Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  The real underhand trick that Ser Piero played on Leonardo at this time was to become a father again. In 1475 he married for the third time, and the following year, a few weeks short of his fiftieth birthday, the long shadow of marital barrenness was lifted with the birth of a son. The child was duly baptized Antonio, in memory of Ser Piero’s father and in confirmation of his status as Ser Piero’s son and heir – his first-born in legal if not biological terms.90 For Leonardo this was surely a blow. It cemented his illegitimacy. Up till then he had enjoyed the protection and encouragement of his father, however gruffly expressed; he perhaps hoped that, if no other child was born to Ser Piero, he might in the fullness of time become his heir. With the birth of Antonio di Ser Piero da Vinci in 1476 Leonardo is disinherited. He is once again the bastard son, the second-class citizen. Somehow, without really meaning to, Vasari’s story partakes of this – the cheating father, the secretly spurned gift, the lost legacy of the hundred ducats. Ser Piero walks off down the street, with the painting under his arm, glad to be out of that strange shady room smelling of dead lizards.

  GINEVRA

  L’aer d’intorno si fa tutto ameno,

  Ovunque gira le luci amorose…

  Agnolo Poliziano, Stanze per la giostra

  Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (Plate 6) was first mentioned in the early sixteenth century by Antonio Billi, and then by the Anonimo and Vasari, but for a long while the painting was thought to be lost. It was only at the beginning of the last century that it was identified with a small half-length panel portrait then obscurely housed in the Prince of Liechtenstein’s collection in Vaduz castle.91 The sitter, it was noticed, was posed in front of a juniper-tree – in Italian ginepro, and hence a typical pun on ‘Ginevra’. Other findings have followed, confirming that this is indeed Leonardo’s Ginevra. The painting is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC – the only major Leonardo work outside Europe. It was his first portrait. I would also call it his first masterpiece.

  It is a small painting – little more than 15 inches tall, though it used to be rather larger – but it has an extraordinary intensity of atmosphere. The face is pale, round, melancholic; it glows against the juniper’s dark foliage like the moon coming out of cloud, and indeed the light which falls on the more distant background, glinting on water and hovering over thin, ghostly trees, could as well be moonlight as the more conventionally supposed twilight. The sitter’s eyelids are heavy, her gaze abstracted; whatever those feline eyes are looking at, they do not seem to see. She is looking into a distance not physically measurable. She is, as we would say, miles away. Her hair, fair or auburn, is smooth and glossy where it has been combed down against her head – a hint of perfumed macassar hovers about her – but where it frames her face it forms a little cascade of ringlets. Amid the hermetic stillness of the picture these twirling, twisting, highlit curls give a sudden sense of release, of constraints thrown off. They are a force of vitality amid the painting’s almost oppressively serene atmosphere. They are also, already, a kind of Leonardo trademark (see his Tobias; see his angels): they are what the discerning customer wants from him.

  I call this Leonardo’s first masterpiece: a subjective and ultimately unhelpful term, but the one that best expresses the frisson of beauty and mystery which the painting provokes. It was certainly painted within the Verrocchio ambit. It has a close affinity with Verrocchio’s marble Woman with a Bunch of Flowers (Bargello, Florence), which may well be a portrait of Ginevra as well. But the poetry of the picture is not something learned from Verrocchio: it is the product of the painter’s own particular sensibility. It is the first Leonardo painting where one has a sense of looking through the picture-plane, as through a window, into some charmed space. It shows the world seen in a kind of trance. The alabaster smoothness of Ginevra’s face contributes to this dream-like quality: she is not quite human. This was a desired effect – the paint surface of the face was smoothed by Leonardo’s own hand.

  *

  Verrocchio’s marble Woman with a Bunch of Flowers, c. 1476.

  Probable study for the hands of Ginevra de’ Benci in the lost portion of her portrait.

  Ginevra de’ Benci – or ‘La Bencina’, as Poliziano calls her – was young, witty, beautiful and rich.92 The poet Alessandro Braccesi wrote of her, ‘Pulchrior hac tota non cernitur urbe puella / Altera nec maior ulla pudicitia’ – ‘In all the city you will not find a more beautiful girl, nor any more modest.’ She was born in the summer of 1457, probably on the Benci estates at Antello, south of Florence. The family had risen to eminence on the coat-tails of the Medici, whom they served as bankers and advisers. Ginevra’s grandfather Giovanni, of lower-middle-class origins, had been a close business associate of Cosimo de’ Medici; her father, Amerigo de’ Benci, was director of the Medici bank in Geneva. The family had a handsome city palazzo in the Santa Croce quarter, on what is now Via de’ Benci. In the catasto of 1457, the year Ginevra was born, Amerigo was estimated as worth over 26,000 florins, making the Benci the wealthiest family in Florence after the Medici (who were worth four times as much). Amerigo was also a noted art-collector and patron. He was not the commissioner of Leonardo’s portrait – he died in 1468, still in his thirties – but it will be of interest that he was an early patron of the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, to whom he gave a rare Greek manuscript of Plato.

  In January 1474, at the age of sixteen, Ginevra was married to a cloth-trader, Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini. It used to be thought that Leonardo’s picture was a wedding-portrait, commissioned by her husband, but Ginevra was more famously associated with the brilliant but rackety Venetian diplomat Bernardo Bembo, and recent evidence strongly suggests that it was he who commissioned it. Bembo arrived in Florence, as Venetian ambassador, in January 1475; he was in his early forties, with a wife and a son in tow, and a mistress and a love-child somewhere else in his life, but he swiftly threw himself into a highly public ‘Platonic’ affair with Ginevra. Such an affair was permissible: he was, within the conventions of the day, her cavaliere servente, though there are suggestions that their relationship strained against the boundaries of chastity. Cristoforo Landino wrote a poem about it, joking that only two letters of her name need to be changed for her to become one with her lover, ‘and though she was once Bencia, her name will be Bembia’. The poet Braccesi soothed the pains of separation by ‘gathering the violets that Ginevra deliberately let fall from her bosom so that he could secretly carry them to Bernardo’. (The flowers in Verrocchio’s sculpture may allude to this amorous game, though they are usually identified as primroses.) A note in Bembo’s own hand describes her as ‘the most beautiful of women, and famous for her virtue and her manners’. Ginevra was herself a poet, and doubtless responded in verse to Bembo’s chivalric attentions. Only a single line of her poetry has survived: ‘Chieggo merzede e sono alpestro tygre’ – ‘I beg for mercy; I am a wild tiger.’

  On the reverse of the panel Leonardo painted an emblematic device which features again the identifying visual pun of the juniper. A juniper-branch is surrounded by a wreath composed of branches of laurel and palm. On a scroll is the motto ‘Virtutem forma decorat’ (‘The form adorns virtue’), expressing the Platonic–Petrarchan commonplace that outward physical beauty embodies inner spiritual virtue.93

  This device is unexpectedly informative. To begin with, it is off-centre, both vertically and laterally; part of it is actually missing off the side-edge of the panel. This clearly shows that the panel has been cut down at some point. Assuming the device was placed centrally on the reverse, the panel must have been a few inches wider on the right-hand side (in other words, on the left-hand side of the portrait itself), and longer by about a third, the lost portion being at the bottom of the panel. This has fascinating implications for the portrait itself, which must originally have shown Ginevra almost down to her waist. In the Windsor collection is a beautiful study of hands – or actually a pair of studies, each concentrating on a different
hand. The right hand is holding something, though quite what is not clear. The lines may suggest the stalks of a posy of flowers, for once again there is a close visual connection with the hands of Verrocchio’s Woman with a Bunch of Flowers. This drawing may well be a study for the hands of Ginevra de’ Benci as they appeared in the lost lower portion of the portrait.94 The real Ginevra’s beautiful hands and her ‘fingers white as ivory’ are mentioned by both Landino and Braccesi.

  The device on the reverse also confirms the portrait’s particular connection with Bernardo Bembo, for Bembo used precisely the emblem of the laurel and palm which is here shown enclosing the sprig of juniper. It has been found in two Bembo-related manuscripts now in England. One version of it, in Bembo’s own hand, is in his autograph copy of Marsilio Ficino’s De amore (a commentary on Plato’s Symposium, written in the early 1460s and published in 1469); it was in the margin of this manuscript that Bembo wrote the words about Ginevra which I quoted earlier. Another version of the wreath is in Eton College library, in a manuscript copy of Bembicae Peregrinae (‘The Travels of Bembo’), a poem describing his journey to Spain in 1468–9.95 Leonardo’s device thus shows Ginevra emblematically entwined with Bembo. This confirms that the portrait was commissioned not, as was hitherto assumed, by her husband on the occasion of their marriage in 1474, but by her Platonic lover a year or two later. Bembo was ambassador in Florence for two spells – between January 1475 and April 1476, and between July 1478 and May 1480. On stylistic evidence the earlier sojourn gives a more likely date for the commissioning of the picture.

  The first notice of Bembo in Florence records his presence at the giostra of Giuliano de’ Medici on 28 January 1475. It was probably here that he met Ginevra for the first time, and was swept up in the ethos of courtly love which was very much the theme of Giuliano’s giostra, as can be gauged from Poliziano’s elegant, sweet-toothed poem, Stanze per la giostra, which commemorated it. The couplet I quote at the opening of this chapter gives the typical tone – ‘Sweet the air all around, the lights of love flickering everywhere’.96 It is quite likely that the Verrocchio studio designed standards for Giuliano’s giostra, just as they had done earlier for Lorenzo’s. There is a Verrocchio sketch of Venus and Cupid in the Uffizi: its elongated triangular shape strongly suggests that it is a study for a standard. The Venus is a typically elegant and mellow Verrocchio female. The Cupid, with his quick, darting movements – one hand reaching an arrow from his quiver, the other saucily reaching to bare the goddess’s breast – has been attributed to Leonardo.97

  The icon of the giostra was Giuliano’s own mistress, the young Genoese beauty Simonetta Cattanei, wife of Matteo di Vespucci. (She was Giuliano’s mistress in the same playfully ‘Platonic’ sense that Ginevra was Bembo’s mistress, but Vespucci did not enjoy his role as Platonic cuckold and there arose tensions between the Vespucci and the Medici as a result.) Within the iconography of the giostra Simonetta was associated with Venus, the goddess of love: there is a great deal of decorative verse from Poliziano about this. This in turn ties in with an old tradition that Simonetta was the model for Venus in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and for the equally Venusian figure on the left-hand side of his Primavera. In the latter she stares intently at a dark young man reaching up for an apple – this is plausibly a portrait of Giuliano. These paintings were commissioned in the early 1480s by Giuliano’s cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici for his villa at Castello.98 By the time they were painted both Simonetta and Giuliano were dead – she from consumption in 1476, and he from an assassin’s dagger in 1478. Her image is nostalgically evoked, a memory of the enchanted moment of the giostra.

  Is it possible, I wonder, that the poetic Venusian theme which emanates from the giostra of 1475, and which is later evoked in these famous Botticelli paintings, may also be a clue to the particular ambience of Leonardo’s Ginevra? A brief passage from the work of Marsilio Ficino suggests that it is. In his De vita coelitus comparanda (Of Drawing down the Life of Heaven), written in the early 1470s, Ficino discourses on what can be summed up as Neoplatonic magic, and one of the sections of his treatise deals with the designing of talismans. One of these talismans, which gives ‘health and strength’, is described as ‘an image of Venus as a young woman [puella], holding apples and flowers, and dressed in white and gold’.99 I think Leonardo’s portrait may have been conceived, at Bembo’s request, as a kind of talismanic, Venusian image of Ginevra. She is not holding an apple (as far as we know), but she is probably holding flowers; her dress is golden and her bodice is white; her hair and her face echo this colour-scheme. In this reading, Leonardo’s picture shows us Ginevra as Venus, just as Botticelli’s pictures – later, and hence perhaps derivatively – show us Simonetta Cattanei as Venus. For Ficino, of course, Venus symbolized spiritual rather than sexual love – as in the De amore, which we know Bembo owned, where the ‘ecstasy [furor] of Venus’ is said to ‘transmute the spirit of man into a god, by the ardour of love’.100 In Bembo’s eyes and in Leonardo’s, this sort of meaning would attach to the painting: a talisman of philosophical love.

  Bembo’s involvement with the philosopher Ficino in these years is well documented. He attended Ficino’s Platonic ‘academy’ at Careggi, he corresponded with him, he wrote his praise of Ginevra in his own copy of Ficino’s De amore. His whole courtship of Ginevra is done within an ambience of dilettante Neoplatonism. The Benci were also part of the Ficino circle. We know that Ginevra’s father gave Ficino a rare Greek manuscript of Plato; we know also that two of her cousins, Tommaso and Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Benci, were scholarly assistants of Ficino’s.

  In these ways the Ginevra portrait brings Leonardo close to Ficino’s academy of philosophers and poets. The commissioner and the subject of the portrait both belong in that circle, and the painting itself has a Ficinian shimmer of love and magic. Leonardo is perhaps on the sidelines – a mere studio hand, a hired craftsman, but one whose brilliant intelligence would be recognized. Leonardo was not a Platonist: the ‘disciple of experience’ has a different agenda, and the ‘first causes’ he seeks are not the emanations of the Platonic ‘World Mind’. In the broad philosophical divide of the day he is an Aristotelian, absorbed in the workings of the material world rather than the numina of the spirit. But to the aspiring young artist of the mid-1470s, Ficino must have been a charismatic figure, and his desire to communicate complex ideas in a clean, simple prose – and in Italian, too: the De amore was translated into Italian in 1474, ‘so that this health-giving manna should be within the reach of all’ – would have impressed Leonardo. And how could he resist Ficino’s stirring synopsis of Plato’s philosophical aspirations: that the minds of those who practise philosophy have ‘recovered their wings through wisdom’, and so can ‘fly back to the heavenly kingdom’?101

  There is some fragmentary evidence of Leonardo’s connection with the Ficino circle on a page of the Codex Atlanticus. This has a list of names in Leonardo’s hand, at the head of which is a certain Bernardo di Simone; on the verso of the sheet the name appears again in a series of doodles or pen-trials, in mirror-script: ‘bernardo di sim / di di disimon / ber bern berna’.102 A plausible candidate for this man on Leonardo’s mind is Bernardo di Simone Canigiani, who was one of Ficino’s pupils. The date of the sheet, judging from the script and the early technological drawings on the verso, is around 1478–80. Snatches of text are found on the page. Leonardo is in melancholy or indeed philosophical mood: ‘Chi tempo ha e tempo aspetta perde l’amico’ (‘He who has time and waits for time will lose his friend’); and ‘Come io vi disse ne di passati, voi sapete che io sono sanza alcuni degli amici’ (‘As I told you in days gone by, you know that I am without any friends’); and this haunting little memo:

  Essendomi sollecitato

  S’amor non è che dunque

  [Now I am fired up, if there is no love, then what?]

  There is something of this melancholy, love-lorn tone in the Ginevra portrait itself. The young woman’s expressio
n is ethereal, but one glimpses in it also a more human truth, which is that behind these amusing Platonic posturings lie real hearts that get broken. In the catasto of 1480, Ginevra’s husband, Luigi – I am tempted to call him her long-suffering husband – spoke of the costs he had incurred because of her ‘sickness’. This cannot be taken as gospel (because of the motive of tax relief), but it coincides well enough with Bembo’s last departure from Florence, in May 1480, and with the tradition that Ginevra retired thereafter to the country. Two sonnets addressed to her by Lorenzo de’ Medici suggest this. He praises her decision to ‘leave the passion and evil of the city’ and never ‘gaze back on it’. We do not know if she really devoted herself to a life of prayer in rustic seclusion, as implied by these poems, but it is true that little is heard of her after her brief and brilliant courtship with Bembo, and what little there is seems retrospective: a noted beauty of a bygone age. She died, a childless widow, in about 1520.

  THE SALTARELLI AFFAIR

  Platonic love-games or real emotions? The question which hovers over the Ginevra portrait now enters more closely into the story of Leonardo’s life.

  In early April 1476 an anonymous denunciation was posted in one of the receptacles placed around the city for that purpose, known as tamburi (drums) or, more picturesquely, buchi della verità (holes of truth). A notarized copy of this document survives among the archives of the Ufficiali di Notte – the Officers of the Night and Conservers of the Morality of Monasteries, who were essentially the Florentine night-watch, though they could as well be described as the vice squad. It reads as follows: