Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  We may, at any rate, imagine a period of uncongenial clerking in that little office opposite the Bargello. But if this was the course that Ser Piero had envisaged for his son, he wisely changed his mind.

  RENAISSANCE MEN

  Politics, commerce, fashion, noise, building-dust, dogs in the street – but to these perennial ingredients of big-city life must be added something less definable, for fifteenth-century Florence was also, as the guidebooks never fail to tell us, the ‘cradle of the Renaissance’, or anyway one of the cradles. What the Renaissance was, and when and why it happened, are not precisely definable. The schoolroom version is that it began with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, in which case we might take a Hungarian arms-manufacturer named Urban to be the man responsible for it, his new siege-cannon being a crucial factor in the breaching of Byzantium’s triple-walled defences by the armies of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II.16 This was certainly a decisive moment, as a stream of refugee scholars fanned up through Italy with their bundles of rescued manuscripts containing the stored-up wisdom of Greek science and philosophy: Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle – names already known in Italy, of course, but only partially studied. These Byzantine immigrants were still quite recent arrivals when Leonardo came to Florence. One such was the great Aristotelian scholar Joannes Argyropoulos, whose name occurs in a list written by Leonardo in the late 1470s: someone he knew, or wished to know.17

  But this influx of Byzantine Greek scholarship only accelerated a flow of ideas which had been going on for centuries. Arabic science, much of it based on the Greek tradition, had been percolating into Europe since at least the twelfth century; the humanist revival of classical Roman culture was already in full swing. These too are part of the Rinascimento or Renaissance in its primary sense: a ‘rebirth’ of classical learning. The doctrine of the sudden break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is largely a construction by nineteenth-century commentators like Jacob Burckhardt and Jules Michelet. Their purpose, according to the Marxist historian Arnold Hauser, was ‘to provide a genealogy for liberalism’: in other words, the Renaissance was moulded into a model for later ideas of rationalist political enlightenment.18 Nowadays the pendulum of interpretation has swung away from this ‘new dawn’ rhetoric, and the sources of the Renaissance are sought in less glamorous socio-economic factors – not the fall of Constantinople but the rise of double-entry accounting and the international bill of exchange, which created an economic climate in which ideas and art flourished.

  None the less, Michelet’s stirring slogan for the Renaissance agenda – ‘la découverte de l’homme et de la nature’: ‘the discovery of man and nature’ – expresses pretty well the mood abroad in the Florence of the 1460s, a city brimming with new ideas and forms which were often old ideas and forms re-examined in a new and modern light.

  The intellectual luminaries of the Medici circle were men like the philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the scholarly poets and translators Agnolo Poliziano and Cristoforo Landino, but this refined coterie held no lasting attraction for Leonardo, though he had some interesting contacts with it. For Leonardo, the man who symbolized the new Renaissance mood more than any other was Leon Battista Alberti, whose books he later owned and whose ideas reverberate through his notebooks. Alberti is often called the ‘first Renaissance man’ – a loose term, but one that conveys his importance as a role-model. The same epithet is often applied to Brunelleschi, but Brunelleschi had been dead for twenty years when Leonardo arrived, whereas Alberti was still a living presence. Then in his sixties, he summed up those qualities of versatility and intellectual rigour which we now think of as Leonardian. He was an architect, author, classical scholar, art-theorist, musician, stage-designer, town-planner – the list could go on. After his death in 1472, Cristoforo Landino wondered, ‘Where shall I put Alberti? In what class of learned men shall I set him? Among the natural scientists [fisici], I think. Certainly he was born to investigate the secrets of Nature.’19 That last sentence echoes in the mind as a potential synopsis for Leonardo.

  Alberti was also famed for his style and elegance: ‘the avatar of grace’, someone called him. The cultivated man, Alberti said, ‘must apply the greatest artistry in three things: walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking’, but to these must also be added another art, ‘namely that none of these seems to be done in an artful way’. He was a remarkable athlete it was said he could jump right over a man from a standing start, and could throw a coin up inside the Duomo so that it hit the roof of the cupola20 – and from the look of his self-portrait, in a bronze medallion of c. 1450, he was handsome and fine-featured, with a powerful Ciceronian profile. Physical beauty, stylish clothes, good manners, fine horses – these were always important to Leonardo, part of his contemporary image, despite the contradictory pull towards the rough-and-ready ways of the countryside.

  As Leonardo might also have noted, Alberti was an illegitimate son. His father was a prosperous Florentine merchant forced to leave the city for political reasons; he settled in Genoa, where Alberti was born in 1404. As with Leonardo, Alberti’s illegitimacy is an important paradox: it was a disadvantage of status, but it gave him a certain marginality, an exemption from family expectations and traditions, which proved in the long run beneficial. He was driven, as his biographer Anthony Grafton puts it, ‘to avenge in the realm of intellect his initial defeats in the counting-house’.21 He created a career for himself which hadn’t really existed before: a kind of freelance consultant in matters architectural, scientific, artistic and philosophical. In this role he served the papal Curia and the courts at Urbino and Mantua, as well as the Medici and Rucellai in Florence. It was this kind of role that Leonardo later aspired to when he looked beyond the Florentine horizon to the Sforza of Milan.

  For Burckhardt, Alberti was the shining new light of Italian humanism, but there were also in him those strata of doubt, and self-doubt, which I have already suggested are part of the Renaissance psyche. He struggled with the demons of depression; he was, says Grafton, ‘a tightrope performer of self-creation’. Spring and autumn made him melancholy, he said, because all those flowers and fruits made him feel how little he had produced in his life – ‘Battista,’ he would tell himself, ‘now it’s your turn to promise some sort of fruits to the human race.’ Leonardo too would have this haunting sense of non-achievement which is the downside of the expansionist Renaissance mood. If the possibilities are endless, the realization of them can only ever be partial.22

  Another aged guru whose name occurs in Leonardo’s notebooks is Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, born in 13 87, renowned as an astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, geographer, physician and linguist – the grand old man of Florentine science. Back in the 1420s he was a friend of Brunelleschi’s, and was said by Vasari to have assisted the architect in designing the cathedral dome. He was also close to Alberti, who dedicated his witty Intercenales (Dinner Pieces) to him, ‘mindful of our long friendship’. Much of Toscanelli’s work is lost, but a long manuscript survives, largely autograph, in the same Florentine collection which contains the Anonimo Gaddiano’s biographical sketches. Its Latin title translates as ‘The immense labours and long vigils of Paolo Toscanelli concerning the measurement of comets’; it contains remarkably accurate measurements of the paths of various comets, including the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1456.23 These labours and vigils are the currency of the new empiricism: the insistence on direct observation, the accumulation of raw data, the testing and questioning of ancient wisdom – Toscanelli is an early role-model for Leonardo as ‘disciple of experience’. He is best known today as the geographer and cartographer who questioned the old Ptolemaic world-map and thereby contributed to Columbus’s discovery of America. In around 1474 he wrote a letter to a Portuguese churchman, Fernão Martines, in which he demonstrated, with the support of a map, that the shortest way to Asia was to sail west across the Atlantic (or the ‘Ocean Sea’, as it was then called) at the latitude of Iberia. It is plausible that Columb
us knew of this via his connections with the King of Portugal.

  Poliziano wrote of Toscanelli, ‘Paolo traverses the earth with his feet, and the starry sky with his mind, and is at once mortal and immortal’24 – an elegant metaphorical synopsis of the aspirations of the Renaissance scientist.

  Alberti and Toscanelli sum up an idea of the ‘Renaissance man’ as it might have been perceived, if not so called, in the Florence of the mid-1460s: men, in Landino’s phrase, ‘born to investigate the secrets of Nature’. How much their names impinged on the fourteen-year-old trainee painter Leonardo da Vinci we cannot say – his references to them are of course later – but they are part of the air he breathes, this wonderful cerebral oxygen of the Renaissance, and they provide a blueprint for his own multi-disciplinary career, a tradition that he follows. He would certainly have studied Alberti’s De pittura as part of his training under Verrocchio, and have stood in admiration before the cool classical façades of Santa Maria Novella and the Palazzo Rucellai.

  The painters and sculptors of Florence felt themselves to be part of the new spirit of discovery, though artistically this was a time of transition rather than high achievement. The great maestri who had dominated the mid-century were ageing or dead. Among the painters, Fra Angelico had died in 1455, Andrea del Castagno in 1457, and Domenico Veneziano in 1461. (The latter, for reasons implicit in this list, was not murdered by Castagno, as was colourfully rumoured by Vasari.) The pre-eminent sculptor of the day, Donatello, whose influence we have seen percolating into Vinci, died in 1466. The troublesome friar Fra Filippo Lippi had left Florence for the last time, to work on the cathedral frescos at Spoleto, and to die there in 1469. Paolo Uccello, the great practitioner of pictorial perspective, was a spent force, declaring mournfully in his tax return of 1469, ‘I am old, infirm and unemployed, and my wife is ill.’25

  The new generation of artists flourishing in the mid-1460s were brilliant professionals, though not the towering figures of yesteryear. The important studios were those of Verrocchio (who was at this stage still primarily a sculptor); the Pollaiuolo brothers, Antonio and Piero; Neri di Bicci, the pupil of Donatello; Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico; and Cosimo Rosselli. There was also the hugely successful workshop of Luca and Andrea della Robbia, which specialized in glazed terracotta works. Up-and-coming young artists to watch were Sandro Filipepi, better known as Botticelli (born c. 1444), and the fresco specialist Domenico Ghirlandaio (born 1449), who becomes the great visual journalist of Florentine life. Many, if not all, of these artists would soon be personally known to Leonardo in the intimate studio world of rivalries and collaborations. Michelangelo and Raphael had not yet been born. Nor had the great chronicler of Florentine art, Giorgio Vasari.

  ANDREA’S BOTTEGA

  When we speak of Leonardo ‘entering the studio’ of Andrea del Verrocchio we should avoid extraneous notions of what an artist’s studio was and what it looked like. The word generally used in Leonardo’s day was bottega, which means simply a shop or a workshop. This conveys well enough the daily reality of Verrocchio’s studio. It was a workshop or indeed a small factory devoted to the production of works of art. Some studios were specialist, but Verrocchio’s was decidedly not. Over the years it produced paintings of various types and sizes; sculptures in marble, bronze, wood and terracotta; goldwork, silverwork and ironwork; tombstones, marriage-chests, jousting-pennants, heraldic devices, suits of armour, and theatrical sets and costumes. It was a commercial operation – Kenneth Clark has dubbed the studio ‘Verrocchio & Co.’ – and from Vasari onward there has been a tendency to think of Verrocchio as more a master-craftsman than a ‘great artist’. ‘The style of his sculpture and painting tended to be hard and crude,’ opined Vasari, ‘since it came from unremitting study rather than any inborn gift.’26

  Though best known as a sculptor, Verrocchio had actually trained as a goldsmith, and was a member of the goldsmiths’ guild. In this he followed Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Ghirlandaio, who all trained first as goldsmiths. One of his masters was a certain Francesco di Luca Verrocchio, from whom he took his professional name (his real name was Andrea di Cione). It was not unusual for an apprentice to adopt his master’s name: to become, within the ambit of trade secrets, his ‘son’ – a trope of initiation. The name of Piero di Cosimo, for instance, signifies that he is the ‘son’ of his master, Cosimo Rosselli. In one of the earliest references to Verrocchio as an independent artist he is styled Verrocchino or ‘Little Verrocchio’. He in turn became one of the foremost teachers of his generation. As well as Leonardo, his pupils and assistants included the painters Pietro Vanucci (known as Perugino) and Lorenzo di Credi, and the sculptor Agnolo di Polo, and he seems to have had good relations with other independent artists like Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Francesco Botticini, Biagio d’Antonio and Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, all of whom were associated with his workshop at one time or another.

  Verrocchio’s bottega was in the parish of Sant’ Ambrogio, towards the eastern flank of the city walls. He was a local boy – he was born and raised here, and though he died in Venice his body was brought back to be buried, next to his father, in the parish church. He was born sometime between 1434 and 1437, and was thus about thirty when he became Leonardo’s master. His father, Michele, is documented as a fornaciaio or kiln-worker, as Leonardo’s stepfather Accattabriga had been; his elder brother, Simone, entered the church. The family home still stands, deduced from documents to be the tall house on the north-western corner of Via del Agnolo and Via de’ Macci. Verrocchio’s bottega was close by, on Via Ghibellina, close to the forbidding, windowless walls of the city’s prison, Le Stinche, which stood on the present-day site of the Teatro Verdi.27

  The studio where Leonardo began his apprenticeship was just a short walk from Ser Piero da Vinci’s offices opposite the Bargello. This suggests the intimacy of the city – the physical closeness of family and work, everyone in walking and talking distance of each other – but in these crowded cities there are invisible social boundaries, and you would have crossed one as you walked out from the well-appointed city centre into the crowded, artisan neighbourhood of Sant’Ambrogio. The names of the streets give a flavour of the area – on Via della Salvia, where sage and other herbs were once sold, we get a smell of the area. A speciality of the neighbourhood was earthenware: you went to Via dei Pentolini for the small two-handled cooking-pots of that name, and to Via delle Conche for larger washing-pots. North of the church was Via della Mattonaia, or Brickworks Street, perhaps the site of Michele di Cione’s business as a fornaciaio. Moving on east towards the walls you arrived at a pair of rather grim-looking convents for murate – immured nuns or anchoresses. At the Monasterio delle Murate were 150 nuns; they passed their time making silver and gold embroidery, for which Savonarola reproved them. Next to it was the convent of Santa Verdiana, named after the anchoress par excellence, St Verdiana of Castelfiorentina, a thirteenth-century murata who is said to have lived for thirty-four years in a walled-up cell with only two snakes for company. Beyond the city gate – the Porta alla Croce – was greenery and space: how often Leonardo must have walked there to clear his head.28

  Andrea’s studio cannot be tied to a precise building on Via Ghibellina, but we know broadly what it looked like. The typical bottega was a large, open space on the ground floor, opening on to the street, usually with living-quarters at the back or upstairs. Walking between Sant’Ambrogio and Santa Croce you can still see vestiges of botteghe. Old arched entranceways are visible in the brickwork, and sometimes there is a pizzeria or laundromat or car-repair shop where the interior shape has been preserved: the low, vaulted ceiling; the workspace stretching back the whole width of the building to a glimpse of the yard out back. From a doorway on Via delle Casine comes the sound of hammering, the flare of a welding-torch. Thus Leonardo’s first experiences of artistic life in c. 1466: physical, dusty, noisy; the penetrating smells of varnishes and solvents; more like a kind of garage th
an a studio.

  At this time Andrea del Verrocchio was in the first flush of success. In 1467, a busy year, he was completing work on Cosimo de’ Medici’s tomb in the Medici church of San Lorenzo, and beginning work on one of his sculptural masterpieces, the large bronze group of Christ and St Thomas for one of the exterior niches of Orsanmichele. Both these were plum commissions. The sculpture was commissioned by the powerful Tribunale della Mercanzia, the law-court for cases involving guildsmen and traders – an organization with which his ‘good friend’ Ser Piero da Vinci had connections. At the convent of San Marco, he was also involved in the casting and mounting of an enormous bronze bell, later known as La Piagnona after the followers of Savonarola, the piagnoni or weepers.

  Another famous Verrocchio bronze has recently been dated back to this period, and is of particular interest because it is possible that Leonardo was the model for it. This is Verrocchio’s David. It is just over 4 feet tall, and shows David as a wiry, curly-haired youth with the profusely bearded head of Goliath at his feet. Traces remain of what was probably extensive gilding on the figure’s boots, armour and hair. The sculpture is now in the Bargello, just a few hundred yards from where it was created. It is sometimes dated to the mid-1476s, because in 1476 it was sold by Lorenzo de’ Medici to the Signoria, but the Verrocchio expert Andrew Butterfield has shown that on stylistic grounds it is much earlier. He dates it to c. 1466: it was perhaps a commission by Lorenzo’s father, Piero, for the garden of the Medici villa at Careggi.29 If this date is right, the statue belongs to Leonardo’s earliest days at the bottega. What could be more natural than that this handsome new assistant should be the model for the boy-warrior David? That Leonardo was a beautiful youth is stated by all the early biographers. A visual comparison of the David with the probable self-portrait in the Adoration, c. 1481, adds some conviction to this. There is no early documentation to support the idea, but it is persuasively possible that Verrocchio’s graceful, skinny, wavy-haired ragazzo is the fourteen-year-old Leonardo.