Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Another form of public theatre was the sacra rappresentazione, or sacred show, the Florentine equivalent of the medieval English miracle plays. These shows were performed on holy days in churches and cloisters by young boys belonging to religious foundations. They were big productions, conspicuously financed by the Medici and others. There were special effects – huge revolving discs to change the scenery; wires and pulleys to make actors fly through the air. According to Vasari, Brunelleschi invented many of the cunning devices or ingegni that made such special effects possible. At San Felice there was a performance of the Annunciation every 25 March (the Feast of the Annunciation, or Lady Day). Heaven was up among the roof-trusses, and Mary’s house was on a stage in the nave; the angel Gabriel was perilously winched down on a wooden cloud to make his announcement. Another popular rappresentazione was performed on Ascension Day at the Carmine monastery. These shows enacted the same religious scenes that the painter depicted; their groupings and gestures and tableaux vivants fed into the more subtle narrative conventions of the paintings. A visiting bishop made this connection, commenting after a performance of the Annunciation that ‘the angel Gabriel was a beautiful youth, dressed in a gown as white as snow decorated with gold, exactly as one sees heavenly angels in paintings.’ As Leonardo prepared to paint his own version of the Annunciation, these witnessed scenes were part of what he had to work with.62

  Leonardo’s love of theatre takes wing later in Milan, but is grounded here in the jousts and processions and sacre rappresentazioni of Medici Florence. He is the handsome, slightly quizzical young man standing at the edge of the crowd – rapt but alert, observing and calculating, working out how it’s done.

  In 1471 Verrocchio and his assistants were involved in preparations for another kind of spectacular: the state visit of the Duke of Milan. Verrocchio was commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici to make a helmet and suit of armour ‘in the Roman style’ as a gift for the Duke, and the studio was also called on to redecorate the guest apartments of the Palazzo Medici. This marks the first definite presence of Leonardo in the Medici ambit – as an interior decorator, no more – as well as his first contact with the Milanese court, which would become his habitat in years to come.

  The visit was controversial. The old duke, Francesco Sforza, had been one of the Medici’s principal allies, but his son Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who succeeded him in 1466 in his early twenties, was a sinister and profligate young man with a reputation for appalling cruelty. According to the Milanese chronicler Bernardino Corio, ‘he did things too shameful to write down.’ Some things which did get written down (though this does not guarantee their truth) were that he ‘violated virgins and seized the wives of other men’, that he cut the hands off a man whose wife he fancied, and that he ordered a poacher to be executed by forcing him to swallow a whole hare, fur and all.63 The Medici’s enemies argued that this undesirable young duke should be ditched, and that Florence should return to its old alliance with Venice, but Lorenzo maintained that good relations with Milan were essential to Florentine prosperity. The fact that Galeazzo’s wife, Bona of Savoy, was a daughter of the King of France added a further diplomatic dimension.

  The Duke’s magnificent cavalcade entered Florence on 15 March 1471. A document in the Milanese court archives entitled ‘Le liste dell’andata in Fiorenza’ gives us an idea of its size – about 800 horses in all, carrying a retinue of courtiers, chaplains, butlers, barbers, cooks, trumpeters, pipers, dog-handlers, falconers, ushers, pages, wardrobe-mistresses and footmen (among the latter one called Johanne Grande, or Big John).64 A portrait of Galeazzo by Piero del Pollaiuolo, probably painted during this visit, shows a hooked nose, a sardonic curve of the eyebrow, a small mouth, a glove held in a fastidious hand. Among the troupe was Galeazzo’s younger brother Ludovico, known for his swarthy looks as Il Moro – ‘the Moor’. Still a teenager, and still on the periphery of Milanese power-politics, he was a young man to watch. Ten years after this first glimpse of him, Leonardo would be heading north to seek his patronage.

  In view of this later allegiance, the Florentine reaction to the Duke’s visit is interesting, for it suggests something that, perhaps unconsciously at this stage, attracted the young Leonardo. Machiavelli criticized the hedonism – as we would say, the ‘consumer culture’ – of young Florentines at this time, and particularly associated it with the pernicious influence of this Milanese visit:

  There now appeared disorders commonly witnessed in times of peace. The young people of the city, being more independent, spent excessive sums on clothing, feasting and debauchery. Living in idleness, they wasted their time and money on gaming and women; their only interest was trying to outshine others by luxury in costume, fine speaking and wit… These unfortunate habits became even worse with the arrival of the courtiers of the Duke of Milan… If the Duke found the city already corrupted by effeminate manners worthy of courts and quite contrary to those of a republic, he left it in an even more deplorable state of corruption.65

  We do not know the precise motives of Leonardo’s move to Milan in the early 1480s, but it may be that some of these ‘courtly’ qualities given such a negative spin by Machiavelli – snazzy clothes, witty banter, effeminate manners – were more congenial to him than the robustly bourgeois ethos of republican Florence.

  There were sacre rappresentazioni put on in the Duke’s honour, among them a Descent of the Holy Ghost to the Apostles, performed at San Spirito, the Brunelleschi church on the Oltr’Arno. On the night of 21 March a fire broke out during the show, causing panic and considerable damage. For the preachers of Florence it was divine retribution for the decadence and opulence of the Milanese, and their feasting during Lent, but a spark of that fire glows on in Leonardo’s memory.

  ON THE LANTERN

  In 1470 or early 1471 a minor Florentine painter called Biagio d’Antonio Tucci produced a painting of Tobias with Three Archangels, a variation on the popular Tobias theme which Verrocchio and Leonardo had also tackled.66 Behind the figures is the familiar view of Florence – walls, towers, hills and, in the middle, the great dome of the cathedral. It is conventional enough, but Biagio painted what he actually saw, and what he saw was a tall and rather complicated wooden scaffolding around the marble lantern on top of the dome. The painting thus becomes a unique visual record of the finishing touch being applied to the dome. The main structure of the cupola had been completed nearly fifty years previously by Brunelleschi – ‘challenging the sky itself’, as Vasari memorably phrased it – but it had never been crowned with the orb and cross specified in Brunelleschi’s original design. This project was now entrusted to Verrocchio & Co., and if one could apply some kind of magical magnifying-glass to Utili’s painting one might discern certain figures perched aloft on the scaffolding, and one of those figures might be Verrocchio’s assistant Leonardo da Vinci.

  This prestigious contract had been awarded to Verrocchio by the cathedral’s fabbriceria, or works department, in September 1468. The following spring he travelled to Venice and Treviso to purchase high-quality copper for the orb. The finished orb – or, as it is invariably called, the palla or ball – was 8 feet in diameter and weighed more than 2 tons.67 According to Vasari, the casting ‘required much care and ingenuity, to make it possible to enter the ball from below, and make it proof against damage from the wind’. The mould for it is probably the ‘sphere’ mentioned in the post-mortem inventory of Verrocchio’s possessions.

  On Monday 27 May 1471 the ball was hoisted to the top of the marble lantern which tops the dome, 350 feet above the ground. The ledgers of the Opera del Duomo record the payment of 2 lire ‘to buy bread and wine for the workmen when they put up the ball’. The work of installing it and securing it to its plinth took three days, then on 30 May the cross was placed on top of it. Among the crowd watching below was the apothecary Luca Landucci: ‘They placed the cross on the said ball, and the canons and many other people went up, and sang the Te Deum there.’ The accounts note that 3 lire was paid ‘
to the trumpeters of the Palagio [i.e. the Signoria]… for their trouble when they played on the lantern when the cross was put up’.68

  Leonardo certainly had first-hand knowledge of the project, and of the engineering problems involved. A memorandum in one of his notebooks contains a specific recollection: ‘Remember the solders used for soldering the ball on Santa Maria del Fiore.’69 This note is datable to c. 1515, when he was involved in a scheme to manufacture parabolic mirrors, made of a number of facets soldered together. He is looking back more than forty years to that vertiginous Florentine project in which he had assisted as a young man.

  It cannot, of course, be proved that Leonardo was perched up on that scaffolding high above the rooftops of Florence, ‘challenging the sky itself’. But where else would we expect to find him?

  The project drew Leonardo close to the work of the already legendary figure of Filippo (or Pippo) Brunelleschi, the master architect of the dome, who had done so much to give a new status to the Renaissance architect-engineer. He was a small, ugly, combative man: he was ‘insignificant to look at’, says Vasari, ‘but his genius was so commanding that we can surely say he was sent by heaven’. The famous anecdote of the egg summed up the man’s provocative flair. In the competition to build the cupola, we learn, Brunelleschi refused to divulge his plans, but won the competition with a kind of wager or dare. He said ‘that whoever could make an egg stand on end on a flat piece of marble should build the cupola, since it would show how intelligent each man was’. An egg was duly brought, and the competing experts tried in vain to make it stand on end. Then Filippo stepped up and ‘graciously taking the egg he cracked its bottom on the marble and made it stand upright.’ The others complained that they ‘could have done as much’, but Filippo laughed and said ‘they could also have vaulted the cupola if they had seen his models.’70 This incident is probably apocryphal, but its mix of showmanship and originality (what we would call ‘lateral thinking’) is right, as is the strong motive of professional secrecy. He was plagued by fears, often justified, of piracy and plagiarism – another Brunelleschian feature inherited by Leonardo.

  The dome remains one of the wonders of European architecture – it is still, nearly 600 years later, the largest masonry dome in the world. According to modern estimates it contains some 4 million bricks and weighs about 36,000 tons, and it was built without a ‘centring’ (a wooden framework to support the masonry). It is in fact two domes, one nestling inside the other: the larger one measures 180 feet between its opposite edges. Each dome is formed of eight self-supporting arching segments, built simultaneously and reinforced by circular hoops.71 One of Brunelleschi’s innovations was the introduction of safety harnesses: only one mason fell to his death during the building of the dome – a remarkable record by the standards of the day.

  The placing of a 2 ton copper orb or ‘ball’ on top of the dome posed engineering problems not dissimilar to those originally confronted by Brunelleschi – primarily how to get it up there. Leonardo’s involvement in the project would have provided him with direct access to the cathedral workshop, and to Brunelleschi’s famed designs for hoists and cranes. Studies recording the overall forms and some of the details of Brunelleschi’s devices are found in a clutch of Leonardo drawings in the Codex Atlanticus; these are generally dated to the late 1470s, but probably reflect this earlier involvement in cathedral engineering. The same machines are found in the notebooks of other Renaissance engineers, but the way Leonardo isolates and analyses particular components strongly suggests he was working directly from the original machines.72 One drawing shows the collo grande (‘big neck’), a machine built by Brunelleschi in 1421, which served as the main hoist for lifting worked stone and other heavy materials to the top of the cathedral. Its particular feature was a gearing mechanism which meant that the hoist could either raise or lower materials without the animals turning the windlass at its base having to change direction. Another drawing shows Brunelleschi’s revolving crane, designed to provide a stable and precise way of placing worked stones during the construction of the dome. Another gives detailed sketches of a crane running on circular rails. All these

  Florence cathedral, showing dome, lantern and orb.

  devices would have been directly relevant to the hoisting and placing of the copper sphere.73

  On a folio of the late 1480s, thinking about a naval attack system, Leonardo notes that he must ‘make a cast of one of the 3 screws at the Opera di Santa Liberata’.74 This is another name for Florence’s cathedral, and he is referring to yet another Brunelleschi mechanism – for keeping cables at high tension – to be found in the cathedral workshop. At around this time Leonardo was himself thinking about domes and cupolas, in connection with a project at Milan cathedral. Close reflections of Brunelleschian architecture are

  Technical study by Leonardo of Brunelleschi’s reversible hoist.

  found in his studies for this, and a later drawing shows the herring-bone arrangement of bricks in a dome, again echoing the great prototype in Florence.75

  One can today make a vertical pilgrimage to the base of the lantern of the Duomo. A stairway of 463 stone steps leads up from an entrance on the south side of the transept, debouches briefly at the lower rim of the cupola – where one walks past the huge sandalled feet and flapping hems of the Vasari fresco of the Last Judgement – and then twists up behind the wainscots of the cupola to emerge on top of the city, with the rooftops of the old centre spread below, and the streets radiating through them like the spokes of a slightly squashed bicycle wheel. One can see the line of Via Ghibellina where the bottega was, and the tall spire of the Badia marking the site of Ser Piero’s office, and then looking north there is the huge sandstone cube of the Palazzo Medici, still looking as if it has just been rolled into place.

  Here Leonardo stood on an early summer’s day in 1471. One senses the grandeur of the occasion for him – in part a euphoria from the bird-like altitude, and in part a sense of the powers of Brunelleschian technology, the precisely calibrated magic which could throw up this gravity-defying structure halfway to heaven. It is an inspirational Renaissance moment.

  FIRST PAINTINGS

  In the summer of 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo was registered as a member of the Florentine painters’ confraternity, the Compagnia di San Luca. The company’s ledgers record that ‘Lyonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci dipintore’ was charged 32 soldi for the privilege of membership. This included 16 soldi for his annual subscription, to be paid in monthly instalments from 1 July 1472, and 10 soldi as a contribution to the company’s observances on the feast-day of St Luke, 18 October.76 St Luke, who was supposed to have painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary, is the patron saint of painters. Also registered as new members in this year were Verrocchio, Botticelli, Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, the Pollaiuolo brothers, and Filippino Lippi: the cream of Florentine painting in the early 1470s.

  Founded in the mid fourteenth century, the Compagnia di San Luca was a loose grouping or sodality of painters of all sorts. Others were established in Siena and Milan, and later there were versions in Paris, Rome and London. (The last of these, St Luke’s Club, also called the Virtuosi, was founded in 1638 by Anthony Van Dyck, and met at the Rose Tavern in Fleet Street.) The original Florentine Compagnia had a religious overtone, but it was essentially an artists’ ‘club’, and no doubt a convivial one. It was distinct from the painters’ guild, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, though it shared some of the guild’s functions. Many of its members were also members of the guild, but this was not obligatory (as is shown by the appearance of Filippino Lippi in the 1472 register, aged about fifteen and too young to be a guild member). In practice the guild’s control over artistic affairs was much in decline, and many artists preferred not to join. This decline was largely due to the increasing mobility of artists in search of patronage: the guilds had a strictly local axis of influence, and art was becoming a national and international market. We don’t know if Leonardo ever became a membe
r of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali – the guild records are fragmentary – but there is no evidence that he did.

  The records of the Compagnia di San Luca are also very patchy, and it is not clear why all these painters are recorded as joining in the same year; possibly there had been an earlier hiatus in the company’s activities. None the less, Leonardo’s appearance in the company’s libro rosso is a tangible marker in the otherwise shadowy chronology of his artistic development. By mid-1472 he is a dipintore: a practising painter.

  What whole paintings had Leonardo done by this time? There are various possibilities (leaving aside his contributions to Verrocchio’s Tobias, which are charming but limited), and the most obvious is the Annunciation, now in the Uffizi (Plate 5). It was probably painted for the monastery of San Bartolomeo at Monte Oliveto, in the hills south-west of Florence. It was certainly there by the late eighteenth century, when it is first documented.77 In 1867 it was bought by the Uffizi; according to a label on the back of the panel, it was then hanging in the sacristy at San Bartolomeo. Its oblong format suggests it may have been designed to be placed above the furniture of the sacristy: there is a similarly shaped intarsia Annunciation by Giuliano da Maiano in the north sacristy of Florence cathedral. It is known that San Bartolomeo was partly rebuilt in 1472 – the portal, attributed to Michelozzi, bears this date – and the painting may have been commissioned as part of the refurbishment. Today the monastery is a military hospital.

  Before its transfer to the Uffizi, the painting was believed to be by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It was first attributed to Leonardo in the Uffizi catalogue of 1869. This attribution is now almost universally accepted, though there remain one or two revisionist doubters. What the doubts correctly convey is that the style of the work is hard to differentiate: this is the young Leonardo, still visibly associated with Verrocchio’s shop and its prevalent forms and techniques. David A. Brown sums it up well: ‘Combining innovative and lyrical passages with borrowings and mistakes, the Annunciation is the work of an immensely gifted artist who was still immature.’78 The borrowings are evident in the face and colouring of the Virgin, in the raised little finger of her hand – a typical Verrocchio mannerism – and in the ornate decoration of the lectern, which echoes Verrocchio’s work on the Medici sarcophagus in San Lorenzo, completed in 1472.79 The mistakes are essentially of perspective. The right-hand cypress-tree, for instance, appears to be in the same plane as the other cypresses, but to read it as such would make the receding wall next to it impossibly long. More critically, the spatial relationship between the Virgin and the lectern is illogical. Read from the pedestal upward, the lectern is nearer to us than she is, but read from her right hand downward it should be further away from us. Her awkwardly elongated right arm is a result of this irresolution. Both these compositional errors occur on the right-hand side of the painting. The other side – the angel, the garden, the wonderful melting vistas – seems richer and more accomplished. It has been thought they may have been done at different times. Overall the painting has a certain stylized stiffness, and gains its effect from the ephebic beauty of the angel and from what Martin Kemp calls its ‘myopic focus’ on individual detail.80