THE NEW FEDERALIST

November 9, 1990

Page 8

American Almanac

Leonardo da Vinci's Great Water Projects

by Nora Hamerman

The portrait called Mona Lisa, after 1500, by Leonardo da Vinci, poses a true
enigma for hydraulic engineering in the landscape background.

"Now we are supported by one of the two solid banks, and the mist from the
river above shelters us, so that the water and the embankments save us from
the fire. As the Flemish, between Wissand and Bruges, fearing the onrushing tide, make a shield to force back the sea; and as the Paduans do along
the Brenta River, to defend their towns and castles, before the Carentine
feels the thaw; in such an image were they made." Dante Alighieri,
Inferno, Divine Comedy, XV, 1-15, c. 1310

Every educated person in Dante's day, the opening of the fourteenth century,
knew that the great hydraulic engineers of Europe in that era, were the
Netherlanders and the northern Italians.
When Europe descended into the Dark Age in the fourth to sixth centuries
after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the dams, canals, and aqueducts
built by Roman engineers collapsed. After the political basis for maintaining
such projects had crumbled, even the technical knowledge to build them
vanished. Beginning in the eleventh century, however, all over Europe, but
especially in the Low Countries (today's Netherlands and Belgium, at that
time often called simply Flanders) and in the valley of the great Po River
and its tributaries in northern Italy, great water projects began to be revived
or built anew.
These two regions became famous for their productive agriculture, and the
fastest urban development, with the greatest population densities, occurred
therealong with the greatest concentration of genius in painting, sculpture,
and music.
Since the outbreak of the Persian Gulf crisis in August, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. has reiterated that only an economic program based on the
mutual interest of Arab and Israeli alike, can heal the wounds of decades in
the Middle East, and provide the firm basis for political solutions. The
keystone of such a program, as Jonathan Tennenbaum developed the point
recently in New Federalist, is large-scale water infrastructure, to bring manmade lakes and rivers to the desert. Moreover, the lives of billions of human
beings worldwide will depend on solving problems of water supply and
water management. Bangladesh, which suffers from terrible floods and also
acute water shortages, exemplifies the challenge.
As LaRouche has indicated, achieving this obviously desirable aim, beneficial to all, entails more than a practical problem. The establishment of
governments willing to apply human inventive genius to solve such problems, depends on the vigorous assertion of the Judeo-Christian notion of
man created "in the living image of God," the imago viva Dei, which was the
crux of the Western European Renaissance.
The work of the most universal artists of that golden age expresses the way
in which the idea of great projects, today associated with the name of
LaRouche, was wedded to this notion of man's dignity, the "divine spark of
reason" which is the creative potential in every human being. Not only did

water, the indispensable basis of life, hold special awe for artists, but the
control of water was the major practical area where spiritual ideals and
economic program came together.
Dante's poem, the Divine Comedy, had laid the cultural basis for nationstates, which, he argued, is the best ordering for human affairs, by shaping a
scientific vernacular language. It remained to the leaders of the Renaissance
in the century after Dante to implement this concept, politically and
economically.
Leonardo's Water Projects
In the first of these two articles, I will focus on Leonardo da Vinci, who was
born near Florence in 1452, and died in France in 1519. Leonardo's earliest
dated drawing studies the valley of the Arno, the unruly river which flows
through Florence; his last designs included the Canal du Midi linking the
Atlantic to the Mediterranean in southern France (built 150 years later by
Colbert).
Leonardo da Vinci's famous mural of The Last Supper in Milan has been
described as a study in hydrodynamics. On the same page with a sketch
related to The Last Supper, Leonardo wrote down a passage of Dante
Alighieri's Paradise, which describes the waves generated by a pebble
dropped into a round vessel of water, and compares this to the flow of a
dialogue between two reasoning beings.
In Leonardo's Last Supper, Christ's challenge to his Apostles to carry on his
mission after his death; his invitation to them to partake of his body directly
through the Eucharist; and his charge that one of the twelve will betray him,
set off a wave motion across the room whose effect is similar to that seen in
some of Leonardo's drawings of water experiments. The experiments
showed that when he created different velocities of flow, this provoked a
self-organizing process in the fluid, such that double and triple helical
"braids" occur. In the mural, we perceive precisely this "braiding" effect in
the apostles directly to either side of Christ.
Leonardo thus conveyed a more profound concept than most people realize.
In the painting, showing the founding of the Church by Christ at his last
meeting with his disciples, Leonardo evokes the process in nature which
refutes the notion of entropy (Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics).
Under special conditions of turbulencecharacteristic of life processes and
physical processes in the very large and very smallnot breakdown, but

A Leonardo landscape study shows a storm threatening

the beautifully developed Po valley near Milan.

rather a higher and more beautiful order develops. Leonardo took this
physical reality, which runs counter to popular perceptions, and used it to
represent a spiritual and historical reality.
Leonardo believed that this tremendous, and potentially so destructive,
power of water must be harnessed to the human will. He stood in awe
before the cycle by which water is lifted from the deepest seas to the highest
mountains, through what today we call "phase changes" when ice forms,
then thaws, and when water turns to vapor and rises to the clouds. He took
detailed notes on the processes by which rivers dig new channels due to the
vortical action of the water. All of this, not in order to be a passive witness
to God's hand in nature, but to learn nature's tricks and to better her.

Northern Italy around 1494

Leonardo's plan for the Arno Canal included damming up the river to make
an artificial lake near Arezzo, and digging a huge canal to arch from Florence
to Pisa, passing through Prato and close to Lucca. After Venice menaced
Ferrara, a key city near the Po River's mouth on the Adriatic, in 1488, the
Milanese realized they needed an independent shipping route. Parallel to his
Arno scheme, Leonardo may have planned a canal from the Po near Pavia
where a major canal linked up to Milanto flow into the Tyrrhenian Sea
near Lucca'.

Leonardo was the first to systematically attempt to measure the velocity of

water in calculating provision of water by man-made conduits to various
parts of Milan, as opposed to the merely geometric methods of measurement
which predominated before him. He thus concerned himself with the problem of measuring a continuous quantity with discrete unitsa conceptual
riddle which flows throughout all of his creative work. Not accidentally, the
landscapes which appear in almost all of his extant authentic paintings are
filled with portrayals of waterways, often half-wild, half-tamed by man, and
so posing a challenge.
Behind the enigmatic expression of the Mona Lisa lies a true engineering
enigmahow did one join, in fact, those two sharply different water levels
glimpsed on the left and right of the landscape behind the head of the lady?
"Every larger river may be led up the highest mountains on the principle of
the siphon," he wrote repeatedly. Behind the head of Christ in the Last

Supper is a luminous landscape. Due to the damaged state of the picture, we

may never know what details it held, but if it is like all of Leonardo's extant,
better-preserved paintings, that landscape must have held a challenge to
man's creative reasonmost likely in the form of a great problem of hydraulic engineering.
Lombardy
Leonardo was a great hydraulic engineer, a designer not only of locks, dams,
dredging machines, "water ladders," paddleboats, and countless other
machines to bend the waterways of Italy and France to human needs; he
planned whole great systems of water transport with the potential of
redrawing the political as well as the physical map.
At the age of 30, in 1482, Leonardo arrived in Milan, the capital of Lombardy in northern Italy, as a cultural envoy of Florence. Situated between
two tributaries of the mighty Po Riverthe Ticino and the Addathe
Milanese kept for centuries the most developed irrigation canal network in
Europe. In 1495, Philippe de Commines, who had been a courtier of the
great nation-building King Louis XI of France, wrote in awe of his first view
of the Milan region:

In the drawing above, Leonardo designed one of his many machines for water
projectsa dredge for lagoons.

A map of Europe by Leonardo before the discovery of America, showed

north-central Italy as the economic and cultural center of the known world.

"As we descended the mountain we beheld the great countryside of

Lombardy, the most beautiful, best, and among the most abundant in the
world. And although it is a plain, it is as hard to traverse, because it is full of
many ditches all over, as Flanders, and even more so, because it is more
fertile than Flanders and more copious of grain, wines, and every other kind
of fruits; for this terrain never rests." Commines was from Flanders!
"Among the causes of destruction of human property, it seems to me that
rivers on account of their excessive and violent inundations hold the foremost place. And if anyone were to counterpose fire to the ruinous rivers, I
would think such a person wanting in judgment, since fire remains spent and
dead when fuel fails it, but against the irreparable inundation caused by
swollen and haughty rivers no resource of human foresight can avail. . . .
What a need there is of flight for whoso is near? O how many cities, how
many lands, castles, villas, and houses has it consumed! O how many
labors by the wretched farmers have been made vain and fruitless! O how
many families has it brought to naught and overwhelmed!" Leonardo da
Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, ca. 1490
The Italian scholar Empio Malara points out that around 1490, Leonardo
was designing a great canal linking Milan to the Adriatic sea, which would

have provided the city with its own independent port capability. The port
would free Milan from dependency on Venice, as its major outlet to the sea,
previously, was through Ferrara, whose port on the Po River was controlled
by Venice. The new canal was intended to provide an outlet on the western
shore of Italy.
Malara asserts that Leonardo's better known Arno canal system, to transform
the Arno river flowing through Florence into a viable seaway, was first
conceived simultaneously with the Milan canal and port, around 1490.
Leonardo's first notes on the Arno scheme reckon the costs in Milanese, not
Florentine, currency, even though he did his main work on the Arno project
in 1503 in Florence.
I would like to emphasize the strategic and political implications of this date
of ca. 1490-92. As everyone knows, 1492 was when Columbus sailed to
America, beginning the process of evangelizing the American Indians and
freeing them from pagan cults. It was also the year year that Lorenzo de'
Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, died, removing the key political
stabilizing force in the Italian peninsula. Thus it was a time of great danger,
but also of splendid opportunity.
In this context, consider the intriguing hypothesis that Leonardo's painting of
the Last Supper, commissioned by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, was
begun around 1492, not 1494 as is usually stated. The 1492 dating was put
forward in a recent lecture in Washington, D.C. by Dr. Pietro Marani, who is
supervising the restoration of this great masterpiece in Milan. Marani has a
good reason for his idea: the close likeness between the mural's composition, and Leonardo's scientific studies of water and sound waves, which we
know date from 1490-92.
"It is not unknown to me how many have been and are of opinion that
worldly events are so governed by fortune and by God, that men cannot by
their prudence change them, and that on the contrary there is no remedy
whatever, and for this they may judge it to be useless to toil much about
them, but let things be ruled by chance. . . . I would compare [Fortune] to
an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, removes earth
from this side and places it on the other; every one flees before it, and
everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it: and yet though
it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet, men can make provisions against it
by dikes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal or its

rush will not be so wild and dangerous." Machiavelli, The Prince, ca.
1513; written for the Medici Pope Leo X
A Nation-Building Plan?
The simultaneous conception of the canal to Milan and the one to Florence,
both flowing out the western side of Italy in the direction of Spain and
ultimately the New World, suggests that a bold strategic plan might have
been in the minds of Leonardo and his collaborators quite possibly in the
mind of the wily Ludovico Sforza, his patron. Sforza took a keen interest in
fostering new cities, technological advances in agriculture, and new
waterways. He was kept from implementing such ideas because of the
constant military threat from Venice, the oligarchist state which dominated
northern Italy and openly coveted the rich territory of Milan.

Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, begun perhaps in 1492. Of the four sets
of three apostles, the two closest to Christ form interlocking spirals in
response to Christ's words, at the moment He accuses His betrayer and also
founds his Church. This translates into social terms the insights from
Leonardo's water study dating from the same period (below), proving how
turbulence can lead to higher order (double or triple helical braids) in fluids.

Florence was the cradle of the Renaissance conception of man as the center
of God's Creation, with unique dignity and responsibility. Since 1454, Milan
had been Florence's cultural and political ally. Had these two landlocked
cities developed, by such man-made means as those sketched by Leonardo,
port capabilities to rival those of Venice, the "Queen of the Adriatic," then
the economic stranglehold of Venice could be broken.
Webster Tarpley, in a 1983 article in Campaigner magazine, described the
plot of the Venetian oligarchy to destroy the Renaissance culturally and
militarily. I wish to suggest here a hypothesis that Venice may also have
been pitted against an economic alternative, one coherent with the unique
value that the Florentines and their co-thinkers placed on human labor
power. Such a program could also have forged the rival city-states of the
peninsula into a nation, with a great civilizing mission in the world, as
envisaged by Dante.
The lack of cheap, efficient water transport was the major obstacle, possibly
even greater than the limited forms of energy at the time, to the early
development of large-scale industry. There was no point in setting up
assembly-line style industrial productionwith the accompanying

economies of scale, all entirely possible by applying Leonardo's designsif

it cost more to move the finished products to markets, than to build them by
less efficient means on the spot. This is why the Venetian Arsenal, in the
heart of oligarchist Venice, was the biggest proto-industrial plant in Europe.
To solve the transport problem would have unleashed far superior energies
in republican Florence and its ally, Milan.
The great architect Filippo Brunelleschi, best known for his dome of Florence Cathedral, had attempted a partial solution to the problem of using the
Arno for transport as early as 1420, when he received the first recorded
monopoly patent in Western European history for a marble transport barge to
travel up the Arno. Although the barge failed, it marked a historic watershed
because the minister of naval affairs of Florence at the time, Cosimo de'
Medici, was farsighted enough to recognize the need to stimulate such
inventions through patents.
Eighty years later came Leonardo's collaboration with then Florentine
secretary of state Niccolo Machiavelli in the Arno Canal project, during
Florence's war with Pisa around 1503. The project, which scholars once
mistakenly viewed as only a military scheme, involved a grandiose plan that
could have permanently allayed the threat of floods, powered dozens of
"automated" industries, provided cheap year-round transport for manufactured goods and raw materials, and revolutionized sanitation in the cities
through which it passed. In one notation, Leonardo listed 16 manufactures
in which he claimed, because of the canal, the labor of 100 could now be
done by one worker.
Leonardo noted, on a famous aerial view of his Arno plan, "Let sluices be
constructed in the Val di Chiana at Arezzo [where the Arno has its source,
above Florence] so that in summer when there is a shortage of water in the
Arno the canal will not become dried up, and let this canal be twenty braccia
wide at the bottom and thirty at the surface and the general level two braccia
or four, because two of these braccia serve the mills and meadows."
A braccio (pl. braccia) was a unit of measure roughly equivalent to our yard.
Here Leonardo is referring to the use of the canal for driving mills, i.e., as an
energy source, and for irrigation. He continues: "This will fertilize the
country, and Prato, Pistoia, and Pisa, together with Florence will have a
yearly revenue of more than two hundred thousand ducats, and they will
supply labor and money for these useful works, and the people from Lucca
likewise. Since the Lake of Seso will be navigable make it pass by way of

Prato and Pistoia and cut through at Serravalle and go out into the lake, for
then there will be no need of locks or supports, which are not permanent but
require a constant supply of labor to work them and to maintain them." On
the other side of this sheet, Leonardo calculated the manpower requirements
and the necessary wages, as well as the appropriate time of year for digging
the canal.
The cities Leonardo citedPisa, Prato, Lucca, Pistoiawere historic rivals
of Florence, resentful of their more powerful neighbor. The Arno Canal was
a truly ingenious peace plan like Lyndon LaRouche's proposals for the
Middle East today, which would haveas Leonardo's notes indicate
magnified the revenues of every land and town through which it passed, and
created the economic basis for political coexistence instead of bondage.
Moreover, especially taken together with the Milan Port/Canal, for which we
have skimpier documentation, the two projects would have entailed
financing, labor, and capital-goods manufacture on a scale that only a
unified Italian nation could have produced. It is tempting to imagine that,
shrouded in the state secrecy that would have necessarily surrounded such
schemesand quite possibly with the evidence later hidden or destroyed
Leonardo, Machiavelli, and their nameless collaborators could have had in
mind such a grand design for Italy.
Machiavelli himself, in The Prince, seems to allude to this when he uses the
imagery of building dikes and canals against the danger of floods, as his
metaphor for the construction of a political system sound enough to
withstand the whims of fortune.