Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Practical or not, there is a touch of the psychiatrist’s ‘free association’ games in the rebus. His mind is roving between different levels of meaning, between pictures and letters, enjoying the semiotic frissons out of which come strange hybrid meanings. Some of the phrases he comes up with have a certain psychological piquancy: ‘siamo scarico di vergogna’ – ‘we have got rid of all shame’; ‘ora sono fritto’ – ‘now I am done for [literally fried]’. And the psychiatrist might raise a momentary eyebrow at that tiny scribbled self-portrait I mentioned earlier, apropos the lion in St Jerome – the lion in flames = leone + ardere = Leonardo. As a self-identifying pun or hieroglyph it seems rather bleak: the lion, axiomatically noble and powerful, is consumed and destroyed. We seem to be once more in the agitated sphere of the Oxford allegories. Even here, in these courtly quiz-games, we find that words open up chinks of Leonardo’s inner life.

  Also designed for courtly entertainment were Leonardo’s riddling ‘prophecies’, some of which I have already quoted. One of them has what amounts to a stage-direction added to it: ‘Say it in a form of frenzy or craziness, as if from a madness in the brain.’55 They were delivered, in other words, in a kind of mock-oracular ecstasy or furor. An obvious candidate for this performance would be Zoroastro, one of whose nicknames was Indovino, ‘the Prophet’ or ‘Soothsayer’; the word has an overtone of mystic hocus-pocus (cf. indovinello, a riddle) which fits these joke predictions.

  The humour of the prophecies lies in their ingeniously anti-climactic explanations. Mostly they turn on simple little twists of meaning, not unlike the visual puns of the rebuses – those who will ‘walk on top of the trees’ are men wearing wooden clogs, and those who will ‘walk on the skins of great beasts’ are men wearing shoes of ox-leather, and those who will ‘go as fast as the quickest of creatures by means of the stars’ are men using spurs, which are star-shaped. The ‘bodies’ which will ‘grow when the head is taken from them, and diminish when the head is put back’ are pillows. The animal which will be ‘seen with its tongue up another’s arse’ refers to the butcher’s custom of wrapping up pigs’ and calves’ tongues in entrails.56 These are the meanings which the audience has to guess.

  But there is also an element of double-bluff: the prophecies are often pungently expressive little texts, which linger in the mind after they have been explained and deflated. Like the spoof newsletter to Dei, they stray into an imagery of cataclysm and violence. They also express an idea of Nature as the wounded, exploited victim of man’s rapacity:

  There will be many who will flay their mother and turn her skin inside out. [Those who till the land]

  Men will severely beat what gives them life. [Those who thresh grain]

  The times of Herod will return, when innocent children shall be taken from their nurses, and will die with great wounds at the hands of cruel men. [Kids]

  With merciless blows many little children will be taken from the arms of their mothers and thrown to the ground and then torn to pieces. [Walnuts, olives etc.]57

  This ecologically compassionate view of nature is also found in Leonardo’s fables, which were probably also written for recital at court. As far as can be established, the thirty or so fables that survive are original compositions.58 They emulate Aesop, but are not borrowed from him. Leonardo may also have known Alberti’s collection, the Apologhi (not published till 1568, but doubtless available in manuscript). The fables are full of an animistic sense of the landscape as a living thing. It is not only animals that are given a voice, but also trees and plants and stones. They become sentient creatures, capable of feeling pain – a pain constantly inflicted on them by man. A chestnut-tree is envisaged as a protective parent whose ‘sweet children’ – the nuts – are torn from her. The ‘hapless willow’ is ‘maimed and lopped and ruined’. Harvest is wounding. Here is a very short fable about a walnut-tree, almost a gnomic little prose-poem: ‘Il noce mostrando sopra una strada ai viandante la richezza de sua frutta, ogni omo lapidava.’ (The nut-tree by the roadside showed off to travellers the richness of its fruit; everyone stoned it.) 59

  Leonardo liked jokes, and he wrote down a number of them – a conventional activity to which no special significance should be attached: the zibaldoni, or commonplace-books, of the day are full of jokes. The written-down joke must be considered a pale reflection of the told joke. One imagines Leonardo’s delivery of them to be rather deadpan, false-solemn. The pleasantness of his conversation, as enthused over by Vasari, suggests a man who could be verbally entertaining. I have suggested there is also an opposite impression, of a certain taciturnity and aloofness, but for all that, being funny and making people laugh – and laughing himself – was a part of Leonardo’s life. It is perhaps no accident that his most famous painting is known in Italy as La Gioconda – The Jocund [or indeed Joking] Woman.

  Leonardo’s jokes are of variable quality: some of them turn rather tediously on puns, and one or two of them seem to have lost whatever point they had down some lexical cul-de-sac. Some are satirical – particularly anti-clerical – and some are dirty, in what we would think of as a robust, Chaucerian vein. Both the satire and the bawdy have antecedents in the tales of Boccaccio and his imitators, and more immediately in the Renaissance collections of facetiae – pleasantries – pre-eminently those of Poggio Bracciolini, some of which are quite salty.

  Jokes appear scattered throughout Leonardo’s notebooks and manuscripts. Here are a few.

  A man was trying to prove on the authority of Pythagoras that he had lived in this world before, and another man would not accept his argument. So the first man said, ‘As a sign that I have been here before, I remember that you were a miller.’ And the other, thinking this was said to mock him, replied, ‘You are right, for now I remember you were the ass which carried the flour for me.’

  A painter was asked why he produced such beautiful figures, though they were dead things, and yet produced such ugly children. To which he replied that he made his paintings by day and his children by night.

  A woman was washing clothes, and her feet were very red with cold. A priest who was passing by was amazed by this, and asked her where the redness came from, to which the woman immediately replied that it was caused by a fire she had underneath her. Then the priest took in hand that part of him which made him more priest than nun, and drawing near to her, asked her very politely if she would be kind enough to light his candle.

  If Petrarch was so madly in love with bay-leaves it’s because they taste so good with sausage and thrush.60

  This last joke puns on lauro, the bay-tree, and Laura, to whom Petrarch’s love-poems are addressed.

  ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTS

  In 1487 the fabbriceria or works department of Milan cathedral was considering the crowning of the central part of the cathedral with a tiburio, or domed crossing-tower, and Leonardo was among those who submitted designs for this. He constructed a wooden model, with the help of a carpenter called Bernardo, and received small subventions from the fabbriceria to cover the expenses of making the model: there are seven payments listed between July 1487 and January 1488.61 (This circumstance may explain why he used discarded cathedral paper to write his ‘newsletter’ to Benedetto Dei.) Other architects tendering for the job included his friend Donato Bramante.

  A drawing in Paris MS B shows a system of buttresses designed to give a broader base to the drum of the tiburio; the accompanying text describes an experiment to demonstrate the distribution of weight on an arch:

  Let a man be placed on a weighing-device in the middle of a well-shaft, then have him push out his hands and feet against the walls of the well. You will find that he weighs much less on the scales. If you put weights on his shoulders you will see for yourselves that the more weight you put on him, the greater will be the force with which he spreads his arms and legs and presses against the wall, and the less will be his weight on the scales.62

  This elegant if rather dangerous experiment illustrates the property of arches
to distribute weight transversely rather than placing it all on the supporting columns. The spreadeagled figure in the well-shaft makes me think of Leonardo’s famous ‘Vitruvian Man’ – also of Zoroastro, whom I always imagine as the man who steps up to perform this sort of ‘demonstration’; I also imagine him as the test-pilot strapped in to the ornithopter.

  Among Leonardo’s papers is a draft of a presentation speech connected with the tiburio project. It begins with a flourish, ‘Signori padri diputati’ – ‘My lords, fathers, deputies’. Its theme is an analogy between the visual and structural harmonies of architecture and the harmonious balance of the body. In buildings, as in bodies, ‘health is maintained by a balance or concord of elements, and is ruined and undone by a discord in them’. Thus the architect is like a kind of physician:

  You know that medicines, when they are properly used, restore health to invalids, and that he who knows them thoroughly will make the right use of them if he understands the nature of man, of life and its constitution, and of health. He who knows these things thoroughly will know also what opposes them, and will be a more effective healer than any other. This too is what the sick cathedral needs – it needs a doctor-architect, who understands the nature of the building, and the laws on which correct construction is based…

  This analogy is not original to Leonardo: it is found in the writings of Renaissance architects like Alberti and Filarete, and before them in Vitruvius.63 Leonardo develops the theme quite exhaustively in this draft, of which I have only quoted a fraction. Imagined as an actual speech it sounds flannelly, pedagogic, repetitive. One feels this sort of thing is not his forte. Then suddenly he is tired of the performance, and the draft ends with what is almost a linguistic shrug: ‘Choose me or choose another who demonstrates the case better than I do; set aside all sentiments.’

  It is doubtful that the speech was ever delivered. The tiburio project entered the usual limbo of delay, and it was three years before the contract was awarded. Leonardo seems by then to have lost interest: he was not even on the final shortlist.64 The ‘consultation’ was held at the castle on 27 June 1490, with Ludovico and the Archbishop of Milan in attendance. The winning design was by the Lombard architects Amadeo and Dolcebuono.

  Also from this time is a series of designs for ‘temples’ – churches based on a central altar.65 Leonardo could have found examples of these in the architectural tracts of Vitruvius and Alberti, though as this type of church design is particularly associated with Bramante’s later work, there may already have been an exchange of ideas between them. Bramante’s remodelling of Santa Maria delle Grazie (where Leonardo painted the Last Supper) employed a semi-centralized design.

  The temple illustrated here (from one of the pages of MS B stolen by Libri, and now bound separately) is beautifully realized. It has been shown that the ground plan is based on a complex geometrical system called the theta progression. Again there is the influence of Alberti, who recommended ‘natural proportions’ in architecture ‘which are not borrowed from numbers but from the roots and powers of squares’, but again one suspects the personal influence of Bramante, who was undoubtedly more proficient in mathematics and geometry than Leonardo at this stage.66 A note at the lower left of this page shows Leonardo thinking about real churches as well as geometrical progressions. He wonders whether the campanile, or bell-tower, should be separate, as in the cathedrals at Florence and Pisa, where the bell-towers ‘show their perfection on their own’, or whether it should be incorporated into the church, ‘making the lantern serve as the bell-tower as at the church of Chiaravalle’. The medieval abbey of Chiaravalle was a few miles from Milan; Leonardo elsewhere mentions an astrological clock there, which ‘shows the moon, the sun, hours and minutes’.67

  On a folio datable to early 1489 are drawings showing an elevation and ground-plan of a small domed edifice, but this is not a temple or church. The captions identify it as the ‘pavilion of the Duchess of Milan’s garden’.68

  Design for a ‘temple’ based on a central altar.

  This refers to the already existing pavilion in the park of the Sforza castle, described in an account of 1480 as a brick building ‘surrounded by running water and hedges in the form of a labyrinth’; it was probably used as a bagno or bath-house during the steamy Milanese summer. Perhaps the plan to remodel the pavilion was connected with the marriage of the young Duke of Milan to Isabella of Aragon, granddaughter of the King of Naples, in February 1489. A lost folio of Paris MS B may have had another design for the pavilion, and notes for the decor: walls of pink marble, white baths, mosaics with a representation of the goddess Diana, and ‘spouts in the form of eels’ heads for hot and cold water’ – all this on the testimony of the nineteenth-century French biographer Arsène Houssaye, who saw the notebook before its mutilation by Count Libri. A later note about the plumbing of ‘tthe Duchess’s bagno’ probably refers to the same building.69 I include this among Leonardo’s early architectural projects, but the latter note shades towards Leonardo the odd-job man.

  THE MOOR’S MISTRESS

  … Con sua pictura

  La fa che par che ascolti e non favella.

  Bernardo Bellincioni – Sonnet

  The early notebooks buzz with plans and projects which are impressively diverse – diversity is already Leonardo’s trademark – but which are also part of a single plan or project: employment at the court of Ludovico Sforza. The military hardware, the urban planning, the flying-machines, the architectural designs, even the courtly word-puzzles – all these, which today survive fossilized on paper, were part of Leonardo’s bid to become the Moor’s multi-talented tecnico or expert, the ingenious ‘engineer’ in the broadest post-Brunelleschian sense of the word. How far Ludovico responded to all this we don’t know: he was doubtless impressed by the brilliance of the Florentine, but was this translated into specific patronage? Perhaps, like his fellow Florentine Benedetto Dei, Leonardo drew a small mancia – a tip, a dole, an irregular stipend – from the Sforza coffers; perhaps he was given money to develop his ideas for assault-submarines and steam-powered cannon; perhaps he was paid for redesigning the Duchess’s ‘pavilion’ in the castle gardens. It does not add up to much – a reminder of the sour proverb voiced by a Milanese courtier of the day, Tommaso Tebaldi: ‘Chi vive al corte muore al spedale’ – ‘He who lives at court dies in the poorhouse.’70 So the notebooks tell us more, at this stage, about Leonardo’s aspirations and ambitions than about what he lived off. In fact Leonardo’s first identifiable commission from Ludovico himself is not in the realm of engineering or architecture. It is a painting of the Moor’s beautiful young mistress, Cecilia Gallerani.71

  Ludovico Sforza was not a model of depravity like the Duke his brother, but he enjoyed the sexual perks of despotism. He tended to regard his female subjects much as he regarded the harts and hinds of his private hunting-grounds – his for the taking – and, whatever her personal feelings in the matter, any young woman on whom his eye alighted knew this favour to be a passport to a world of comfort and privilege for herself and her family. Cecilia Gallerani was born in early 1473; her father, Fazio, was a public official who had served as ambassador to both Florence and Lucca; her mother, Margherita Busti, was the daughter of a noted doctor of law. Cecilia was a girl of a good but not spectacularly rich family, and as her father died when she was seven years old, and as she had six brothers who took precedence over her, she was only comparatively a child of luxury. She was bright and well educated, and was later a patroness of writers, among them the novelist Matteo Bandello. That she was alluringly pretty could be deduced from many poems and letters written about her, but the deduction is unnecessary because she lives – to borrow the cliché of the time – in Leonardo’s portrait of her, otherwise known as The Lady with an Ermine (Plate 12).

  When she became Il Moro’s mistress is not recorded but can be fairly closely guessed. A document of June 1487 formally releases her from a childhood marriage-contract to Giovanni Stefano Visconti; the l
ikelihood is that Ludovico’s amorous interests lie behind this. She was then just fourteen years old: young, but not unusually so. By the early summer of 1489 Cecilia was no longer living with her family, but in an unspecified property in the parish of Nuovo Monasterio; it is hard to resist interpreting this as a love-nest. In this same year her brother Sigerio killed a man during a dispute, and escaped justice through the personal intervention of Ludovico. On this circumstantial evidence it seems that Cecilia became Ludovico’s paramour in about 1487, though it is not until 1490 that we have incontrovertible evidence of the liaison in the time-honoured form of a pregnancy.

  Though Cecilia’s marriage-plans had proved expendable, Ludovico’s were a weightier matter. Since 1480 he had been pledged, for sound political reasons, to the daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, Beatrice d’Este, and the time was now fast approaching for the marriage to be solemnized: a major dynastic alliance to be celebrated by a major public display of Milanese power-pageantry. On 8 November 1490 the Duke of Ferrara received a rather disconcerting dispatch from his ambassador in Milan, Jacopo Trotti, who reported that Ludovico’s intentions towards ‘la madonna Duchessa nostra’ (i.e. Beatrice) were uncertain, because he was still besotted with ‘quella sua innamorata’ (i.e. Cecilia). ‘He keeps her with him at the castle, and wherever he goes, and wants to give her everything. She is pregnant, and as beautiful as a flower, and often he brings me with him to visit her.’ Perhaps feeling he has warmed a little too much to his theme, Trotti concludes diplomatically, ‘But time, which cannot be forced, makes all things ready’ – even here he cannot resist a slightly overheated pun on Sforza and sforzare, which means also to force sexually.