(b Anchiano, nr Vinci, 1452; d château of Cloux, nr Amboise, 2 May 1519). Italian artist and scientist. He was also profoundly occupied with music. In addition to performing and teaching music, he was deeply interested in acoustics and made many acoustical experiments with immediate bearing on music. He wrestled with the concept of musical time and invented a considerable number of ingenious musical instruments and improved existing ones. Leonardo also had some highly original ideas about the philosophy of music that were intimately connected with his philosophy of painting. It is characteristic that in his paragone, which forms an introduction to his treatise on painting, he accorded music the highest place, after painting, among the arts.
No details are known about Leonardo's musical education in Florence, but it is significant that Andrea del Verrocchio, in whose workshop he grew up, was also a musician. One of the earliest biographical sources, the so-called Anonimo Gaddiano (I-Fn Magl.XVII) of the early 16th century, mentions Leonardo as a musician:
he was an elegant speaker and an outstanding performer on the lira, and he was the teacher of Atalante Migliorotti, whom he instructed on this instrument. From Lorenzo il Magnifico, he was sent to the Duke of Milan, together with Atalante Migliorotti, to present to him a lira, for he was unique in playing this instrument.
The ‘lira’ was the lira da braccio, then fashionable among improvisers. Vasari, whose famous biography of Leonardo in his Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architetti (Florence, 2/1568) is partly based on the Anonimo Gaddiano, recorded that Leonardo ‘devoted much effort to music; above all, he determined to study playing the lira, since by nature he possessed a lofty and graceful mind; he sang divinely, improvising his own accompaniment on the lira’. Vasari also noted that after Lodovico Sforza became Duke of Milan, Leonardo, already famous, was brought to play for him:
since the duke had a great liking for the sound of the lira; and Leonardo brought there the instrument which he had built with his own hands, made largely of silver but in the shape of a horse skull – a bizarre, new thing – so that the sound [‘l’armonia’] would have greater sonority; with this, he surpassed all the musicians who met there to play. In addition, he was the best improviser of rhymes of his time.
The mathematician Luca Pacioli, for whose De divina proportione Leonardo drew geometric illustrations, also described him as a musician. The Milanese painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo extolled Leonardo as one of the outstanding masters of the lira. Among Milanese musicians, Gaffurius had close contact with Leonardo, lent him books and is probably the subject of Leonardo's painting Portrait of a Musician, in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. In a comparison between wind instruments and the larynx, Leonardo referred to a book ‘delli strumenti armonici’, possibly Gaffurius's De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum.
Leonardo's ideas about music are scattered through many of his numerous notebooks; they range from passing thoughts, notes and marginal remarks to ideas for planned research, results of experiments or hypotheses in various degrees of verification. Many of his remarks permit interpretation only on the basis of sufficient familiarity with the natural sciences and technology of his time. A systematic examination and correlation of the enormous amount of material he left reveals an intensive occupation with music.
Leonardo, who regarded himself as ‘uomo sanza lettere’, was neither a humanist nor a philosopher in the strict sense. Of ancient theories of music only some echoes of Pythagoras and Boethius appear in his notebooks. He inquired into the origins of sound (‘What is the nature of a sound produced by a blow?’) and examined the sonorous impact of bodies upon bodies, expanding the age-old Pythagorean notions. He studied the phenomenon of vibration and sympathetic vibration, noting that the percussion of a body makes it oscillate and communicate its oscillation to the surrounding air or to other liquid or solid matter. He studied the propagation of sound waves as differing from that of light waves, the reflection and refraction of sound waves and the phenomenon of echo, the speed of sound and the factors that determine degrees of loudness. Especially characteristic of his approach in this context is his establishment of what can be called a ‘perspective of sound’, that is, the fading of sound in exact ratio to the distance of the ear from the source of sound, paralleling the laws of optical and pictorial perspective that were so important to him as a painter. His ideas about proportions in music go far beyond the traditional theory of intervals and the Pythagorean patrimony. Also, as a musician, he was naturally occupied with the factors that determine musical pitch and experimented with vases of different shapes and apertures. He anticipated by three centuries Chladni's discovery of the geometrical figures produced by setting the edge of a sanded plate in vibration with a fiddle bow.
Leonardo's studies of anatomy and physiology, based on his own dissections, enabled him to examine the structure and function of the musician's hand. His dissection of the respiratory organs of animals gave him interesting ideas about voice production, although, lacking the preserving chemicals, he could not have had the necessary knowledge of the vocal cords. Probably for similar reasons he gave no description or discussion of the inner ear. He discussed the peripheric phonetic organs, such as the facial muscles, the lips and the tongue, and their impact on pronunciation. His study of the tongue led him to an investigation of vocal pitch, comparing the function of the trachea to that of wind instruments such as organ pipes and the slide trumpet. His alleged authorship of a treatise on the voice, De vocie, is controversial.
Leonardo's universal command of technology enabled him to imagine novel musical instruments, and to alter existing ones radically. In his notebooks there are numerous drawings of such instruments, from rapid sketches, often not easily decipherable, to exact blueprints for their execution in the workshop. They reveal his systematic efforts to realize some basic aims: automation of certain instruments and the wider use of various types of keyboard to facilitate playing technique; increasing the speed of playing; extension of tonal range to play, for instance, melodies on drums; and overcoming the quickly fading sound of plucked strings. Among other instruments, he constructed glissando flutes, flutes with key systems anticipating Boehm's invention more than three centuries later, bells with variable pitch, drums of which the pitch could be changed during performance or which could produce chords, and above all, the ‘viola organista’ (see illustration), a keyboard instrument the strings of which were set into vibration by an endless friction band, and which permitted polyphonic playing with dynamic gradation – a virtual string orchestra under the control of ten fingers. Here, as in other cases, Leonardo tried to obtain from one instrument what could normally be produced only by several or by a whole set of instruments.
The sensational reappearance in 1967 at the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, of two of Leonardo's notebooks, comprising 700 pages, substantially enriched our information about his novel ideas for the construction of musical instruments. The notebooks include drawings of new types of bellows for organetti and chamber organs, another drawing for the viola organista, and one for the viola a tasti, a keyed string instrument operated by segments of cogwheels.
The depth and originality of Leonardo's meditations on music can be perceived by his definition of music as the ‘figurazione delle cose invisibili’ (‘shaping of the invisible’).
J.P. Richter, ed.: The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (London, 1883/R, rev. 2/1937/R by J.P. and I.A. Richter)
G. Panconcelli-Calzia: Leonardo als Phonetiker (Hamburg, 1943)
A. Marinoni: I rebus di Leonardo da Vinci raccolti e interpretati (Florence, 1954)
E. Magni-Dufflocq: ‘Da Vinci’s Music’, Leonardo da Vinci (London, 1957), 227
E. Winternitz: ‘Leonardo’s Invention of the Viola Organista’, Raccolta Vinciana, xx (1964), 1–46
E. Winternitz: Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (New Haven, CT, 1982)
M. Tiella: ‘Leonardo da Vinci's “Viola Organista”’, Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis IX: Orta San Giulio 1986
EMANUEL WINTERNITZ/LAURENCE LIBIN