Leonardo da Vinci, Animal Lover

About six months ago, I stopped eating meat. I was teaching a graduate course at UCLA that investigated how Italian Renaissance writers conveyed their concepts about the human through writing about the nonhuman—plants, animals, objects, angels, demons, gods, and God. As weeks passed, I found myself becoming more and more attuned to the nonhuman entities all around me, more aware of their vibrant lives. Cutting flowers for a short-lived bouquet seemed wrong; chewing on animal flesh became flat out impossible.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the authors we were studying in the course. Out of the thousands of pages comprising his 25 documented codices, known collectively as his “notebooks,” we read passages describing the natural world and its inhabitants, and some of his philosophical maxims, fables, and riddles. In a striking passage that introduces his “Treatise on Water,” he wrote:

“By the ancients man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well bestowed, because, inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, his body resembles that of the earth; and as man has in him bones—the supports and framework of his flesh—, the world has its rocks—the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide which likewise rises and falls. . .”

Unlike many thinkers of his time who anthropomorphized the Earth, Leonardo terramorphized man. But it was not just man that Leonardo saw as a Platonic, microcosmic world in miniature. Animals, he wrote, are “the image of the world.” They reflect the Earth, just as we do.

Man or beast?

Leonardo never challenged the Christian belief that human beings were made in the image of God, nor the classical notion that man’s proportions and symmetries (albeit a white, middle-aged, able-bodied European man) were beautiful and worthy of imitation in architecture and art. But he also never claimed that other living beings were less beautiful, soulless, or lacked intelligence.

When comparing animals and humans—which he did often—animals often came out looking better. In one of his notes, Leonardo wrote: “Man has much power of discourse, which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.” He often pointed out how much more powerful animals’ senses were; how much faster, stronger, and more efficient and capable they were of performing remarkable feats, such as flight.

And animals were not nearly as “bestial” to one another as humans could be. “King of the animals—as thou hast described him—I should rather say king of the beasts,” he wrote. Leonardo lamented how human stomachs have become “a sepulcher for all animals” and how “our life is made by the death of others.”

Leonardo the vegetarian?

This passage, along with other writing about humans as killing machines and their esophagi as animal cemeteries—as well as a few comments by his contemporaries—have led many to believe that Leonardo was a vegetarian.

There is a 1515–16 letter by the Italian explorer Andrea Corsali to Giuliano de’ Medici that, in discussing how the Gujarati of India won’t eat anything with blood or allow hurt to come to any animate thing, says they are “like our Leonardo da Vinci.” Corsali, however, did not know Leonardo well, and the sentence is ambiguous; it could just mean that Leonardo never hurt animals or wanted to see them hurt.

Artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari noted that Leonardo was famed for buying caged birds and setting them free, and Leonardo did, in fact, advocate for eating nature’s abundant senplici (“simples”), a term that seems to imply plant-based recipes. He pondered why nature had created a world in which animals ate one another, but concluded it was because life is compelled to reproduce and endure, and consequently, nature needed a way to keep numbers down.

Nowhere in his writing, however, did he speak of not eating meat. His grocery lists have meat on them, though it is possible he was purchasing it for members of his household: students, servants, guests, and animals.

Whether Leonardo ate a totally meat-free diet is unclear, but his love for animals is unquestionable. He lived with animals on a farm as a child, and they were ever-present in his studio—likely cats, dogs, insects, birds, and reptiles (some alive, some deceased). Leonardo studied them, depicted them, wrote about them, and built machines—even war machines—inspired by them.

Literary animals

Leonardo’s literary writings—fables, riddles, aphorisms—are filled with animals. While they often serve as Aesopic moral stand-ins for humans, Leonardo also used them differently than other classical, medieval, and Renaissance fabulists: contrasting them to humans, celebrating their strengths and wisdom, and critiquing how humans treat them.

In his “Prophecy” riddles—which read like predictions of a horrendous apocalyptic future—one encounters legions of cruelty and pain. “I see children of thine given up to slavery to others…paid with the severest suffering, and spend[ing] their whole life benefiting those who ill treat them,” Leonardo wrote. As a riddle, this is not what it seems. He’s writing not of humans, but rather of donkeys, and how humans repay their services with unkindness and even violence. That said, in an empathic move, Leonardo was also linking humans to donkeys, and pointing to the ever-present fact that humans subject other humans to terrible fates.

In another riddle, Leonardo noted the twistedness of horned animals being slaughtered by horn-handled knives, and the ostensible cannibalism of masters of estates “eating their own laborers”—oxen.

In a particularly chilling prophecy, he described animals so full of evil that they were destroying all life on land and sea. He cries, “O Earth! Why dost thou not open and engulf [these animals] in the fissure of thy vast abyss and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven such a cruel and horrible monster!” The monster, of course, is man.

Although many people assume Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is an indication of an adherence to the commonly (but not universally) held Renaissance notion that man was the most perfect of beings and “the measure of all things,” Leonardo’s literary and artistic production seem to show that he saw animals as the true “image of the world.” While he included human beings in the group he called “animals,” it was not as preeminent entities, but as one of the world’s infinite, beautiful varieties.

Animals on their own terms