{"product_id":"the-artist-the-philosopher-and-the-warrior-isbn-9780553386141","title":"The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn 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\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003efrequent dispatches and Leonardo’s meticulous notebooks. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eSuperbly written and thoroughly researched, \u003ci\u003eThe Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior\u003c\/i\u003e is a work of narrative genius—whose subject is the nature of genius itself.“Using his novelist’s eye and a historian’s sweep, Strathern . . . makes you care deeply for these complex figures.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] rigorous and scholarly yet readable study of the confluence of three major Renaissance figures. Accessible and impressive in scope.”—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Readers will reel at this meticulous popular account of Renaissance tyranny, corruption, injustice and atrocities.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “This is popular history at its narrative best—rich in colour, character and consequence.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “The book breaks new ground.”—\u003ci\u003eSan Antonio Express-News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A triumph.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e (London)Paul Strathern has lectured in philosophy and mathematics and is a Somerset Maugham  Prize–winning novelist. He is the author of two series—\u003ci\u003ePhilosophers in 90 Minutes\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Big Idea: Scientists Who Changed the World\u003c\/i\u003e—\u003cb\u003eNapoleon in Egypt\u003c\/b\u003e, and the \u003ci\u003eSunday  Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller \u003ci\u003eThe Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in London.\u003ci\u003eChapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Leonardo Learning\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In 1456, when Leonardo  was four, Tuscany was devastated by a great storm, possibly a tornado. Years later  he could still vividly recall:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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 be spent trying to realize the dreams  of humanity itself. He remained deeply attuned to the promptings of his unconscious  mind—its wish to fly, to understand the secrets of nature, to survive a torrent of  water. Instead of being taught what to do, what to think, he dreamed of what he wanted  to do, and no formal schooling persuaded him otherwise.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Leonardo's father, Ser Piero,  would certainly have visited his own father, Antonio da Vinci, and his brother, Francesco,  at the da Vinci estate for feast-day family gatherings and during longer summer holidays.  And he would of course have brought along his young wife, Albiera, whom he had married  in Florence, just as he would bring along his second wife, Francesca, whom he married  when Albiera died. Both of these women remained childless. Leonardo may have been  a lone motherless child, but it appears that his growing good looks and precocious  skill in drawing charmed both his childless stepmothers. From the beginning, he exhibited  the self-certainty of one who is used to being the center of attention, of a boy  who has grown up experiencing worshipful and unquestioning female love. The fact  that both these adoring stepmothers would die when he was still young doubtless caused  him sorrow, and may have contributed to the reserved self-possession that he began  to display.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Around the mid-1460s, at the beginning of Leonardo's adolescence, he  went to live in Florence, where his exceptional talent for drawing enabled him to  become apprenticed to the studio of the leading artist Andrea del Verrocchio. Here  Leonardo would learn drawing, painting, anatomy, sculpting, and architectural design.  This led him into new fields, extending his intellect even further. Drawing would  lead him to the study of perspective, which then interested him in geometry; anatomy  would lead him to ponder the workings of mechanical devices; architecture would lead  him to a study of arithmetic proportions; and this would in turn lead him to learn  about harmony in music. His intellectual curiosity coupled with his lack of formal  education prompted him to an endless quest for new knowledge. But this would be knowledge  that he insisted upon acquiring in his own way: not from books (most of which were  written in Latin, which he could not understand), but from experience; not systematically,  but as and when the appropriate opportunity presented itself. He began jotting things  down in notebooks, without overall order or consequence, just as he would throughout  his life. There was no encompassing plan beyond the pure initial impulse, which led  with childlike power and wonder in its own direction. Yet his education was not entirely  without book learning. It was at around this period that he started reading, in Italian  translation, the first-century bc Roman author Lucretius, whose epic poem De Rerum  Natura (On the Nature of Things) sought to explain the world in scientific terms.  Although Leonardo's investigations may have appeared serendipitous, they were increasingly  guided by an overall vision, a consistent empirical view of the world, and this he  probably drew from Lucretius.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Many of Florence's finest artists would gather at  Verrocchio's studio, including Botticelli, the favorite painter of Lorenzo the Magnificent,  head of the powerful Medici family that ruled Florence. Lorenzo's \"magnificence\"  extended into many fields. As a ruler he would make Florence great; his bravery in  jousting was legendary; he was one of the most accomplished poets of his time, and  the circle he maintained at the Palazzo Medici on the Via Larga included the finest  poets, artists, philosophers, and scholars. Amongst these were the poet Angelo Poliziano,  the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the Platonic scholar Marsilio  Ficino, all leading luminaries of the Renaissance that was taking place in Florence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Inevitably, it was not long before the handsome and talented Leonardo da Vinci came  to the attention of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Here was another powerful young man  to whom Leonardo would find himself drawn, and Leonardo would soon be regarded as  part of Lorenzo's circle of artists, philosophers, and poets. In the course of his  musical studies Leonardo had learned to play the lyre and had devel-oped an exceptionally  harmonious singing voice, with which he would now entertain Lorenzo and his friends.  This personal connection with the city's ruler was to have serious consequences for  Leonardo. Partly in self-conscious assertion of his own exceptional abilities, and  partly in bravura compensation for his illegitimacy, Leonardo had developed into  something of a dandy. Tall and handsome, he cut a fine figure striding through the  streets of Florence in his thigh-length boots of soft Cordoba leather, his long hair  falling in curls about the shoulders of his short pink tunic, his passing presence  wreathed in rose-water scent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In April 1476 Leonardo was denounced, along with three  others, in an anonymous note to the authorities claiming that he had practiced sodomy  with a young man called Jacopo Saltarelli. As a result Leonardo was charged, and  almost certainly spent some time in the cells, before being released pending a trial  in two months' time. The charges were finally dropped after a word to the authorities  from Lorenzo the Magnificent. The accus?ation against Leonardo appear to have been  engineered by one or other of the powerful families who resented Medici rule, as  an attempt to discredit Lorenzo and his circle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was a deeply humiliating episode,  yet the only evidence we have of Leonardo's feelings is characteristically oblique  and ingenious. Amongst his drawings from around this period there is a sketch of  one of his earliest inventions—a powerful and meticulously drawn \"design for a device  for unhinging a prison door from the inside.\" One can but imagine him sitting in  his soiled finery in the dimness of his cell amidst the stinking vermin-ridden straw,  bitterly piecing together in his mind a machine that would have enabled him to escape.Author of Napoleon in Egypt","brand":"Bantam","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299721367781,"sku":"NP9780553386141","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553386141.jpg?v=1767738206","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-artist-the-philosopher-and-the-warrior-isbn-9780553386141","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}