Why mince words? The 1502 scheme concocted by Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli — a rare case of collaboration between geniuses of the first order — proved an utter fiasco.
Their plan was to divert the Arno River, depriving Pisa of water and thus compelling its surrender to the besieging Florentines. It ended up yielding a lot of mud, at great cost to Florence and to the careers of its planners. Leonardo left town, never to work there again, and Machiavelli was soon driven from politics to write the works that have immortalized him. And that was that: a footnote to history, interesting, yes, but primarily because this odd couple of bunglers bore such famous names.
Except that according to Roger D. Masters, the recently retired Nelson A. Rockefeller professor of Government at Dartmouth, there was a lot more to it. Not satisfied with a distinguished career as an historian of political philosophy, Masters has now embarked on a new career as a popular historian. Having recently published a scholarly work on the intellectual relation between Leonardo and Machiavelli, he turns in Fortune Is a River to their one great joint practical endeavor. Bringing to bear his impressive command of both science and politics, he argues that the failure at Pisa is of great significance. Not only did the diversion scheme aim far beyond the intended immediate consequences, but it stands as a prototype for the whole modern scientific and political project.
Machiavelli was second chancellor at the time, largely responsible for the Florentine Republic’s foreign policy and diplomacy, while Leonardo was a hired engineer. They had collaborated on several military-engineering projects, and the stalemate at Pisa commanded their urgent attention. The Arno is also the river of Florence, and Pisa stands on it between Florence and the sea — which enabled her to impede the larger city’s commerce. For centuries the policy of Florence had been to control Pisa, and the goal not only of Pisa but of all the political rivals of Florence had been to maintain Pisan independence.
In 1494 Pisa had successfully revolted, contributing to the collapse of the Medici regime in Florence and its replacement by the republic in which Machiavelli eventually emerged as a leading figure. In 1502, after eight years of efforts to recapture the city, the Florentines were willing to try anything, even so doubtful a scheme as Leonardo’s. Protected by a thousand men at arms and supervised by a supposed expert on hydraulics, a legion of Florentine workmen was to dig, dig, dig, until the Arno flowed away from Pisa and with it the town’s hopes of freedom.
Contending that the scheme was sound but beyond the capacities of those to whom it was entrusted, Masters may be right. But the margin for error was thin, and the plan impinged dangerously on the limits not only of Renaissance engineering but of the basic physics of the era. (Reliable calculations of the effect of the shape of a channel on the rate of water flow through it depend on Bernouilli’s Principle, anticipated by Leonardo in one of his famous doodlings but not formulated with certainty until the eighteenth century.) In retrospect the chances of success seem slight.
It could be argued, of course, that Florence had nothing to lose but her ducats, since conventional methods of warfare had proved unavailing. In any case, Masters has bigger fish to fry — as did, he contends, Machiavelli and Leonardo. “Had the diversion at Pisa succeeded, it was hoped to go ahead with Leonardo’s larger scheme of moving the Arno into a canal through Prato and under Mount Serravalle, transforming the economic basis of Florentine power.” Leonardo’s goal was to reroute the Arno to make it navigable all the way to the sea — thus turning Florence into a port. Pisa would be bypassed, and the trade that was the lifeblood of Florence would no longer be hostage to middlemen. At the same time, malarial marshes would be drained and massive irrigation would increase the agricultural productivity of Tuscany. The balance of power in Europe would shift.
America figured in this scheme, Masters decides, because the enterprising Florentines had not been idly strumming their lutes while the Spanish and Portuguese ventured westward. Amerigo Vespucci was a Florentine, and he not only invested in one of Columbus’s voyages but conducted two of his own to Brazil. Vespucci was the first to demonstrate by means of longitudinal observations that what had been discovered was America (Columbus would insist until his dying day that he had succeeded in reaching Asia), and it was Vespucci who got out the word of a vast new continent of boundless potential.
Vespucci’s letters were published in Florence around 1503, and his kinsmen were close collaborators of Machiavelli in the chancery. Masters reasons that this must have lent further impetus to the scheme to divert the Arno. Only as an independent sea port could Florence hope for her fair share of the riches of America.
Like much else in the book, this remains conjectural. But also like much else in it, se non e vero, e ben trovato: “If it’s not true, it’s well concocted.” The two men might well have had America in mind along with the other advantages of the plan. If so, however, this would only have deepened their eventual frustration, as the failure of the Pisan gambit doomed the plan in its entirety.
Masters doesn’t comment on the ultimate feasibility of this comprehensive scheme, which involved nothing less than the human redesign of the landscape of Tuscany. He does argue that Leonardo and Machiavelli drew very different lessons from its failure. Leonardo concluded that he needed a more reliable patron than a flighty and fiscally challenged republic (he was eventually to climb into the pocket of the king of France), while Machiavelli looked to the political remedy of recruiting a citizen militia.
Like any good popular historian, Masters avoids presuming too much knowledge on the part of the reader. Introducing the reader to the Italian Renaissance, he paints the backdrop of his tale as carefully and lovingly as the action. Fortune Is a River eschews the techniques of historical novels like Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, as it does the realm of historical psycho-analysis like Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence. While he cannot help but speculate about the motives of his protagonists, Masters makes no attempt at fully developing their characters. He gives only as much background and conjecture as he needs to tell a coherent story.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to this approach. The reader learns much about what both Leonardo and Machiavelli did, but little about who they were. Despite the inclusion of enough ribald letters to establish that Machiavelli wrote ribald letters, the reader who is seeking for the man behind the finely crafted mask will be disappointed. Of the layers upon layers of Machiavelli’s mind, only the topmost were visible in his politicking and fornication.
Of Leonardo, there is not even locker-room banter to adduce. Where others have followed Freud in looking to his art for glimpses into his character, Masters has little to say apart from noting the novelty of the art’s methods and its tremendous impact upon the artist’s contemporaries. He is clearly more at home with the notebooks, but while these provide dazzling proof of the fertility of Leonardo’s mind, they reveal little of the temper of his soul. If the paintings do give any insight, that soul was not an endearing one. Undisputed masterpieces of technique and innovation, they emit an enigmatic coldness. Leonardo appears to have approached his art primarily in a spirit of experimentation: Even in his art, the scientist prevailed.
For Masters the ultimate significance of the Arno scheme is that it was the first instance of the fundamentally modern stance toward the world of which he holds Leonardo and Machiavelli to be co-founders. He contends that Leonardo pioneered the extension of human power in natural science as Machiavelli did in political science, and that Francis Bacon’s project of the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate represented a synthesis of the two. So understood, their failures during their lifetimes were pregnant with their posthumous triumphs.
We have all read bad biographies of great human beings written by mediocre ones, but Masters rises above mediocrity not least in respecting the impenetrable privacy of greatness. He offers an intriguing tale of grand hopes and bitter disappointments. If the greatness of the men themselves remains elusive, we still have their works to which we can turn.
Clifford Orwin is professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
