"Inside da Vinci and Machiavelli’s Plot to Weaponize a River"

Talk about your strange bedfellows.

From History.com, August 31:

A plan to divert the Arno River brought two of the Renaissance’s most famous minds into the same wartime effort against Pisa.

In 1503, Leonardo da Vinci began painting a portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant. With its enigmatic smile, the “Mona Lisa” would become one of the most famous paintings in history. But a closer look reveals something else. In the background is a winding waterway that some scholars believe may be the Arno, the Italian river that flows through Florence and Pisa on its way to the Mediterranean Sea. And while da Vinci was working on the portrait, he also was studying the river to devise an extraordinary plan to change its course.

Da Vinci was not the only Tuscan thinking about the Arno. Niccolò Machiavelli, second chancellor of the Florentine Republic who was later immortalized as the author of The Prince, was also exploring plans to radically alter the river. Their paths would converge in one of the most ambitious engineering schemes of the Renaissance.

Florence’s Precarious Position
At the dawn of the 16th century, Florence was a republic in crisis. To the west, Pisa had broken free of Florentine rule and controlled the lower Arno, cutting off Florence’s most direct route to the Mediterranean. Repeated attempts to retake the city had ended in failure. Meanwhile, a new threat emerged to the east. Cesare Borgia, the ambitious son of Pope Alexander VI, was carving out a state in the Romagna.

Florence’s predicament was made all the more frustrating by the possibilities of a rapidly expanding world. News of Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages to the New World had reached the city, fueling dreams of overseas commerce. Yet Florence’s access to the sea depended on Pisa.

Florence’s leaders searched for an alternative. If they couldn’t conquer Pisa outright, perhaps they could undermine it by transforming the landscape itself.

Da Vinci the Engineer
“The popular conception of Leonardo emphasizes his paintings, though he actually made very few in his lifetime,” says Leslie A. Geddes, associate professor of art history at Tulane University and author of Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature. “He was primarily employed as what we might think of today as a military and civil engineering consultant.”

For nearly two decades, da Vinci served Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, for whom he not only painted “The Last Supper,” but also devised plans for canals, flood-control measures and urban water systems. After Sforza’s regime collapsed, da Vinci began working for Borgia in 1502 as an architect and military engineer. 

Why da Vinci chose to work for Borgia, the Duke of Romagna, whom Machiavelli later held up as a model of political ruthlessness in The Prince, remains unclear....

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