had a much better understanding of physical phenomena then those around him. This afforded him with the skill set necessary to attain a position working for the Duke of Milan and afterward supervising positions in other courts. Without question, a “court position offered real advantages for someone of Leonardo’s proclivities” (“Leonardo” 36). He would deal with anything from matters of engineering and war, to matters of artistry and aesthetics. Supervising so many different jobs with so many different people was a perfect fit. He was now the “highly esteemed court architect Leonardo da Vinci” with “every engineer… prepared to further any undertaking he may find necessary” (“Leonardo” 29, 30). This also applied to any of his personal projects. Leonardo now made a regular habit of “taking technicians into his workshop to make specific devices” (“Leonardo” 31, 32). But this status not only gave Leonardo access to almost any resource he desired and any situation. It also made it near impossible for anyone else to keep track of him. If he had no use for engineering work at a given time he could pick up more aesthetic endeavors. And if he had no need for the aesthetics, no other artist would question him or what he was doing if he said he was “hard at work on geometry” with “no time for the brush” (“Leonardo” 41). And even if it didn’t aid his immediate work or temperament, habitually switching between different projects was always good for keeping his employers on their toes and his alibis beyond reproach. Additionally, Leonardo’s public persona shielded him from any unnecessary interest shown by his peers, for he presented himself as “a gracious and attractive person who retained… the air of remoteness that accompanies a closely guarded inner self” (“Leonardo” 43). Leonardo had countless opportunities to experiment and chip away at his masterwork of self-preservation on his own time with minimal interference.
Additionally, the freedom to take freelance work from other employers and tutor various pupils allowed Leonardo to keep the true amount of his income, savings, and expenditures a secret. He was free to purchase the materials necessary for his own experiments without raising suspicion. With involvement in so many projects, he had an explanation that was impossible to follow up on for every occasion. And due to his personal purchases, centuries later the “bank holdings do not suggest that Leonardo became wealthy” (“Leonardo” 28). If he needed to, Leonardo could always petition for more resources from his primary employer in the court. With unbridled access, Leonardo went about assembling “what might be called a ‘kit’ for the imaginative reassembly of nature” (“Leonardo” 7).
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At this point, Leonardo understood the path he must take. No matter what happened, he would have to falsify his death. Simply disappearing would raise too many questions and create unneeded interest in his whereabouts. A false corpse was the way to leave the smallest disturbance after shedding ties to the court and its connections. This not only made anatomy all the more important for the future, but also the study of the human eye and perception. Even with the knowledge Leonardo would gain in his study of the human body, it would not be enough to make a perfect human corpse. Nature was truly flawless in her designs. Anatomical accuracy could only carry the ruse so far; how convincing the corpse appeared to the eye would carry the rest of the weight.
Leonardo’s painting took on the role of experimentation. If he could give the viewer the impression of character and energy with a lifeless, flat painting, then he would certainly be able to do one step better with a fully constructed corpse. The corpse would be one instance where Leonardo’s “unprecedentedly integrated vision of the dynamism of the living body in three dimensions” would truly shine (“Leonardo” 96). In the meantime, experiments with portrait paintings provided ample practice. One picture (the Mona Lisa) was a special success. Contrast in the background caused the “observer’s eye to inadvertently oscillate back and forth across the subject’s eyes, creating an optical illusion of animation” (177 Atalay). Implying the forms with such little rendering of detail, finding at which points the human expression was most subjective, and encouraging the viewer to project details onto the face without drawing any definite conclusions: these would be important skills for creating the corpse. Leonardo would keep this portrait with him for later reflection at the time of the construction.
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Perhaps out of all Leonardo’s excursions and work to find materials, his most successful was the project the equine monument for Ludovico. Providing more bronze than he would ever need, the statue was “to measure almost 24 feet from the nape of the neck to the ground”, even surpassing “the famed equestrian monuments by Donatello and Verrochio” (“Leonardo” 34, 35). However, the plan was not as successful as initially envisioned due to reasons outside of Leonardo’s control. When the French invaded Italy, Ludovico sent the “vast and expensive quantity of bronze… to make into cannon”, a major inconvenience (“Leonardo” 34, 35). Not only was much of the bronze in the project taken for military purposes, but transporting the amount Leonardo had set aside for himself was not an easy task. At least it wasn’t time wasted, since more bronze was gained from the project than was possible anywhere else.
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A rare and most fortunate opportunity: an autopsy of a freshly deceased man who claimed “he had lived one hundred years and… was conscious of no bodily failure other than feebleness” (“Marvellous Works” 257). Certainly, this would give Leonardo insight into prevention of the aging process. But upon inspection Leonardo found that the cause of death “proceeded from weakness through failure of blood and of the artery which feeds the heart and lower members” which were “found to be very parched and shrunk and withered” (“Marvellous Works” 257). This discovery was earth shattering for Leonardo. Specifically, the manifestation of aging was not just a few misfires in the human machine; it was everywhere. Even with his altered body, Leonardo realized that at some point he would degenerate in too many places before he could build a proper external shell; “the network of vessels behaves in man as in oranges, in which the peel becomes tougher and the pulp diminishes the older they become” (“Marvellous Works” 257). Leonardo had originally planned to do “nothing to alter radically the physiology he had inherited” (“Leonardo” 96). But now it was necessary to put all his efforts towards transferring his consciousness into a new machine, a new body, and only keeping the old parts necessary to maintain his thoughts and communicate with his soul. Specifically, this would entail his brain and eyes above all else. With a “deep understanding of the forms and functions of the body”, Leonardo would “aspire to contrive inventions that nature herself had not made” (“Leonardo” 7).
This entirely threw out the idea of piercing the aether of time before Leonardo’s removal from society. After ruminating and sketching, Leonardo finally understood the flow of natural forces and time, an understanding forgotten in the future after the invention of eternal life (Popham 296). The best way to show this visually in drawings was to consider water and the natural eroding forces at work in the world, as part of a larger, “intricate synthesis of observations and theoretical constructions” (“Leonardo” 78). Mountains, cities, all of man’s creations eventually fall to the churning inevitability of time, the vortex. For a long time the vortex had been “a subject of intense interest for Leonardo” in large part because he thought it a potential means to re-enter the time flow (“Leonardo” 75). He had even “devoted huge amounts of observation and speculation to the motion of turbulent water” (“Leonardo” 76). But now water and the vortex did not just represent “a major source of power” (“Leonardo” 79). Nor was it a savior. It was a demon imparting death on all it touched. The vortex was a bringer of destruction unto cities, of deluges, storms, and tornadoes. It was the silent killer within nature, the agent within the river that boor away at the shore, causing the body to eventually crumble away to dust like so much sand. Perhaps ironically, nature no was longer measured by man. Man was measured by nature. Leonardo had long considered the irrigation of water and the destruction of shores. But now he was that shore. And the churning of the water would wash away his humanity.
In a way, “Leonardo’s anatomical investigations played a central role in determining his attitude towards the formative principles of the universe” (“Marvellous Works” 286). He realized now that out of necessity, “man looks out and away, beyond the frame which contains and constrains him” (Nicholl 176).
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After everything had been set into motion and the totality of his plans fully realized in his own mind, Leonardo set about completing the final pieces of the puzzle. He had now aged significantly, but it was not without its advantages. A clever ruse gave him all the time in the world. For as far as everyone else knew, Leonardo had “suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed in his right arm, effectively ending his career as a painter” (Atalay 12). Leonardo now held the role of “an ornament of the court, as a kind of seer or magus, as a purveyor of ideas and knowledge, and as a wonder to be paraded before prestigious visitors, rather than a productive worker” (“Leonardo” 43). He no longer had to be bothered with everyone else’s projects. After making an appearance for whomever Francis I had visiting that day, Leonardo could get some real work done without any distractions.
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Looking upon his creation, Leonardo cannot not help but feel nostalgic. It is not a proper external structure, and yet “this ‘scientifically’ assembled, modern Leonardo is very much of its own time” (“Leonardo” 8). He will survive. Worst case, living long enough is its own form of time travel.
Appendix:
Although there is no hard evidence that Leonardo is a time traveler, there is also no hard evidence to the contrary. Many sources were taken out of context to create the illusion of textual support. The quotes that are taken more out of context tend to be more obvious about it. For example, the last quote in the paper about the ‘scientifically assembled’ Leonardo is certainly not in reference, within the original text, to a new robotic body Leonardo constructed for himself. It is instead in reference to the current, historical conceptualization of Leonardo.
Bibliography:
Kemp, Martin. Leonardo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Atalay, Bulent. Math and the Mona Lisa. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004.
Nicholl, Charles. Leonardo da Vinci; Flights of the Mind. New York: Viking, 2004.
Kemp, Martin. Leonardo da Vinci; The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Popham, A.E. The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945.
(This image is the one I cited, and was attached to the end of my paper:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmiYh3ei25gMBS4YWTBFpf098wyfYzVub6EZACbuAB3Y6198qRfXUkp-YN1aWOYVTJHRVttyCT9R4lY2HxVBhR-0CxoxD1tTlW8hQMdfeUuA2-GAioyMQTBvnyi642qzE8Ve5UGchckqEw/s1600-h/A+Deluge,+Formalized+(c.+1515),+black+chalk,+pen+and+ink,+Windsor,+Royal.jpg
)
