Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  The Saltarelli affair is the first but not the only suggestion of Leonardo’s homosexuality during his early years in Florence. There is another cryptic memorandum to consider – cryptic because partly illegible – which is found on a sheet of drawings and diagrams in the Uffizi.117 Among the drawings is a pair of heads, one of which may be an early self-portrait (see page 175). The writing is typical of Leonardo’s earlier ‘notarial’ hand, full of scrolly decorative curlicues; in some parts it looks as if he is doodling or trying out a new pen. At the top of the sheet Leonardo has written something about a young man called Fioravanti di Domenico living in Florence. It is difficult to read, and where the paper is smudged at the top left-hand corner quite impossible. This is how J.-P. Richter transcribed the lines in the 1880s:

  Fioravanti di domenicho j[n] Firenze e co[m]pere

  Amantissimo quant’e mio…

  Pen and ink portrait of a young man, c. 1475, from the studio of Verrocchio.

  He translates this as ‘Fioravanti di Domenico in Florence is my most beloved friend, as though he were my [brother],’ the last word being a conjecture for the illegible scribble at the end of the second line. In his 1913 study of Leonardo, Jens Thiis provided a rather different reading:

  Fioravanti di domenicho j[n] Firenze e che aparve

  Amantissimo quanto mi e una vergine che io ami

  This would give us, ‘Fioravanti di Domenico in Florence is one who seems very loving towards me, and is a virgin whom I might love.’

  Carlo Pedretti prefers Richter’s reading, but sees in the second line subsequent to ‘mio’ only ‘calligraphic squiggles which make nonsense’. It is certainly hard to muster all the minims that Thus claimed to see there, so one cannot say that the note goes into overt homosexuality, but clearly Leonardo had very warm feelings towards his ‘beloved’ Fioravanti. The standard patronymic form of the name makes it unlikely he will ever be identified.118 It is possible his features are preserved on some page of Leonardo’s Florentine sketchbooks, but like Jacopo Saltarelli he remains elusive – not a face but a certain tone, or frisson.

  ‘COMPANIONS IN PISTOIA’

  It was perhaps convenient, in the wake of the Saltarelli affair, that Verrocchio should have important works afoot in the city of Pistoia. On 15 May 1476 – precisely during that edgy period between accusation and acquittal – he won the commission to produce an enormous marble cenotaph in Pistoia cathedral in memory of Cardinal Niccolò Fortaguerri. There were disputes – the Consiglio of Pistoia had voted 300 florins for the work; Verrocchio wanted 350. In early 1477 Piero del Pollaiuolo submitted a model which the Consiglio was disposed to accept, but the dispute was arbitrated by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who decided in favour of Verrocchio.119

  Around the same time, Verrocchio was commissioned to produce an altarpiece in memory of a former Bishop of Pistoia, Donato de’ Medici, a distant relative of Lorenzo’s. This altarpiece, with a Verrocchiesque Madonna and Child flanked by St Donatus and St John the Baptist, was painted by Lorenzo di Credi – it is his first securely dated work. It was substantially under way by 1478, but once again there were financial disagreements and it was not finished until about 1485. There are strong signs that Leonardo was involved in the original conception of this altarpiece. A small preparatory study in tempera for the figure of St Donatus (the namesake of the Medici bishop whom the altarpiece commemorates) has recently been proposed as his. There is a silverpoint drawing of St John the Baptist at Windsor which has strong similarities with the St John in Credi’s altarpiece.120 And there is that small Annunciation in the Louvre, which was originally one of the predellas (the narrow painted panels at the bottom) of the Pistoia altarpiece, and which is demonstrably based on the composition of Leonardo’s Annunciation. It is sometimes said that the predella version is also by Leonardo, but it is more likely to be by Credi working under Leonardo’s supervision.

  These pictorial links suggest Leonardo’s involvement in the early stages of the Pistoia altarpiece. He was by now the most accomplished painter in Verrocchio’s studio, and it is natural to find his junior colleague Credi working under his supervision. Leonardo would also have been involved in the early stages of the Fortaguerri cenotaph, and there is a terracotta model for the monument in the Victoria & Albert Museum which some believe to be partly his work. These Pistoia projects of c. 1476–7 would have offered Leonardo a welcome change of scene in the aftermath of the Saltarelli affair. Pistoia was a town he knew: in fact he had family there – his aunt Violante had married a Pistoiese. It was just the kind of pleasant provincial backwater to which a young man might retreat – to which he might be dispatched by his employer – while the storm of scandal blew over back in Florence.

  Some confirmation of this is found on the same sheet of notes and drawings which contains that amorous reference to Fioravanti di Domenico. At the bottom of the page is a fragmentary sentence. The beginning of it is torn away; what remains is the phrase ‘e chompa in pisstoja’ – ‘and companions in Pistoia’. (Chompa is a contraction of compare, an affectionate word meaning a comrade or buddy.) Another fragment on the page bears the date 1478. Sometime before this, we infer, Leonardo had made some friends in Pistoia. It is possible that Fioravanti was himself one of them; another may have been the Pistoiese poet Antonio Cammelli, who can be discerned in Leonardo’s company a couple of years after this. This hard-to-read scribble is further evidence that Leonardo took the opportunity to put some space between him and Florence in the period after the Saltarelli scandal.

  A few miles west of Pistoia stands the little hilltop village of San Gennaro, with its Romanesque pieve, or parish church, founded by Neapolitan refugees fleeing an eruption of Vesuvius in the early sixth century. Leonardo certainly knew the village, for he marks it on one of his maps of central Tuscany, connected with a project to canalize the Arno river via Pistoia and Serravalle.121

  Inside this church, on a low pedestal by the west door, is a small terracotta statue of an angel. Ignored for centuries, it was recognized about fifty years ago as being ‘of the school of’ Verrocchio, and is now accepted as being entirely by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci (Plate 8). It is a beautiful piece, alert and full of movement. Some parts are modelled with precision, others with a note of carelessness and speed which is more typical of a bozzo, a rough model, than of a finished sculpture. The angel’s right arm is an unmistakable echo of the Annunciation angel, and the long curling hair is a Leonardo trademark. I am struck by the wonderful realism of the right foot, extending slightly over the pediment – the bossed knuckles, the well-worn sandal, the downward curl of the little toe. The pose of the angel is echoed in some figures on a page of Francesco Ferrucci’s sketchbook – the same sketchbook which has that drawing of the model for Verrocchio’s David; the figures are not by Leonardo, but there is a line of writing on the page which seems to be his.

  Nothing is known of the provenance of this piece. It was certainly at San Gennaro by the eighteenth century: its first appearance in the records is on 31 July 1773, when a workman’s ladder fell on it and broke the upper part into several pieces. It was painstakingly restored by a local man named Barsotti. A thin crack like an accident-scar is still discernible on the angel’s forehead. The traces of paint – yellow, green and red – which can be seen on the sculpture are probably the restorer’s, but may indicate an original colouring from which he was working: in other words it was originally a polychrome sculpture, as was conventional in church statuary when the material was terracotta or wood.122 It remains a mystery how a sculpture by Leonardo da Vinci comes to be standing in an unregarded corner of a small country church near Pistoia. One answer might be that it has been here from the beginning – that is, from the time it was created, in about 1477, by a young Florentine artist temporarily holed up in the area and glad for a small local commission, glad for the respite of the green Tuscan hills.

  On an April day in 1477 Leonardo turns twenty-five. I imagine him staring at his face in the mirror – an action whose
complex optometrics he will later puzzle over under a rubric beginning, ‘Let a–b be a face which sends its simulacrum to the mirror c–d.’123 He wonders how much he likes what he sees. He is no longer, by the standards of life expectancy in Quattrocento Florence, quite a young man. He has in some measure become what he will always be.

  To others that face in the mirror was one of great beauty and translucent intelligence. The early biographers are unanimous on this. Paolo Giovio, who had known him personally, said, ‘He was by nature very courteous, cultivated and generous, and his face was extraordinarily beautiful.’ A French writer at the court of Louis XII, Jean Lemaire, speaks of Leonardo’s ‘supernatural grace’ – this is in a poem published in 1509, and is probably also a first-hand impression.124 The Anonimo Gaddiano says, ‘He was very attractive, well-proportioned, graceful and good-looking,’ with beautiful hair, arranged in ringlets, ‘down to the middle of his chest’. None of these sources refers to the long beard which is such a feature of the mythos, and which is probably a late addition to the Leonardo look.

  Vasari is insistent to the point of hyperbole. Leonardo was a man of ‘outstanding beauty’ and ‘infinite grace’ – ‘He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul… He owned nothing, one might say, and he worked very little, yet he always kept servants and horses.’ If Vasari were writing today he might have summed up that ‘great presence’ which could lift people’s spirits, that effortless grace with which ‘he commanded everyone’s affection’, as ‘charisma’. Vasari also presents Leonardo as a man of great physical strength and dexterity: he was ‘so strong he could withstand any violence; with his right hand he could bend the iron ring of a doorbell, or a horseshoe, as if they were lead’. One has to put some of this down to Vasari’s heroizing tendency; there are echoes here of Leon Battista Alberti’s alleged athletic prowess, which should also be taken with a pinch of salt. It is a trope, a rhetorical expression of Leonardo as all-round superhero. It perhaps suggests Vasari’s desire to rectify an overtone of effeminacy in the earlier biographers’ descriptions of Leonardo’s beauty.

  Whether or not he could bend horseshoes with his bare hands, the consensus is that Leonardo was a handsome, tall and imposing figure, a fine horseman, a tireless walker. He was also, we know, a snappy dresser – something of a dandy. His hair is carefully coiffed. He wears rose-pink tunics, fur-lined coats, jasper rings, boots of Cordova leather. There is about him a touch of fastidiousness: ‘Take fresh rosewater and moisten your hands with it, then take flower of lavender and rub it between your hands, and it will be good.’125 In one of his comparisons between the painter and the sculptor he pictures the latter sweating and dirty with labour, ‘his face smeared with marble dust so he looks like a baker’. The painter, by contrast, works ‘at ease’; he is ‘well dressed’; he ‘moves a light brush dipped in delicate colours’ and ‘adorns himself with the clothes he fancies’.126

  But we cannot understand this rather showy young man without seeing also the strains of uncertainty and loneliness and dissatisfaction in the face that looks out from the mirror, the sense of himself as an outsider: illegitimate, unlettered, sexually illicit. These moods will be concealed more and more hermetically in an aura of aloofness. They are glimpsed in scattered fragmentary phrases of his manuscripts – little chinks of darkness: ‘If freedom is dear to you, do not reveal that my face is the prison of love…’127

  PART THREE

  Independence

  1477–1482

  He is a poor pupil who does not go beyond his master.

  Forster MS 3, fol. 66v

  LEONARDO’S STUDIO

  In about 1477 Leonardo set up his own studio in Florence. This was a natural progression: he had been ten years with Verrocchio as pupil, apprentice and assistant. The portrait of Ginevra shows him already breaking the envelope – it is visibly linked to the Verrocchio ambit, but its poetic tone is something entirely new. He now enters into the first, difficult period of independence: a young maestro in a crowded, competitive market.

  The first clear sign of his new independence is a contract he signed on 10 January 1478, but there is another document, recently discovered, which gives us a curious hint of the ambience of Leonardo’s bottega. It is a letter from Giovanni Bentivoglio, Lord of Bologna, to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and it concerns a young man whose name is given in the letter as ‘Paulo de Leonardo de Vinci da Firenze’.1 There was a flutter of excitement in the Italian press when this came to light in the 1990s, since the formation of his name could suggest that this Paolo was a hitherto unsuspected son of Leonardo da Vinci. A moment’s reflection makes this unlikely: for reasons implicit in the letter, Paolo cannot have been born much after 1462, when Leonardo was ten. Far more likely is that he was an apprentice of Leonardo’s. As noted, it was conventional for an apprentice to take on the name of his master, as Verrocchio had done.

  So it seems we have here the name of one of Leonardo’s first apprentices, and with the name comes a story. From Bentivoglio’s letter, which is dated 4 February 1479, we learn that Paolo had been sent away from Florence ‘some time ago’, because of the ‘wicked life he had followed there’. This exile was to ‘reform’ him and to ‘remove him from the bad company he kept’. It seems that Lorenzo de’ Medici was personally involved in this, for when Paolo arrived in Bologna he was promptly imprisoned, and Bentivoglio specifically says that this was at Lorenzo’s request: ‘In compliance with letters from Your Magnificence he was put in prison.’ Paolo spent six months in jail, but after his release, ‘having purged himself of his sins’, he ‘devoted himself to the art of marquetry, which he had already begun to learn there [i.e. in Florence], so that he has become a skilled craftsman, and pursues it as his trade’. He is now anxious to return to Florence, and his brothers have written to Bentivoglio asking for this. This is the motive of Bentivoglio’s letter – to seek Lorenzo’s ‘benevolent permission and good pardon’ so that Paolo can return. He is a reformed character, says Bentivoglio; he promises henceforth ‘to be an honest man, and live in an orderly manner’.

  It is a spicy story, and it leads back to Leonardo, who is identified patronymically as Paolo’s master. Given that he was in jail in Bologna for six months, and had thereafter established and supported himself as an intarsiatore or marquetry artist, we can say that the date of Paolo’s scandalous exit from Florence must have been at least a year, if not more, before the date of the letter – thus late 1477 or early 1478. We can reconstruct the situation retrospectively, as follows. In 1477 Leonardo had a Florentine apprentice or servant named Paolo. He was probably a teenager. He had brothers whose social status was not negligible: Bentivoglio twice mentions them in his letter. He perhaps did not have a father, whose role the brothers seem to be taking in the affair – this would tie in with his status as Leonardo’s adoptive ‘son’ in the studio sense. He already had some training in marquetry, the highly skilled and much demanded craft of inlaying wood. He lived, however, a ‘wicked life’, and was involved in ‘bad company’ (mala conversatione), and by early 1478 he had been hustled out of the city. The nature of this wickedness is not actually stated, but it is very likely that it was homosexuality. A further imputation – only an imputation, but hard to avoid – is that among the bad company from which young Paolo needed rescuing was his master, Leonardo da Vinci. And so to the names of Jacopo Saltarelli and Fioravanti di Domenico we add another of Leonardo’s boyfriends. That he is also, within the workshop convention, Leonardo’s ‘son’ is a detail that Freud would have enjoyed getting to grips with.

  Thus a whiff of scandal hangs over Leonardo’s fledgling studio. Little more than a year after his brush with the Officers of the Night, he is once again touched by charges of homosexuality. Lorenzo de’ Medici perhaps had notice of that first scandal, since it also touched a member of his mother’s family, and he is certainly involved in the expulsion of Paolo di Leonardo.

  Despite this inauspicious overtone, Leonardo recei
ved his first recorded commission as an independent painter on 10 January 1478.2 It was a commission from the Signoria for a large altarpiece to hang in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Capella di San Bernardo. He was not actually the Signoria’s first choice for the job – the commission had been turned down by Piero del Pollaiuolo the previous month. It seems a highly prestigious offer, and it was backed up with a cash advance of 25 florins, paid in mid-March, so it is curious that Leonardo never delivered the work. It is his first abandoned project, the first of the renegings which will dog his professional career.

  The new altarpiece was to replace an earlier painting by Bernardo Daddi which showed the apparition of the Virgin to St Bernard, and the agreement indicates that Leonardo was to produce a painting on the same theme. No trace of any sketch or study for a Vision of St Bernard can be found among his drawings, but it is just possible that an echo of this ghostly work is discernible in a painting by Filippino Lippi. According to the Anonimo Gaddiano, Leonardo had actually started work on the painting, and it was later finished from his preparatory drawings by Filippino. There is indeed an altarpiece by Filippino showing the Vision of St Bernard: a fine work, now in the Badia Fiorentina. It was painted in the mid-1480s for the Pugliese family chapel at Marignolle, near Florence; the donor, Piero del Pugliese, appears bottom right. Is the Anonimo right? Is that cluster of Madonna and angels on the left – which can certainly be called ‘Leonardesco’ – an actual rendition of a lost Leonardo cartoon of c. 1478? It is possible, though one of the angels has a strong affinity with Leonardo’s Annunciation, and does not therefore need a putative lost drawing to explain its Leonardesque look.3