A partially obliterated sentence on that page of notes and drawings which mentions Fioravanti di Domenico reads: ‘[… ]mbre 1478 inchomincai le 2 vergini Marie’. The date may be September, November or December 1478. Which are the ‘two Virgin Marys’ or Madonnas that Leonardo began at that time? And are they the same as the two Madonnas that appear in his list of c. 1482, which itemizes various works he had done in Florence and was taking with him to Milan? They are described on the list as ‘a Madonna finished’ and ‘another almost, which is in profile’.
Kenneth Clark believed that the Madonna in profile was the Litta Madonna, now in St Petersburg. The finished painting is certainly later: it is a product of Leonardo’s Milanese studio, probably from the end of the 1480s. But Clark argues that it was begun in Florence, and was brought to Milan in precisely the unfinished state mentioned in the list of 1482. In its finished form it has manifestly non-Leonardian aspects, such as the strange changeling head of the child: these are the work of one of his Milanese pupils, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio or Marco d’Oggiono. But there is a silverpoint studio drawing for the head of the Madonna, done on greenish paper, which is certainly by Leonardo.4
The Florentine genesis of the Litta Madonna remains unproved. We are on much surer ground with another Leonardo painting in the Hermitage – the Benois Madonna (Plate 9). Stylistically it belongs to Leonardo’s first Florentine period. It is very probably one of the ‘2 vergini’ he began in 1478, though whether it is also the ‘finished’ Madonna of the 1482 list is less certain: some aspects of the painting seem to lack finish.
This small (19 x 12 inches) oil painting, somewhat inexpertly transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century, is one of Leonardo’s most underrated works. It has, for all its imperfections of detail, a sweetness and freshness and movement which immediately lift it beyond the posed, hieratic elegance of the Verrocchio Madonnas with their blonde hair and lifted little fingers. This Madonna is demonstrably a girl, not even a very beautiful girl. Her long, braided, auburn hair cascading down her left shoulder suggests for a moment the Simonetta Cattanei look – but only for a moment: again one has a sense of the role-models which Leonardo is conspicuously rejecting. She is the antithesis of Botticelli’s languid, pretty, almond-eyed Madonnas. The great Bernard Berenson – who always preferred Leonardo’s drawings to his paintings – found her frankly ugly: ‘a woman with a bald forehead and puffed cheek, a toothless smile, blear eyes and furrowed throat’.
Also quite foreign to Verrocchio is the new dark, velvety tonality of the painting. The figures are lit dramatically amid the suggestive greys and russets of the background. The tone is muted, modest, domestic. Technical examination shows an underlying preparation of dark umber, with the colours spread over it ‘in sediments, like a dew’.5
There are enigmas about the detail. There has been some retouching: the Madonna’s neck and the child’s right hand show signs of a later, flattening brush; the lower part of the drapery has also lost something. But it is the mouth which usually causes the viewer problems. The Madonna seems, as Berenson unkindly stresses, to be toothless. According to de Liphart, who examined the work in 1909, her half-open mouth revealed ‘the presence of her teeth almost imperceptibly drawn on the black preparation beneath’, but these vestiges seem now to have disappeared completely due to oxidization of the varnish.6 The empty window is also problematic. Has something been unaccountably covered over here, or is it an original Leonardian trick? Deprived of the view it expected, the eye turns back with a renewed sense of the interiority of the scene. The high placing of the window gives the couple a sense of sequesteredness. They are not on view to the world: our glimpse of them is privileged. This is reinforced by the absence of eye-contact – neither mother nor child is looking at the spectator; the scene is enacted between the two of them, and is centred on the flower which the child contemplates. This small white flower is not, as is sometimes said, a sprig of jasmine, which is a five-petalled flower (and is represented as such in the Uffizi Leda), but is a member of the four-petalled family known as Cruciferae. According to the botanist William Embolden, it is probably the bitter cress, Eruca sativa, which traditionally symbolized Christ’s passion, both in its cruciform shape and in its bitterness.7 As in the later Madonna of the Yarnwinder, the Christ-child contemplates a symbol of his own future agony. The mother who smilingly proffers the flower does so unknowingly; she is shielded from her tragic future as the child is from his.
The panel (as it originally was) has a story of romantic vicissitudes. Its whereabouts until the early nineteenth century are uncertain, though it may be the Madonna and Child described in 1591 as a ‘small panel in oils from the hand of Leonardo’, which was then in the house of the Botti family in Florence. In the 1820s it unexpectedly surfaced in the Crimean province of Astrakhan. According to one account, it arrived there in the baggage of an itinerant Italian musician. By 1824 it was in the possession of the Sapojnikov family of Astrakhan; it was on this date, according to family records, that it was transferred to canvas by a restorer named Korotkov. The painting was later in France, in the collection of the artist Léon Benois, whose wife was a Sapojnikov. After his death she returned to St Petersburg. The Benois Madonna, as it was now called, was exhibited there for the first time in 1908, and was purchased for the Hermitage by Tsar Nicholas II in 1914.
There are three drawings closely tied to the Benois Madonna – a head of a child in the Uffizi, which catches the infant’s intentness as he inspects the flower; a Madonna and child with a bowl of fruit in the Louvre; and a sheet of studies in the British Museum.8 These in turn lead to other sketches relating to the Madonna and Child (or anyway the mother and child) which belong to this period. A charming and little-known drawing in the Escola de Belas Artes in Oporto has something of the Benois touch; it shows the child sitting on the mother’s lap while she washes his feet in a basin. Until recently this was attributed to Raffaellino da Reggio, a mid-sixteenth-century follower of Taddeo Zuccaro. In 1965 it was identified as a Leonardo by Philip Pouncey, who spotted some traces of Leonardo’s handwriting showing through from the back. As the drawing has been laid down, and cannot be removed from its mount without risk, only part of the Leonardo text on the verso has been deciphered. (In Leonardo’s mirror-world, of course, the words that show through can be read in regular left-to-right form.) It is a vocabulary list. Seven words can be made out, all beginning with a – affabile, armonia, etc. This relates the Oporto drawing to one in Windsor, which shows a plump baby sitting in the crook of his mother’s arms and which also has alphabetical word lists on the verso.9
Also part of this nexus of drawings of the late 1470s is a sketch of the Madonna and child with the infant St John, also at Windsor. This may have been worked up into a full cartoon, or possibly even a finished painting, since the Madonna and child are reproduced almost exactly in a painting by Andrea da Salerno in Naples. In the drawing the three figures are compressed into a pyramid, a compositional device that Leonardo returned to in the St Anne ensemble twenty years later. There is the hint of a landscape behind the figures, which shows his characteristic love of craggy hills already developed. This drawing is the first version of a grouping which resonates through Leonardo’s work – the meeting of Christ and St John the Baptist as children (an episode found only in the Apocrypha). It recurs in the Virgin of the Rocks, and later in the National Gallery cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist. This grouping is rare in Italian art at this time: Leonardo is innovating, or to put it another way, the grouping comes to him from somewhere other than pictorial convention. Recalling the circumstances of his childhood, one might wonder if this recurrent ‘other’ child, this outsider who looks in at the self-completing duo of the Madonna and Christ, has a particular resonance for Leonardo, whose relationship with his mother seems fraught with a fear of rejection.
But the mood of these Florentine mother-and-child studies is not rejection but celebration: the mother dandling, feedin
g, washing and – if the Litta Madonna is truly a part of this group – suckling her child. And most joyous of all is the series of the Madonna and child with a cat. As in the Benois Madonna, there is that emphasis on the youth of the Virgin Mother – the young woman almost still a girl. (One thinks of the teenage peasant Mary in Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew.) These sketches are among the most vibrant of Leonardo’s Florentine works. Their rapidity and compassion make them jump off the page: they belong, in the way that a finished painting does not, to the reality of the moment in which they were sketched. These people are actual presences, in the studio or in a room. There are four pages of very rapid sketches: mixtures of pen, charcoal and metalpoint. The figures intertwine – a ballet of movements – as the intent young man scribbles away, the pen hurrying to capture the momentary truth of their bodies and gestures, of their lives. Then come four more finished studies, one of which is traced through on to its verso, where
Mothers and children, c. 1478–80. Upper left: head of a child, probably a preparatory sketch for the Christ-child of the Benois Madonna. Upper right: the Oporto drawing known as Il Bagnetto. Lower left: sketches of a child with a cat. Lower right: study for a Madonna and child with a cat.
Leonardo experiments with a different position for the head of the mother. The most finished of all, precise and serene, is the lightly washed pen-and-ink drawing in the Uffizi.10
There is no evidence that these marvellous drawings ever resulted in a painting, except in so far as they are stages towards the greatest of his early Florentine paintings, the Adoration of the Magi, where the child reaching out from his mother’s lap is very similar. But the cat has vanished, and with it goes the vibrant, jocular note of the drawings.
THE HANGED MAN
Shortly before midday on Sunday 26 April 1478, a sudden commotion disturbed the celebration of mass in Florence cathedral. As the priest raised the host, and the sanctuary bell tolled, a man named Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli pulled a knife out from under his cloak and plunged it into the body of Giuliano de’ Medici, younger brother of Lorenzo de’ Medici. As he reeled back, Giuliano was stabbed ferociously and repeatedly by another man, Francesco de’ Pazzi: there were found to be nineteen separate wounds on the body. Lorenzo was himself the target of two other assassins in the congregation – malcontent priests – but they bungled the job. Bleeding profusely from a wound in his neck, he was hustled into the safety of the north sacristy. The great bronze doors were locked behind him, though in the scuffle one of his friends, Francesco Nori, was fatally stabbed, also by the knife of Bernardo di Bandino.
This was the day of the Pazzi Conspiracy,11 also called the April Plot, a desperate attempted coup d’état against the rule of the Medici, fomented by the rich Florentine merchant-family the Pazzi, discreetly backed by Pope Sixtus IV, and involving various anti-Medici interests including the Archbishop of Pisa. There are contemporary accounts of the plot by the poet Agnolo Poliziano, who was actually in the cathedral when the attacks happened; by the diarist Luca Landucci, who witnessed the grisly reprisals that followed; and by Florentine historians like Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. The construction of the event which is found in these sources, and which has been handed down to our own day, is either overtly or implicitly pro-Medici, but a recent book by Lauro Martines has opened up other angles. The plotters’ motives were tangled, but there were genuine grievances at the cynicism of Medici power-politics – what Martines calls Lorenzo’s ‘piecemeal usurpation’ of Florence’s much-trumpeted political freedoms by bribery, vote-rigging and pilfering of public funds.12 The assassination of the Duke of Milan a year or so previously was a precedent – the death-blows similarly struck during high mass in the city’s cathedral – and the barbarous execution of his assassins was a portent.
In the confusion at the cathedral the assassins escaped, but the other half of the plan – the taking of the Palazzo della Signoria by a contingent of Perugian mercenaries – had failed, and when Jacopo de’ Pazzi galloped into the piazza shouting ‘Popolo e libertà!’ (‘For the people and freedom!’) he found the doors of the Palazzo barred. The warning bell known as La Vacca was booming from its tower; armed citizens were pouring into the streets; the uprising had failed. Jacopo, the head of the family in Florence, had initially been sceptical about the putsch, which was promoted by his nephew Francesco, head of the Pazzi bank in Rome. ‘You will break your necks,’ he warned the conspirators. He was eventually persuaded, though his prediction proved accurate, and his own neck was among those that got broken.
Now began the bloody reprisal. The grim etiquettes of Florentine public execution were suspended: the first night was nothing less than a mass lynching. According to Landucci, there were more than twenty conspirators hanging out of the windows of the Signoria and the Bargello. A further sixty, at least, died over the next few days. On that first day, as the revenge squads roamed the streets, Lorenzo appeared at a window of the Palazzo Medici, a scarf bandaged around his wounded neck: the vanquisher. According to Vasari, Verrocchio was commissioned to produce three life-sized wax figures of him, dressed exactly as he was at that moment of bitter triumph. No trace of these remains, nor of Botticelli’s portraits of the hanged traitors, for which the painter received 40 florins in mid-July.13 Thus the studios served their political masters.
On 28 April Lorenzo received a discreet visit from Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo’s future patron – the younger brother of the assassinated duke, Galeazzo Maria. Though the latter’s ten-year-old son, Gian Galeazzo, was duke apparent, Ludovico was now the strongman of Milan. It was he who controlled the puppet-strings, and he would retain them, remarkably, for more than twenty years. He brought condolences and promises of support to Lorenzo.
Of the four assassins in the cathedral, three were captured. Francesco de’ Pazzi was hanged on the first night of the conspiracy, and the two priests who had bungled the assault on Lorenzo perished on 5 May – it is said they were castrated before being hanged. The fourth man, the double-murderer Bernardo di Bandino, was cleverer or luckier, or both. In the first confusion after the killing of Giuliano he had hidden, just a few yards from the murder scene, in the bell-tower of the cathedral. Somehow, despite the watch set for him he got out of Florence; he made it to the Adriatic coast at Senigallia and thence took ship out of Italy. He disappeared. But the eyes and ears of the Medici were everywhere, and in the following year came news that Bandino was in Constantinople. Diplomatic representations were made by the Florentine consul, Lorenzo Carducci; envoys were loaded with gifts; and Bandino was seized by the officers of the Sultan. He was brought back to Florence in chains, was interrogated and doubtless tortured, and on 28 December 1479 was hanged from the windows of the Bargello.14
Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli hanging.
Leonardo was there, for the sketch by him showing Bandino’s hanging body was undoubtedly done in situ. The punctilious notes in the top left-corner of the paper record exactly what Bandino was wearing for the occasion: ‘Small tan-coloured berretta; doublet of black serge; a black jerkin lined; a blue coat lined with fox fur [literally ‘throats of foxes’] and the collar of the jerkin covered with stippled velvet, red and black; black hose.’ These notes give an air of reportage to the drawing: a small moment of history is being witnessed. They also suggest that Leonardo intended to work the drawing up into a painting of the sort that Botticelli had produced the previous year. Perhaps he had been commissioned to do so, or perhaps he was just struck by this scene taking place virtually on the doorstep of Ser Piero’s house.15
As the body dangles in its final indignity, with bound hands and unshod feet, Leonardo captures a strange sense of repose. Bandino’s thin face with the downturned mouth has almost a wistful look about it, as if contemplating from this new and drastic vantage-point the errors he had committed. In the bottom left-hand corner Leonardo does another drawing of the head, adjusting its angle slightly, giving to it that tilt of exhausted resignation so often seen in depict
ions of the crucified Christ.
ZOROASTRO
It is time now to rescue from obscurity one of the most curious and engaging figures in Leonardo’s retinue: Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, generally known by the imposing alias of ‘Zoroastro’. He is mentioned by the Anonimo Gaddiano as one of Leonardo’s assistants during the painting of the Battle of Anghiari fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio, and this is confirmed by documents recording payments to him in April and August 1505; these describe him as Leonardo’s garzone, whose job was ‘to grind the colours’.16 This precise mention of him, and the rather lowly status he is accorded, have led most biographers to assume that he was a young apprentice of Leonardo’s in 1505. But in fact he was already part of Leonardo’s circle in Milan in the 1490s – he is mentioned (as ‘Geroastro’) in an anonymous Milanese poem dedicated to Leonardo in about 1498 – and there is other evidence suggesting that their association goes back to this first Florentine period.
Tommaso was born in about 1462, in the village of Peretola, in the flatlands between Florence and Prato. He died in Rome in 1520, at the age of fifty-eight, and was buried in the church of Sant’Agata dei Goti.17 A brief and colourful sketch of his life is found in Scipione Ammirato’s Opusculi, published in Florence in 1637.
Zoroastro’s name was Tommaso Masini; he was from Peretola, a mile out of Florence. He was the son of a gardener, but claimed to be the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, the brother in law of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Then he joined up with [si mise con: literally, ‘he placed himself with’] Leonardo Vinci, who made him an outfit of gall-nuts, and for this reason he was for a long time known as 11 Gallozzolo [‘the Gall-Nut’]. Then Leonardo went to Milan and with him went Zoroastro, and there he was known as Indovino [‘the Fortune-Teller’], since he professed the arts of magic. Later he was in Rome, where he lived with Giovanni Rucellai, castellan of Sant’Agnolo, and then with Viseo, the Portuguese ambassador, and finally with Ridolfi. He was a great expert on mining techniques… When he died he was buried in Santa Agata, between the tombs of Tressino and Giovanni Lascari. On his tomb there is an angel with a pair of tongs and a hammer, striking at the skeleton of a dead man, representing the faith he had in the resurrection. He would not kill a flea for any reason whatever. He preferred to dress in linen so as not to wear something dead.18
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 17