We can say something of the artistic influences that percolated into the provincial world of Vinci. In the church of Santa Croce, where Leonardo was christened, stood a fine polychrome wood sculpture of Mary Magdalene. It probably dates from the late 1450s: during Leonardo’s childhood years it would have been a recent and probably costly purchase. It is visibly influenced by Donatello’s famous Magdalene sculpture (c. 1456), and may be the work of a pupil of Donatello’s such as Neri di Bicci or Romualdo de Candeli. This powerful piece might be cited as Leonardo’s first discernible contact with High Renaissance art. Another very Donatellesque work is the Madonna of the Welcome, a marble bas-relief in the church of Santa Maria del Pruno in nearby Orbignano.77 Via these provincial imitations comes the formative influence of Donatello: an ageing figure from the heyday of the early Renaissance, a former colleague of Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. His sculptures – expressive, tense, saturated in the spirit of classical antiquity – influenced all who followed, including Leonardo’s teacher, Verrocchio, who was primarily a sculptor. Donatello died in Florence in 1466, around the time of Leonardo’s arrival in the city.
Further afield Leonardo might also have seen the magnificent early-fourteenth-century bas-reliefs by Giovanni Pisano on the pulpit of Sant’Andrea in Pistoia – a city where his aunt Violante lived and where his father had business interests. It is also very likely he visited the river-port of Empoli, the nearest town of any size to Vinci, and a transit point to Florence. We know that Accattabriga’s father went there, as his debt to the town for unpaid tolls is mentioned in one of the family’s tax returns. At Empoli the young Leonardo could have seen paintings by artists of the stature of Masolino and Agnolo Gaddi.
Here too he would see the great sweep of the Arno river – an educational experience, one might say, in view of his deep interest in the principles and patterns of water-flow – and on a sandbank not far from the town the remains of the ill-fated Badalone, the enormous paddle-wheeled barge built by Filippo Brunelleschi to transport marble up to Florence.78 It ran aground on its maiden voyage, depositing 100 tons of finest white marble into the Arno silt. This occurred in 1428, thus within living memory: a resounding failure, but a heroic one. Brunelleschi was a giant of the early Renaissance, a visionary architect and engineer, and the rotting hulk on the river-bend brings a whisper of grandeur from a world far different from Vinci.
Consideration of Leonardo’s education tends away from any idea of formal schooling – he was certainly not taught Latin; he had a lifelong preference for first-hand experience over book-learning; and his first awareness of art is likely to have been gained more from looking at sculptures and carvings in local churches than from any specific training in artistic principles.
One other feature of Leonardo argues strongly for his education as informal and largely autodidactic – his handwriting. The reasons for Leonardo’s ‘mirror-writing’ have been much debated. (It is correctly mirror-script, rather than just writing backwards. Not only does the whole line of script move from right to left, but each letter is formed in reverse; for
Two signatures. ‘Leonardo Vinci disscepolo della sperientia’, written in his mirror-script; and ‘Leonardo da Vinci Fiorentino’, written effortfully from left to right.
instance, a Leonardo d looks like a normal b.) There is certainly a strong psychological element of secrecy in this – it is not exactly a code, but it is a kind of veiling which makes the reading of his manuscripts an intrinsically taxing experience. We know that he was continually on guard against the pilfering of his ideas and designs.
But the root of his mirror-writing is probably very simple. Leonardo was left-handed. Writing from right to left comes naturally to the left-hander. Educational pressure normally prevails against this; in Leonardo’s case, without such pressure, it established itself as the habit of a lifetime.79 His handwriting would develop over the years, from the florid, looped style of the 1470s to the dense, minimal script of forty years later – these changes are an important tool for the dating of his manuscripts – but its direction remains the same. It moves defiantly from right to left; it is difficult, and different (and, in the typical association, ‘sinister’). This strange script is another aspect of the ‘unlettered’ Leonardo, of the profound mental independence which was perhaps the greatest legacy of his rural childhood.
PART TWO
Apprenticeship
1466–1477
Florence is a place of transit through which many outsiders pass.
Codex Atlanticus, fol. 323r-b
THE CITY
Sometime in the mid-1460s the teenage Leonardo left Vinci for Florence, where he was apprenticed to the sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. It is a decisive point of transition, and we know very little about it. According to Vasari, who is our only source on the subject, the apprenticeship was arranged by Leonardo’s father:
One day Ser Piero took some of Leonardo’s drawings along to Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a good friend of his, and asked if he thought it would be profitable for the boy to study drawing. Andrea was amazed to see what extraordinary beginnings Leonardo had made, and urged Piero to make him study the subject. So Piero arranged for Leonardo to enter Andrea’s workshop. The boy was delighted with this decision.
Vasari does not say how old Leonardo was, but his use of the word ‘boy’ (fanciullo) shows his picturing of the scene. The matter is ‘arranged’ between the father and the master – this would include a financial arrangement – and the boy is informed of their ‘decision’. The conventional age to begin apprenticeship was around thirteen or fourteen: in Leonardo’s case this would mean he entered Verrocchio’s studio in about 1466. This is only a vague guideline: many started younger, and some older – Fra Bartolomeo seems to have been apprenticed at the age of ten, Mantegna and Caravaggio at eleven, Michelangelo and Francesco Botticini at thirteen, Benvenuto Cellini at fifteen.1
We know something, at least, of Ser Piero’s circumstances at this time: he was fast approaching forty, his notarial career was flourishing, but it was also a time of change. His wife, Albiera, having finally conceived after nearly twelve years of childless marriage, died in childbirth. She was buried in June 1464, aged about twenty-eight.2 This was no doubt a personal loss for Leonardo too: many years later he was still in touch with Albiera’s brother,
The ‘Chain map’ of Florence, c. 1470–72.
Alessandro Amadori. The following year Ser Piero married again: another notarial match, no doubt advantageous. His bride was Francesca, the daughter of Ser Giuliano Lanfredini; she was fifteen years old. They set up home in a house on Via delle Prestanze, at the northern corner of the Palazzo della Signoria: a prestigious address. The house (no longer extant) belonged to the powerful merchants’ guild, the Arte dei Mercanti; it was sub-let to Ser Piero for the sum of 24 florins a year.3
The death of Leonardo’s grandfather, the aged patriarch of his Vinci childhood, may also have been a precipitating factor in his move to Florence. Antonio was certainly dead by 1465, when Ser Piero refers to him as ‘olim Antonius’, ‘the late Antonio’.4 Ser Piero was now the head of the family. It was time to discharge some responsibilities concerning the future of his son – his only child, indeed, as the months pass and his new wife proves as unproductive as her predecessor in the marriage bed.
Thus family circumstances tend to confirm a speculative date of c. 1466 for the beginning of Leonardo’s apprenticeship. His childhood – that landscape of memory and loss to which so much of his later work seems to refer – is over. He moves from it into the adult, urban, competitive world of his father: the world of guilds and contracts and deadlines, into which he would never quite fit.
Florence in the mid-1460s was a city of some 50,000 people. The punctilious Benedetto Dei – diplomat, traveller and later an acquaintance of Leonardo’s – reels off the following statistics. The city walls stretch for 7 miles and are fortified with 80 watch-towers. Within the walls there are 108 churches, 50 piazzas, 33 banks, and 23 large
palazzi or mansions ‘where live the lords, officials, chancellors, stewards, suppliers, notaries, functionaries, and their families’. There are 270 woolworkers’ shops, and 84 woodworkers’ studios specializing in intaglio and marquetry, and 83 silkworkers’ shops.5 We are in a pre-eminent city of craftsmanship, a city with more woodcarvers than butchers. Also a city of fashion, a centre of the garment industry: weavers, dyers, tanners, furriers – and clothes shops galore to tempt a teenager keen to slough off the dowdier mien of the countryside.
The walls and watch-towers have mostly gone, but the central landmarks of Leonardo’s Florence are all still there – the cathedral or Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore, with its stupendous brick cupola by Brunelleschi; Giotto’s slender, elegant bell-tower next to it; the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s bronze-relief doors; the tall-towered Palazzo della Signoria (not yet called the Palazzo Vecchio); the Bargello or Palazzo del Podestà; the guildhall and grain-store of Orsanmichele; and the Ponte Vecchio, the oldest of the four stone bridges spanning the Arno river. All these can be seen in the panoramic ‘Chain map’ of c. 1470–72, with its vignette of a young draughtsman in the corner, sketching the view from a hill to the south, and looking curiously like how one imagines the young Leonardo.6 There are a few differences in today’s view. The bell-tower beside Santa Croce is no longer there – it was destroyed by lightning in 1529 – nor is the teeming, odoriferous city market, the Mercato Vecchio, which was demolished in the late nineteenth century. The Piazza della Signoria, the political hub of the city, was even larger than it is today: in theory it could accommodate the entire adult male population of the city, for in times of crisis the bell of the Signoria would toll – it was known from its low booming tone as La Vacca (The Cow) – and citizens would assemble under the banners of their gonfaloni (the sixteen administrative districts of the city) and march into the square for a parlamento. When Charles VIII of France briefly occupied the city in 1494 he threatened to ‘sound the trumpets’ as a sign for his soldiers to sack the city: he received the famous Florentine retort – ‘And we will ring our bells.’7
Florence was a beautiful city, but not a gay or extravagant one. The mercantile virtues of thrift, industry and public-mindedness were constantly pronounced, if not always pursued. These were also deemed to be republican virtues, for Florence was proud of its independence of despotic dukes and kings. Around the base of Donatello’s statue of Judith and Holofernes, then in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici, were carved the words ‘Regna cadunt luxu surgunt virtutibus urbes’ – ‘Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through virtues.’8 A certain opulence was a sign of these ‘virtues’, and the great art-works of the Florentine Renaissance convey messages of prestige and spending-power as much as of truth and beauty; but the line between civic pride and decadent lavishness was a fine one. Greed, said the acerbic wit Poggio Bracciolini, is ‘the emotion which makes civilization possible’. The rich merchant who commissioned a religious work for a church, often with his own image inserted into the picture, was in part atoning to God for the size of his profit-margins. ‘The faith of my Florentines is like wax,’ said the preacher Savonarola: ‘a little heat is enough to melt it.’9
Florence in Quattrocento paintings has a sombre, muted look. It was a city built of sandstone: the honey-brown pietra forte, the softer grey pietra serena. There was little of the coloured plaster which we now think of as typically Italian, and less of the multicoloured marble on the exterior of the churches. (The Duomo’s marble façade was not completed until 1887.) The town-houses were built of large rectangular blocks of stone, with that characteristic roughened or ‘rusticated’ surface which gives the façade of a large palazzo the look of a squared-off cliff. There was a building-boom. According to Benedetto Dei, thirty new palazzi had sprung up in the last twenty years (he was writing in about 1470). Each of the prominent families had its grand palazzo – the Rucellai, the Tornabuoni, the Spini, the Pazzi, the Benci: some of these families have a part to play in Leonardo’s story – but none was grander than the Palazzo Medici on Via Larga, begun in the late 1450s to a design by Michelozzo Michelozzi. There were Donatello statues in the courtyard; in the master bedroom hung Uccello’s Battle of San Romano; in the chapel a glittering fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli depicted members of the family in the procession of the Magi. Here also was the great library created by Cosimo de’ Medici. These palazzi were company headquarters as much as private homes: they had chamberlains and counting-houses. They were also something like clan headquarters: they signified that a certain part of town was the patch of a certain great family.
This building-boom was seen as a sign of civic health and was actively encouraged by the authorities. A law would soon be passed offering a forty-year exemption from local taxes to anyone building a new palazzo. The diarist Luca Landucci watched the construction of the Strozzi palace from the doorway of his apothecary shop opposite. He grumbled, ‘The streets round about were full of mules and donkeys carrying away the rubbish and bringing gravel, which made it difficult for people to pass. All the dust and the crowds of onlookers were most inconvenient for us shopkeepers.’ None the less, he watched and recorded as the building took shape: the digging of the foundations, the pouring in of chalk and gravel, the first cornices, the laying of the rough projecting stones called bozzi above them. People threw medals and coins into the trenches for good luck. Another small trader, Tribaldo de’ Rossi, recalls visiting the site with his four-year-old son, Guarnieri: ‘I held Guarnieri up in my arms, so he could look down into the foundations. He had a little bunch of Damascus roses with him, and I made him throw them in. I said: You will remember this, won’t you? And he replied: Yes.’10
For many, these new palazzi seemed to represent a new and heartless monumentality – they were the mansion-blocks and high-rises of the day, sweeping away the more crowded, intimate feel of medieval Florence. More than twenty houses were demolished to make way for the Palazzo Medici, just as Ser Piero’s house on Via delle Prestanze, probably Leonardo’s first home in the city, would later be demolished to make way for the grandiose Palazzo Gondi. The palazzi were the visible face of Florentine political and social power. This was a world which Ser Piero touched, as a provider of professional services to the Medici and others. There are doors through which he passes, but for his adolescent son – illegitimate, provincial, sketchily educated – those massive rusticated walls are a gesture of exclusion. For all its meritocratic propaganda, the city had its inner sanctums of power and influence. ‘In Florence’, says a character in Machiavelli’s play The Mandrake, ‘if you don’t have power even the dogs won’t bark in your face.’11
In the 1460s, power meant the Medici family and its huge network of allies and cronies. When Cosimo de’ Medici died in 1464, an official decree of the Signoria accorded him the title ‘Pater Patriae’ – a suitably vague term which recognized the family as a kind of presidential dynasty without actually stating it. The Medici were the de facto rulers of Florence: they governed by stacking the city’s executive offices with supporters, and by sheer supremacy of wealth from their banking and business interests.12 Cosimo’s son Piero (known as Il Gottoso – ‘the Gouty’) succeeded him: already nearing fifty, bookish and unhealthy, he had neither the political skills nor the popular touch of his father. His plan to call in massive sums lent by the Medici bank caused alarm. Factions arose, topographically described as the Poggio and the Piano: the Hill and the Plain. The anti-Medici faction, centred on the rich and irascible Luca Pitti, were del poggio, referring to the high ground south of the Arno where the Palazzo Pitti was built; the Medici loyalists were del piano. After an attempted coup in 1466, the chief agitators of the Poggio were exiled; they enlisted military support from Venice, always ready to cause Florence trouble, and in July 1467 there was a clash of troops near Imola. These emergencies are the backdrop of Leonardo’s first years in the city. Piero’s charismatic son, Lorenzo, was waiting in the wings, and would take power, at the age of twenty, in 1469.
> Amid these vicissitudes it was canny of Ser Piero da Vinci to specialize in providing notarial services to the city’s religious foundations, which were less vulnerable to the winds of political change. He had connections with various monastic orders, among them the Servites of Santissima Annunziata and the Augustinians of San Donato, both of which would later commission works from his son.13
It is conventional to depict Leonardo’s arrival in Florence as a moment of wide-eyed revelation – the young country bumpkin dazzled by the energy and splendour of the great city – but it is possible that he had visited Florence before he went to live and work there. Nor do we know (as is often assumed) that Leonardo immediately entered Verrocchio’s studio on his arrival in Florence. It has been suggested that the mathematics teacher mentioned by Vasari – he whom Leonardo bamboozled with questions – may have been a Florentine tutor hired by Ser Piero to train up his son as a notarial assistant.14 In theory Leonardo’s illegitimacy barred him from entering the profession, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t make himself useful in the office for a while. Leonardo’s early handwriting, with its rather effortful flourishes and curlicues, has been thought of as ‘notarial’.
Ser Piero’s office was a few minutes’ walk from his home. It was a former draper’s shop, and was furnished – as the rental agreement brightly explained – with ‘a counter suitable for the practice of notary’. It is described as being ‘opposite the door of the Palagio del Podestà, in other words the Bargello.15 It was probably in the range of semi-subterranean shops, set into the old Roman walls below the church of La Badia, where today one sees Snack Bar La Badia and Fantini’s gold-shop. This street, which is now part of Via del Proconsolo, was then called Via de’ Librai (Booksellers’ Street). Next to it was Canto de’ Cartolai (Paper-Merchants’ Corner). These provided the raw materials of Ser Piero’s métier as the maker and keeper of records, the inscriber of transactions, the official noter-down. There is, perhaps, an echo of his father’s trade – and of his father’s mentality – in Leonardo’s almost obsessive production of written material, the reams of paper which record his own multifarious transactions with the world.
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