Another Florentine in the Moor’s service was Piero di Vespucci. He had been clapped up in the Stinche after the Pazzi Conspiracy, charged with abetting the flight of the conspirators, though more probably because he was an old enemy of Giuliano de’ Medici. The enmity stemmed from Giuliano’s courtship of Simonetta Cattanei, who was married to Piero’s son Matteo. In 1480 Vespucci was ‘restituted in all his rights’, but chose rather the dignity of exile.14 Ludovico welcomed him, and made him a ducal councillor, but in 1485 he was killed in a skirmish in the neighbouring town of Alessandria.
Bankers, diplomats and exiles: these men constitute an inner circle of Florentine influence at the court of the Moor, and would have been useful contacts for Leonardo. Another was Bartolomeo Calco, a distinguished Florentine Hellenist scholar, whom Ludovico appointed as his secretary, as part of his drive to ‘purify the coarse speech of the Milanese’. There are implications of intellectual snobbery in this phrase, and perhaps the Florentines’ presence was resented by the home-grown courtiers. A later Florentine protégé was the gossipy rimester Bernardo Bellincioni, whom Leonardo had known in Florence, though he was probably not in Milan until about 1485.
Artistically Milan was an eclectic mix. As a crossroads city, it sucked down influences from the north – German, French, Burgundian, Flemish – as well as those of neighbouring artistic centres like Venice and Padua. The city was full of Franco-German masons and sculptors, whose Gothic-influenced work adorned the cathedral. The chief engineer in charge of the cathedral works in the early 1480s was a German, Johann Nexemperger, from Graz. This mix of influences impeded the development of an identifiable local style, but in the new Sforzesco era of ostentation and aspiration there was plenty of artistic business. In 1481 the Milanese painters’ confraternity, the Scuola di San Luca, had some sixty members.
The greatest artist working in Milan in 1482 was another immigrant, though he came from the rougher country of Le Marche east of the Apennines. This was the painter and architect Donato Bramante. He became a good friend of Leonardo, who refers to him in a note as ‘Donnino’, and it seems likely that this friendship was formed early on. Bramante was born near Urbino in 1444: he was eight years older than Leonardo. As a youth he perhaps met the great Alberti at the Urbinese court of Federico da Montefeltro. He lived an itinerant life as a painter before settling in Milan in the 1470s. In 1482 he was working on his first major architectural commission, the oratory of Santa Maria. He was esteemed by the Milanese court poets, and himself wrote spirited satirical squibs. Vasari describes Bramante as a kind and genial figure, and also mentions his fondness for playing the lute. He is portrayed by Raphael in the School of Athens fresco and in a chalk drawing now in the Louvre: these much later images show a strong, round-faced man with scanty, dishevelled hair.15
Among the local artists prominent at this time were the Brescia-born Vincenzo Foppa, who had absorbed the influences of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, and whose mastery of a certain shimmery, silvery light seems to anticipate Leonardesco light-effects, and younger artists like Ambrogio da Fossano (known as Il Bergognone – ‘the Burgundian’), Bernardino Butinone, and Bernardo Zenale. But the local artists most closely associated with Leonardo’s first years in Milan were the de Predis family, two of whom are documented as his colleagues or partners in early 1483.
The de Predis studio was a thriving family concern: four brothers were active. The eldest, Cristoforo (who is described in documents as mutus, a mute), worked chiefly as an illuminator, producing wonderfully detailed miniatures in the manner of the Flemish masters. Leonardo’s particular relationship – one that lasted many years – was with Cristoforo’s younger half-brother Ambrogio, born in about 1455. He began his career in Cristoforo’s studio; his earliest documented works, c. 1472–4, are miniature illuminations in a book of hours for the Borromeo family. He later worked with another brother, Bernardino, at the Milanese mint. By 1482 he had begun to make his mark as a portrait painter; in that year the Duchess of Ferrara gave 10 braccia of satin to ‘Zoane Ambrosio di Predi da Milano dipintore de lo Ill. Sig. Ludovico Sforza’. He was thus already ‘painter to Ludovico’ at the time of Leonardo’s arrival, probably specializing in portraits, at which he excelled.16
Leonardo soon came to know this well-connected family of artists, and in the contract of April 1483 for the Virgin of the Rocks he is a partner of Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis. It is a mutually useful partnership – Leonardo is the older and artistically senior, but the de Predis have the contacts and the clientele. In the contract, Leonardo is styled ‘master’, while Evangelista and Ambrogio appear without title. He appears to be lodging with them, or anyway near them, for all three have the same address: ‘the parish of San Vincenzo in Prato intus’. The early Romanesque church of San Vincenzo in Prato lay just outside the south-western stretch of the walls, near the Porta Ticinese. The part of the parish designated ‘intus’ – within the walls – would be the area now bounded by the Piazza della Resistenza and the Circo Torcio. Here Leonardo was lodging in the early months of 1483, with Zoroastro and Atalante Migliorotti in attendance and the de Predis workshop at his disposal.
THE VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS
The tangible product of Leonardo’s association with the de Predis brothers is the beautiful and mysterious painting known as the Vergine delle Rocce, or Virgin of the Rocks (Plate 11). Part of the mystery is intrinsic – the mood elusive, the tone crepuscular, the iconography hermetic – but the painting is also historically mysterious. It is extensively documented, but the story the documents tell is tangled and contradictory. The painting exists in two distinct versions, similar but not identical, whose exact relationship is debated. The consensus view is that the version in the Louvre is the earlier, c. 1483–5, and is essentially pure Leonardo, while the version in the National Gallery, London, was painted later, by Ambrogio de Predis and Leonardo, though how much later depends on one’s interpretation of the documents.
The beginning, at any rate, seems clear enough. The painting was commissioned by a contract dated 25 April 1483, drawn up by a notary named Antonio de’ Capitani.17 This document, recovered from the archives a century ago, is the earliest record of Leonardo’s presence in Milan. The contract is between Leonardo – ‘magister Leonardus de Vinciis florentinus’ – and Evangelista and Ambrogio de Predis on the one hand and a religious group called the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception on the other. The commission is for an ancona (an altarpiece with a curved top) to adorn the Confraternity’s chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande. This was a prestigious contract: San Francesco Grande, founded by the Visconti in the early fourteenth century, was the biggest church in Milan after the Duomo. (It was destroyed in 1576; the site is now filled by the Garibaldi Barracks.) The Confraternity, for all its holy trappings, was a tight-knit club of rich Milanese families: the Corio, the Casati, the Pozzobonelli, et al.
The artists were to produce three painted panels – a central panel 6 feet tall and 4 feet broad, and two smaller side-panels. The dimensions were specified because the paintings were to fit into an existing wooden frame, an elaborate piece by the intagliatore Giacomo del Maino, carved with figures in bas-relief. The painters also undertook to colour and gild the frame, and to do any repairs to it that might be needed. We can guess the likely division of labour: Evangelista, whose known career is confined to miniaturist work, would decorate the frame; the court painter Ambrogio would do the two side-panels; and the centrepiece would be entrusted to the Florentine maestro.
The deadline was the following 8 December, the feast-day of the Immaculate Conception: a tight delivery time, less than eight months away. The fee offered was 800 lire, though the schedule of payments seems unfavourably leisurely. The painters were to receive a down payment of 100 lire on 1 May 1483, then 40 lire a month from July 1483. As the painting was due for delivery in December 1483, over half their payment would be in arrears. This contract has the same grudging sound to it as Leonardo’s contract with the fri
ars of San Donato for the Adoration.
*
This is the beginning of the story, but from this moment of absolute clarity – a dated document, a comprehensible agreement – the matter swiftly goes off into more familiar Leonardian mists of uncertainty.
The Virgin of the Rocks is undoubtedly the painting that resulted from this commission, but it is oddly divergent from the client’s specifications. According to the contract, the central panel was to show the Madonna and Child surrounded by a troupe of angels and two prophets, while the side-panels were to feature four angels each, singing or playing musical instruments. Apart from the Madonna and Child, none of these requirements is met by the Virgin of the Rocks, which has one angel, no prophets, and an unstipulated infant St John; the side-panels are also deficient, having only one angel each.
One possible reason that has been advanced is that Leonardo was already working on the painting, or some version of it, and that he carried on with this composition regardless of the details of the contract. Kenneth Clark believed that the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks was actually begun in Florence, as he also proposed for the Litta Madonna.18 It is true that the painting has a Florentine feel: in the prettiness of the face, the movement of the head, and the long ringletted hair, the Madonna and the angel are still Verrocchiesque. But this is to be expected anyway – indeed it would be expected by the Milanese clients, who were choosing Leonardo precisely because they wanted something in the sophisticated Florentine manner. The later, London version of the painting has a very different mood. It is more austere; the faces have a pale, waxy sheen; it has a flatter, sadder, more reclusive beauty. If the Paris version is crepuscular in tone, this one has the harder edge of moonlight. The addition of haloes – rigorously absent from the first version, as from almost all Leonardo’s Florentine Madonnas – looks like a doctrinal requirement from the Confraternity.
The relationship between these two works is still mysterious, and the mystery is not much illuminated by a series of later legal documents on the subject, mostly disputatious, the latest of which dates from 1508, twenty-five years after the original commission. These show that the painters had indeed delivered the work, in about 1485, but that there were disagreements over the payment. These remained unresolved, and in about 1492 Leonardo and Ambrogio de Predis addressed a supplica to Ludovico Sforza, seeking his help in getting payment from the Confraternity.19 The painting is described, with that marvellous reductiveness of the legal document, as ‘la Nostra Donna facta da dicto florentino’ – ‘the Madonna done by the said Florentine’. We learn that they had asked for a conguaglio, or adjusted payment, of 1,200 lire, claiming that the 800 lire they had received, as per the contract, had barely paid for the work on the frame alone. The Confraternity had responded by offering them a paltry 100 lire. They now ask for a fairer payment, or instead for permission to take back the painting, for which they have been offered payment elsewhere. This mention of another potential purchaser for the painting may hold a clue. Was the interested party none other than Ludovico himself, and was the Virgin of the Rocks the unnamed pala or altarpiece which he sent as a wedding-present to Emperor Maximilian in 1493, on the occasion of his marriage to Ludovico’s niece Bianca Maria? A comment in the earliest Leonardo biography of all, the brief sketch in the notebook of Antonio Billi, may suggest that it was: ‘He did an altarpiece for Lord Lodovico of Milan, which is said to be the loveliest painting you could possibly see; it was sent by this Lord into Germany, to the Emperor.’ The Virgin of the Rocks is the only altarpiece he is known to have painted in Milan. It was not actually ‘done for’ Ludovico, as Billi has it, but it may well have been purchased by him from the Confraternity in 1492 or 1493, and sent as a gift to Maximilian. The presence of Ambrogio himself at the imperial court in Innsbruck at this time lends further credence to this.20
The removal of the painting to Germany might also explain how it ended up in the Louvre. Some of the Louvre’s Leonardos arrived in France with Leonardo himself, in 1516, but there is no indication that the Virgin of the Rocks was one of them. It could plausibly have migrated from the Habsburg collection to France in or after 1528, when Maximilian’s granddaughter Eleonora married François I, and thence to the Louvre. The painting was certainly in France by 1625, when it was seen at Fontainebleau by Cassiano dal Pozzo.
The concomitant of this theory is that it furnishes a specific reason for the second version of the painting: the London version. It is a substitute, a copy painted for the Confraternity to replace the painting sent off to the Emperor. In this scenario, the London version would have been begun sometime between 1493 and 1499, the date of Leonardo’s departure from Milan, and it would be this painting, rather than the Paris version, which is referred to in the later litigations of 1503–8. This sort of date would be supported by the beautiful red-chalk drawing of an infant in profile in Windsor, which is exactly in the position of the Christ-child in the London version, and has a drawing-style typical of the mid-1490s.21
The Virgin of the Rocks is one of Leonardo’s most enigmatic paintings. The eye is immediately drawn to that extraordinary ballet of hands in the foreground – the hand of the mother which shelters, the hand of the angel which points, the hand of the child which blesses.
Christ-child and angel from the London Virgin of the Rocks (left), and study in red chalk for the head and shoulders of the child.
For the rocky landscape which gives the painting its name there are possible antecedents in Filippo Lippi’s Nativity, now in Berlin, and Mantegna’s Adoration of the Magi, painted in the early 1460s for the Gonzaga of Mantua. These both imagine the site of the Nativity as a little cave in the rocks. However, Leonardo’s painting shows the meeting of the infant Christ and St John, which traditionally took place during the Holy Family’s flight from Egypt. (The meeting is not in the Bible, but is found in the apocryphal gospel of St James.) The rocks are an image of wilderness and desert (the latter in the Renaissance sense: an uninhabited or deserted place).22 There is the hint of a narrative in this stillest of paintings: the family have been travelling, they are resting, dusk is falling; they will sleep here in this tough but sheltering recess. I have already mentioned the motif of the cave or caverna, found in that compelling text of c. 1480 now in the Codex Arundel: the painting shows precisely ‘some marvellous thing’ within the gloom of the cave. We have a sense, as we look at it, of revelation. We are positioned somewhat like the narrator in that text, who has ‘wandered some way among sombre rocks’, and now stops short: ‘I came upon the mouth of a huge cavern, in front of which I stood some while, astounded…’
This interplay of the natural setting and the devotional image disclosed within it is underscored by a range of beautifully realized wild flowers with symbolic religious attributes. To the right of the Virgin’s head is the columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris), whose popular name suggests the dove (colomba) of the Holy Ghost, and just above her right hand is a species of galium known in English as Our Lady’s Bedstraw and traditionally associated with the manger. Below the foot of the infant Christ are cyclamen, whose heart-shaped leaves make it an emblem of love and devotion, and by his knee is a basal rosette of primrose, an emblem of virtue (as in Verrocchio’s sculpture of the Woman with a Bunch of Flowers). Another familiar plant, seen below the kneeling St John, is the acanthus (Acanthus mollis), traditionally planted over graves, and considered a symbol of the resurrection because of its rapid growth of brilliant glossy green leaves in spring. Also in the painting, in the cornices of the rock, is the hypericum, or St John’s wort, its small dots of red on yellow petals representing the blood of the martyred St John.23 These symbolic associations were part of a visual vocabulary shared by the painter and the more cultivated of his spectators, but here the exactitude and empathy of the painting insist also that these are real plants, and that what we are seeing is material Nature – rocks and stones and vegetation – spiritually transmuted. The central figure of the scene is the Madonna to whom the Confraternity of the Immacul
ate Conception make their obeisances, but she is also in some measure that female personification of Nature – ‘the mistress of all masters’ – to whom Leonardo was more particularly devoted.
WAYS OF ESCAPE
In 1485 Milan was in the midst of a three-year epidemic of bubonic plague. Leonardo had had some experience of the plague in Florence: there was an outbreak there in 1479, but it had subsided after a few weeks. This was far worse. According to some estimates, possibly exaggerated, it killed nearly a third of the urban population. We know the imagery: the ravaged neighbourhoods, the foggy air, the corpses carted off to mass burials. Hysterical rhetoric from the pulpits. Fraught self-examination in search of the glandular swellings or ‘buboes’ which are the tokens of infection. On 16 March 1485 there was a total eclipse of the sun, ominously interpreted. Leonardo viewed it through a large sheet of perforated paper, as recommended in a brief note headed, ‘How to watch the eclipsed sun without damage to the eyes’.24
All through this epidemic Leonardo was working on the Virgin of the Rocks: there is no reason to assume he was anywhere else than Milan, in the de Predis studio near the Porta Ticinese. We know Leonardo’s fastidiousness: a man with the scent of rosewater on his fingers. The foul smells assail him, as do the teeming crowds and the infections they carry in his own words, ‘this congregation of people herded together like goats, one behind the other, filling every corner with stench and spreading pestilence and death’.25 The painting is a charmed space from which all this is excluded: a cool stony grotto miles away from anything, conferring the benedictions of the wilderness.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 24