Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Lines from Dante’s Inferno copied out by Leonardo,

  Windsor fol. 12349v

  MILAN

  Leonardo estimated the journey from Florence to Milan as 180 miles – he always used the pre-metric miglia in computations of distance.1 A modern road-atlas gives it as 188 miles. Taking some broad guidelines from contemporary journeys, an average day’s coverage on horseback was between 20 and 30 miles (two to three stages a day, if you were using post-horses), so we might be talking of a journey of about a week. The typical route lay north over the Apennine mountains to Bologna, the road running parallel to today’s A1 autostrada, and then across the lower reaches of the Po valley to the little city of Modena, part of the Este fiefdom.

  For the zealous student of Leonardo manuscripts Modena has one singular association: it is the subject of a Leonardo dirty joke. There are ribaldries scattered among the notebooks, but this one is particularly frankly delivered. It is a joke, or rather a sarcastic comment, about the high entrance toll charged by the Modenese authorities:

  A man going to Modena had to pay a toll of 5 soldi to enter the city. He made such a fuss and commotion that he attracted various bystanders who asked why he was so astonished. And Maso replied, ‘Of course I’m astonished to find that a whole man can get in here for a mere 5 soldi, when in Florence I have to pay 10 gold ducats just to get my cock in, and here I can get my cock and balls and all the rest of me in for such a trifling amount. God save and protect this fine city and all who govern her!’2

  My translation approximates to the rudeness in the original – thus ‘cock’ for cazzo and ‘balls’ for coghone (i.e. coglioni). The reference is, of course, to paying for sex with a Florentine prostitute. The introduction of the name Maso (‘Tom’) halfway through the story may just be a joke convention of the ‘Right-said-Fred’ sort, or it may indicate that this pungent bit of badinage was spoken by a man known to Leonardo, in his hearing. It could even have been spoken by Tommaso Masini, a.k.a. Zoroastro, on a day in early 1482 as they passed through Modena en route for Milan.

  They travel on through the lowlands of the Po – Reggio Emilia, Parma, Piacenza, and finally Milan, its Gothic spires emerging from the wintry Lombard plain. The Romans called the town Mediolanum (in medio piano, in the middle of the plain). The conquering Lombards garbled this to Mayland, whence Milano. It was a crossroads town that just kept on growing: its site was not strategic, not healthy, not usefully close to any of the rivers – the Po, the Adda, the Ticino – which bound the plain. In winter the climate is wet and misty, and so one imagines Leonardo’s arrival: everything tinged with that muted northerly light which will seep into his paintings.

  Milan in 1482 was a city on the make. The population was around 80,000, somewhat larger than Florence’s, though the city lacked the political and commercial structures which gave Florence its cohesive identity. Milan was an old-style feudal city-state, controlled by a ruling dynasty whose power was muscular and military more than legislative. The Sforza were very recent nobility. A generation earlier, in 1450, Ludovico’s father, Francesco Sforza, had succeeded the city’s previous rulers, the Visconti, and proclaimed himself Duke of Milan. The family name went back only to Ludovico’s grandfather, a farmer turned mercenary, Muzzo Attendolo, who used Sforza as his fighting name (from sforzare, to force or compel). To Romantic historians like Jules Michelet, the Sforza were ‘heroes of patience and cunning who built themselves up from nothing’, but to their contemporaries these soi-disant dukes were ‘uncouth soldiers’.3 This was to the advantage of the now itinerant artist Leonardo da Vinci, since the arriviste was always a hungry patron. Ostentation and display were Sforza bywords: substitute pedigrees. The city had already a gloss of northern sophistication, imbued with Burgundian fashions and German technology. Leonardo had glimpsed this glamour ten years earlier when the Sforza cavalcade had dazzled and scandalized the citizenry of Florence.

  The shape of medieval Milan – the Milan that Leonardo knew in the 1480s – can still be discerned on a modern map, the ellipse of the long-vanished city walls traceable along a series of wide streets which now serve as the city’s inner ring-road. The original walls – built in the late twelfth century, after the destruction of the city by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa, or Redbeard – are to be distinguished from the outer ring of bastioned walls, some portions of which are still remaining (e.g. the Bastione Porta Venezia at the top end of the public gardens). These latter walls were built by the Spanish in the mid sixteenth century, and did not exist in Leonardo’s time. The circumference of the medieval walls was a little over 3 miles – about the same as the extant walls of Lucca – and thus walkable in some three-quarters of an hour. Considering that the population of ‘Lucca dentro’ is today less than 10,000, one sees how jam-packed were the 80,000 of Quattrocento Milan. Ten gates punctuated the walls. Eight of them are specified on a rough sketch-map of the city in the Codex Atlanticus; below it is a rapid bird’s-eye view of the city from the west, showing the castle, the cathedral and the tall pointed tower of San Gottardo.4

  Arriving from the south, the Florentine delegation of Rucellai and San Miniato – with its presumed retinue including Leonardo da Vinci, Tommaso Masini and Atalante Migliorotti – would probably have entered by the Porta Romana. Its marbled frontage was carved with fierce reliefs of ‘St Ambrose driving the Arians out of Milan with a Whip’, and a ‘Man with a Dragon’ (traditionally believed to be a portrait of Barbarossa). The names of the twelfth-century masons who carved the reliefs are signed in the stone: Girardi and Anselmo.5

  Pressing on through the city, passing the massive Gothic accumulations of the cathedral, the delegation would arrive at the forbidding bulk of the Castello Sforzesco dominating the northern flank of the city. Formerly known as the Castello San Giovio, it had been enlarged and fortified by Ludovico’s brother Galeazzo Maria in the late 1460s, moving the power-centre away from the old Castello Visconti next to the cathedral. An anonymous Florentine who saw it in 1480, two years before Leonardo, sums it up as a ‘beautiful and very strong castle surrounded by ditches, covering half a square mile or more, with a walled garden about 3 miles in perimeter’.6

  From the outside the castle is a grim redoubt of darkened red-brick walls. Through the hugely tall entrance-tower, designed by the Florentine architect Filarete, you enter into the hugely wide outer courtyard – size clearly mattered to the Sforza – and thence into the moated-off inner courtyards to the north: on the right the Corte Ducale, used for court functions, on the left the smaller Cortile della Rocchetta, where the Duke’s private apartments were – an inner sanctum, ringed by walls and soldiers. The elegant colonnades added by Ludovico do not lessen the sense that this is a heavily guarded enclave in an era of justifiable paranoia.

  Leonardo, arriving, could not know how much of his life he would spend in this fortress-court, as his relationship with the generous but unpredictable Ludovico ebbed and flowed. He has left his mark, faintly, in the decorated walls and ceiling of the Sala delle Asse, in the north-eastern corner of the

  Leonardo’s sketch-map of Milan, c. 1508.

  castle. Faintly, because the restoration done a hundred years ago involved extensive repainting – you are aware of this inside the room but by chance my first view of it was from outside, round the back of the castle, where the walls are choked with ivy, and hooded crows nest noisily in the ventilation-slits, and through an upstairs window you catch a glimpse of that lush bower of interwoven branches which Leonardo painted there in 1498, and which now conspires with the crows to remind us of the vanity of political power in the face of Nature, ‘the mistress of all masters’.

  Ludovico Sforza by an unknown Lombard artist, from an altarpiece of the early 1490s.

  Arriving in Milan in mid to late February 1482, the Florentines found the city in the throes of the ‘Ambrosian carnival’, a celebration which combined the pre-Lenten carnival with the feast-day of St Ambrose or Ambrogio, the city’s patron saint, on 23 F
ebruary. This is a context which makes sense of Leonardo’s musical entrée into Milanese court society, as stated by the Anonimo and elaborated by Vasari: ‘Leonardo was invited to Milan by the Duke, who was a great lover of lira music… and he outplayed all the musicians who had gathered together there to play.’ We can perhaps imagine some kind of concorso – a contest or competition – as part of the court’s carnival festivities. The likely setting for this would be the state apartments in the Corte Ducale. A later note by Leonardo may refer to a similar occasion: ‘Tadeo, son of Nicholaio del Turco, was nine years old on Michaelmas Eve in the year 1497; he went that day to Milan, and played the lute, and was judged one of the best players in Italy.’7

  Thus, as an entertainer, Leonardo da Vinci enters the world of Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro, the strongman (though not yet, as Vasari calls him, the

  Engraved map of Milan by Josef Hoefnagel, c. 1572.

  Duke) of Milan. This is probably their first meeting, though Leonardo would certainly have seen him ten years ago in Florence, when Ludovico accompanied his brother Galeazzo Maria on that sumptuous state visit. They were exact contemporaries: Ludovico – the fourth legitimate son of Francesco Sforza – was born at Vigevano in early 1452. The nickname Il Moro, ‘the Moor’, is partly a pun on one of his given names, Mauro, and partly because of his dark complexion. He used a Moor’s head on his coat of arms; on a painted wedding-chest he is depicted on horseback escorted by a Moorish halbardier. Another of his emblems, in this pun-mad world, was a mulberry tree (also moro), a reference to Milanese silk-production, which he enthusiastically promoted. When Galeazzo Maria was assassinated, in 1476, Ludovico moved swiftly to isolate the widowed Duchess, Bona of Savoy, and the legitimate Duke, the ten-year-old Gian Galeazzo. As regent he ruled as Duke in all but name. He was ruthless, ambitious and avaricious, of course, but he was also pragmatic and intelligent (at least until his weakness for astrology and augury began to get the better of him), and he was genuinely keen to create a Milanese Renaissance. In the many stereotyped portraits of him, all in profile, he is burly, fleshy, big-chinned. The portrait of him in the Pala Sforzesca or Sforza altarpiece (now in the Brera Gallery) is a study in self-esteem. He might be humming to himself the chorus of a popular propagandist song:

  There is one God in heaven,

  And on earth there is one Moor.8

  On 6 March Bernardo Rucellai dispatched a report back to Lorenzo de’ Medici. He has discussed with Ludovico ‘the project and design of the fortress at Casalmaggiore’; Ludovico has expressed his satisfaction. Perhaps Leonardo’s presence in the Rucellai retinue relates also to this fortification project on the Po. He is here as part of what would today be called ‘technical cooperation’ between Florence and Milan, as well as for his skills as a maker and player of novelty musical instruments.

  For a moment Leonardo is himself a novelty. His music has charmed the Moor’s ear, and his engineering expertise seems useful. It would now be expeditious for him to present to Ludovico that famous ‘letter of introduction’ or ‘prospectus’ he has brought with him, with its tempting list of military hardware – cannons and armoured cars, siege-machines and tunnel-borers and Bailey bridges – which he ‘knows how’ to produce. There are drawings done in Milan which visualize some of these machines, so perhaps Ludovico was interested. The portable cannon or mortar which ‘fires out small stones, almost as if it were a hailstorm’, is found in a drawing of

  Leonardo’s armoured car, c. 1487–8.

  about 1484 at Windsor; on its verso are sketches of a fortified town under bombardment. The armoured car is seen in a drawing in the British Museum of c. 1487–8, and discussed in a note of the same date in Paris MS B, which states that such vehicles ‘take the place of elephants’ – a curiously archaic observation. In these military projects, says Martin Kemp, ‘practical invention, antique precedent and imaginative implausibility are seamlessly mingled’.9

  The appeal of the weaponry outlined in the prospectus, and worked over in later drawings, is perhaps as much psychological as practical. It is a pitch at the ambition, vanity and vulnerabilities of the Quattrocento despot; it is a rhetoric of omnipotence. The superb drawing of an artillery-yard or foundry, with naked dwarfed workers manhandling giant levers and gun-carriages – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis springs to mind – conveys the sense of technological drama and grandeur which is also implicit in these promises: that Brunelleschian frisson. Will the Moor, Leonardo wonders, be the patron who can measure up to his dreams and aspirations? A certain disillusion on this point is evident, for above his drawing of the scattershot cannon he writes a half-sentence: ‘If the men of Milan would for once do something out of the ordinary…’10

  Almost as an afterthought, it seems, Leonardo’s prospectus ends with some reference to his skills outside the theatre of war:

  In time of peace I believe I can give complete satisfaction, equal to any other man, in architecture, in the design of buildings both public and private, and in guiding water from one place to another. Also I can undertake sculpture in marble, bronze or clay, and in painting I can do everything that it is possible to do, as well as any other man whoever he may be.

  Theatre of war. A dramatic drawing of a Milanese ordnance foundry.

  To us it is strange to find Leonardo the painter, sculptor and architect bringing up the rear behind Leonardo the manufacturer of tanks, mortars and bombards. But that is his construction of the situation: a perception of the priorities of Sforzesco Milan, and perhaps also – as Vasari so often says – a mistaken perception of his own gifts.

  EXPATRIATES AND ARTISTS

  Lombardy was a foreign country: they did things differently there. The climate, the landscape, the lifestyle, the language – a German-influenced dialect, heavy on the zs, in which a Giovanni was Zoane and a Giorgio was Zorzo – were new and strange. The musical soirée and the military promises are not enough to suggest (as is often implied) that Leonardo was swept instantly into Milanese court life. He was more than ever an outsider, an expatriate, a beginner-again. This is both an isolating experience and a self-defining one: he will seldom appear in Milanese records without the epithet ‘Fiorentino’ appended to his name. He becomes a Florentine in a way he never was, and never would be, in Florence.

  There was a strong Florentine presence in Milan, and this was probably Leonardo’s milieu in his first months here. The commercial arm of Florentine influence was present in the customary form of the Medici bank. Its headquarters was a large palazzo on what is now Via Bossi, given to Cosimo de’ Medici by Ludovico’s father; you entered through an ornately carved Corinthian arch in which Lombard and Tuscan motifs were diplomatically combined. It was a meeting-place as much as a counting-house – a kind of consulate for itinerant Florentines. The chief Medici agents in Milan were the Portinari family, whom Leonardo certainly came to know. In a memorandum of the early 1490s he reminds himself to ‘ask Benedetto Portinari how the people go on the ice in Flanders’.11

  A well-known Florentine living in Milan in 1482 was the veteran traveller, author and diplomat Benedetto Dei, now in his mid-sixties. He had first visited the city in the late 1440s, and was there when, as he put it, ‘Francesco Sforza took it with his sword in hand.’ He too knew the Portinari, and in 1476 he travelled to France and the Netherlands as their agent. (The same business links presumably account for Benedetto Portinari’s knowledge of Flemish ice-skaters.) Leonardo may have already met Dei in Florence, where he was a friend of the scientist Toscanelli and the poet Luigi Pulci. The latter addressed a sonnet to him, ‘In principio era buio, e buio fia’ (‘In the beginning was the dark, and the dark will always be’ – a provocative parody of Genesis), which caused some scandal. One gathers from it that Dei was of a sceptical turn of mind on matters religious:

  Hai tu veduto, Benedetto Dei,

  Come sel beccon questi gabbadei

  Che dicon ginocchion l’ave Maria!

  Tu riderai in capo della via

  Che tu vedrai le squadre de
’ Romei…

  [Have you seen, Benedetto Dei, how foolish are those hypocrites who kneel and mumble their Ave Marias! You would laugh from the top of the street if you could see the hordes of pilgrims bound for Rome… ]

  Pulci was denounced by the philosopher Ficino for these infamies he had ‘spewed out against God’. All this was in early 1476, around the time of Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra, with its Ficinian overtones. Pulci and Dei – like Antonio Cammelli – represent a spikier, more sceptical mood which seems to have been congenial to Leonardo. Between 1480 and 1487 Dei was more or less continuously in Milan, in the service of Ludovico Sforza. He was now at the apex of his career as a diplomat and reporter: the man who knew everyone and everything, ‘la tromba della verità’ (‘the trumpet of truth’). He collected and distributed news via a network of correspondents that ranged from his family and friends in Florence, whom he encouraged to write weekly, to the powerful dynasties of the Gonzaga, the Este, the Bentivoglio.12

  Leonardo certainly knew this busy, gregarious Florentine, well placed though not always well paid as a political adviser to the Moor. (Dei speaks rather bitterly of having to ‘brave the plague’ in order to obtain his ‘tip’ from Ludovico.) He would have listened with interest to Dei’s tales of his travels in Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and North Africa: there were not many men who could give you, as Dei could, a first-hand account of life in Timbuktu. This interest is evident in a curious text of Leonardo’s, a kind of spoof travelogue or newsletter which begins ‘Dear Benedetto Dei’. It is datable to c. 1487, which was about the time of Dei’s departure from Milan. Its obviously fictive nature suggests an element of parody – Dei was regarded as a teller of tall tales. Its story of giants perhaps recalls the famous Morgante maggiore of Dei’s old friend Luigi Pulci, a book Leonardo is known to have owned.13