Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  The wedding of Ludovico and Beatrice went ahead as planned, and was celebrated in sumptuous style on 16 January 1491, but Cecilia continued to exert her spell, and a month after the wedding Ambassador Trotti reported that Il Moro had spoken to him ‘in his ear’, and told him ‘he wished he could go to La Rocca [his private apartments at the castle] and make love to Cecilia, and be with her in peace, and this was what his wife wanted too, because she did not want to submit to him’. Apparently Beatrice was refusing to sleep with Ludovico while he persisted in his dalliance with Cecilia. On 21 March, however, Trotti reports that Ludovico has ordered Cecilia away from the castle: ‘He no longer wants to touch her or have relations with her, now she is so big, and will not do so until she has delivered him a son.’ In April she is reported to be living in an apartment in the city provided by II Moro, perhaps again that property in Nuovo Monasterio.

  On 3 May she gave birth to a son. He was christened Cesare Sforza Visconti. The poet Bellincioni rushed out a trio of sonnets celebrating the birth, calling her ‘Isola’ (‘Island’, a pun on Cecilia/Sicilia), and congratulating her on being the vessel which had brought the ‘seed of the Moor to fruition’. The poet’s friendly relations with Cecilia are shown in a later letter, of February 1492, in which he tells Ludovico:

  I dined yesterday morning with My Lady Cecilia, and stayed there till evening, and am her favourite, and I swear to God we had such fun with Signor Cesare, who is nice and fat, I mean fat. And because I guessed he was going to be a boy I know I will ever be in his Lordship’s [Cesare’s] good graces.72

  Alas not so: the plausible rimester was dead by the end of the summer.

  To Bellincioni also we owe the earliest reference to Leonardo’s portrait, in a sonnet addressed, in his usual cavalier tone, to Nature:

  O Nature how envious you are

  of Vinci who has painted one of your stars,

  The beautiful Cecilia, whose lovely eyes

  Make the sunlight seem dark shadow

  ….…

  Think this: the more lively and lovely she is,

  The more glory you’ll get in ages to come.

  Give thanks therefore to Ludovico

  And to the genius and the hand of Leonardo,

  Who both wish to share her with posterity.73

  As far as I know, this is the earliest literary description of a Leonardo painting. It contains the rather acute observation I quote at the top of this chapter: ‘Con sua pictura / La fa che par che ascolti e non favella’ – ‘By his art he makes her look as if she’s listening, and not talking.’ This catches something of the poise of the portrait: her air of attentiveness to something beyond the picture-space. Does it also contain a personal reminiscence of Cecilia – ‘e non favella’: for once she isn’t chattering?

  This is the painting’s backdrop: sex and gossip and poetry at the Sforza court. Like Leonardo’s earlier portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, it is an image of a woman created for the delectation of her lover. But up here in Milan the action is rawer: this is no Platonic crush like Bembo’s for Ginevra, and the portrait of Cecilia has an erotic frisson quite absent from the serene, lunar depiction of Ginevra. The hand caressing the furry animal is a sexual allusion; the fashion accessories – the gold frontlet, the black band, the tied veil, the necklace – suggest the restrained, captive status of the concubine. I am reminded of a passage in the Trattato della pittura, where Leonardo argues that the painter has the same kind of power as a poet to ‘inflame men with love’ – he can make them ‘fall in love with a painting’. He tells this story:

  It once happened that I made a picture representing a divine subject, and it was bought by a man who fell in love with her. He wished to remove the emblems of divinity in order to be able to kiss the picture without scruples. But finally conscience overcame his sighs and desires, and he was obliged to remove the painting from his house.74

  This cannot be the portrait of Cecilia, of course, but the idea of a painting as a kind of love-object, an erotic inducement, is suggestive of it.

  The ermine cradled in the girl’s arms brings a train of symbolic and folkloric associations into the painting. The ermine, Mustela erminea, is the northern variety of stoat whose winter-fur is white (though in the painting the creature’s coat is discoloured by varnish, and appears yellowy-brown). The animal was associated with purity and cleanliness, as in Leonardo’s own ‘bestiary’ compiled in the early 1490s: ‘The ermine, because of its temperance… will rather let itself be taken by hunters than take refuge in a muddy den, in order not to stain its purity.’75 This claim is not original to Leonardo – it is among the many items in his bestiary drawn from his well-thumbed copy of the Fiore di virtù. The ermine also appears as a symbol of purity in Vittore Carpaccio’s portrait of a knight (c. 1510), where a cartouche above the animal reads, ‘Malo mori quam foedari’ – ‘Better to die than to be besmirched.’ This association of purity adds a partly ironic refinement to the portrait: the symbolic in contrapposto with the erotic. Another connection of the ermine is a learned linguistic pun. The Greek word for a weasel or stoat is galé, which puns on Cecilia’s family name of Gallerani: this is parallel to the juniper or ginepro in Ginevra’s portrait. This is the sort of stuff Leonardo liked – or knew that his customers liked – though it seems unlikely that he would have known this rather obscure bit of Greek vocabulary; perhaps he had a bit of help from Ludovico’s secretary, the Hellenic scholar Bartolomeo Calco.

  These meanings play over the ermine, but the creature has a more particular significance. It is an emblematic allusion to Ludovico himself, who in 1488 was invested with the title of the Ermine (‘L’Ermellino’) by Ferrante di Aragona, King of Naples (grandfather of Isabella of Aragon, who was soon to marry young Duke Gian Galeazzo). A sonnet of Bellincioni’s styles Ludovico ‘l’italico morel, bianco ermellino’ (the Italian moor, the white ermine).76 The animal cradled in Cecilia’s arms is thus an emblem of the man to whom she is bound, socially and sexually, and indeed one notes its vigilant eye, and powerfully muscular foreleg, and the claws splayed out against the girl’s red sleeve. As so often, Leonardo renders the emblematic so powerfully that it doubles back into the actual, and one has a sense of the ermine as predator, as it is in nature, and as Ludovico was. It is very likely Leonardo drew the creature from life – ermines were imported to Milan by furriers; there is a letter from a traveller in Moscow promising to send Ludovico’s brother ‘beautiful sables, ermines, bears, and white hares, alive or dead’.77 Stoats and their relatives (weasels, martens, ferrets, etc.) make decorative pets, so the portrait as a whole is not fantastical: it achieves its resonances within an image of almost photographic realism, beautifully lit against a black backdrop.

  Though discarded, Cecilia remained in the Moor’s affections, and as the mother of one of his natural sons she was favoured. She was awarded lands at Saranno, north of Milan, and in 1492 she was married off to a Cremonese, Count Lodovico Bergamini. She created a little salon at the Palazzo Carmagnola in Milan; among those who paid court there was the author Matteo Bandello, who dedicated two of his novelle to her, and praised her wit and learning, and her Latin verses.

  The portrait remained in her possession, and on 26 April 1498 the avid collectionneuse Isabella d’Este wrote to her with a typically peremptory request (though the tone is not unfriendly considering that Isabella was Beatrice’s sister):

  We happened today to be looking at certain beautiful portraits done by Zoanne Bellino [i.e. Giovanni Bellini]; and we began to discuss the works of Leonardo, and wished we could see some of them to compare with the paintings we have here. Recalling that L. V. did your portrait from the life, would you be so good as to send it to me, by this present bearer whom we send for this purpose. As well as serving the purpose of comparison, it will give us the pleasure of seeing your face. As soon as we have studied it we will return it to you.

  On 29 April Cecilia replied that she was sending the portrait,

  though I would send it more wi
llingly if it looked more like me. Your Ladyship should not think this is due to any failings on the part of the maestro, whom I truly believe to be without equal. It is solely because the portrait was done when I was at an imperfect age, and my face has since changed completely, so that if you put the portrait and me side by side, no one would think it was me represented there.78

  This was by no means the last of the picture’s peregrinations. After Cecilia’s death, in 1536, it remained in Milan. In the eighteenth century, according to Carlo Amoretti, librarian of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, ‘it was still to be seen in Milan, in the collection of the Marquises of Bonasana’. He also implied that there were other paintings based on it: a St Cecilia holding a zither, and another in which ‘this renowned lady is painted as she was in the first portrait, done by Leonardo himself in the flower of her youth, but instead of the zither she seems to hold in her hand a fold of her gown’.79 Then, in about 1800, the portrait was bought by the Polish prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, and given to his mother, Isabella. She hung it in her picture gallery, called the Gothic House, in the family estate at Pulawy, near Cracow. It was at this time that the erroneous inscription was added to the top left-hand corner:

  LA BELE FERONIERE

  LEONARD D’AWINCI

  A note by Isabella Czartoryski explains that the picture ‘is supposed to be the portrait of the mistress of François I, King of France. She was called La Belle Ferronnière as she was believed to be the wife of an ironmonger.’ (The idea that Leonardo painted this semi-legendary Frenchwoman has proved tenacious, and the same title is now given – equally erroneously – to another of his Milanese portraits.)

  In 1842 the Czartoryski family were living in exile in Paris, and had the painting with them; it was in Paris for three decades, in their apartments at the Hôtel Lambert, but the French art establishment seems to have known nothing of it. Arsène Houssaye’s exhaustive catalogue of 1869 lists the painting as lost. After the Franco-Prussian War the family returned to Poland, and in 1876 the Lady with an Ermine was exhibited in public for the first time, in the Czartoryski Museum at Cracow. By the early twentieth century it had been accepted and celebrated as an authentic Leonardo, and identified as the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani documented by Bellincioni and others.

  It had a last adventure during the Second World War. Just before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 it was hidden at Sieniawa, with other treasures of the Czartoryski collection – a Rembrandt landscape, a Raphael portrait – but the hiding-place was discovered. The Lady was briefly exhibited at the Kaiser Friedrich Musum in Berlin, and was reserved for Hitler’s private museum (the ‘Führerauftrag’) at Linz, but instead it wound up in the private collection of the Nazi governor of Poland, Hans Frank, at whose villa in Bavaria it was discovered in 1945 by the Polish-American Committee. Thus the fortunes of love and war are etched on this small painted panel of walnut-wood which issued from the studio of Leonardo da Vinci in c. 1489.

  THE MILANESE STUDIO

  By the late 1480s Leonardo had established his own studio in Milan. This was essentially a version of the Florentine studio in which he had himself trained – a bottega or workshop turning out commissioned work under the guiding influence of the maestro. Some of its products, like the portrait of Cecilia, were almost entirely his own work. Others would be mostly painted by assistants working under his supervision, with occasional masterly interventions and corrections from him. This is the sort of set-up described by a visitor to Leonardo’s later studio in Florence, where ‘Dui suoi garzoni fano retrati, e lui a le volte in alcuno mette mano’ – ‘Two of his assistants make copies, and he from time to time puts his own hand to them.’80 Sometimes the assistants were working from an original template by Leonardo, whether a painting or cartoon, and sometimes they were working more freely within an overall style or ‘look’ which was the studio’s trademark. As we have seen, some contracts made a financial distinction between the work of the master and that of his assistants. In a note written in about 1492, and thus referable to the Milanese studio, Leonardo criticizes ‘foolish painters’ who complain that they ‘cannot work up to their best standard because they have not been paid enough’: they should have the sense to ‘keep by them’ a range of paintings, ‘so they can say: this is at a high price, and that is more moderately priced, and that is quite cheap’.81 Presumably the work that was ‘quite cheap’ had a lesser contribution from the maestro.

  In that imagined dialogue between Leonardo and Phidias in Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Sogni (which also discusses Leonardo’s fondness for the ‘backside game’ of homosexuality), Leonardo says, ‘My compositions were admired even when they were later painted by my followers’ – the word used is creati, servants: literally those he has ‘created’. This again refers to studio practice: the use of the master’s work as the prototype for later copies – in some cases, as in the Leda, only the copies survive.

  Another first-hand account comes from Paolo Giovio. He notes how strict Leonardo was about his pupils learning their craft slowly and thoroughly: he ‘would not permit youngsters under the age of twenty to touch brushes and colours, and would only let them practise with a lead stylus’. Giovio also speaks tellingly of the ‘crowd of young men [adolescentium turba] who contributed so much to the success of his studio’. This sounds like a precise evocation – Leonardo’s unruly young entourage: a gang of adolescents.

  We can reconstruct some of the personnel of Leonardo’s first Milanese studio. It would certainly have included Ambrogio de Predis, and perhaps also his brother Evangelista until his early death in 1491. These were his partners on the Virgin of the Rocks, and Ambrogio continues to be linked with Leonardo as collaborator, partner and occasional disputant for another twenty years or so. Two other early assistants were Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco d’Oggiono, both named by Vasari as Leonardo’s ‘pupils’.82

  Boltraffio was born in about 1467, the illegitimate offspring of a wealthy, patrician family. His illegitimacy, which gives him an emotional link to Leonardo, did not mar his fortunes: there hangs over him (rightly or wrongly) a reputation of the rich amateur, one of what Shakespeare called the ‘wealthy curlèd darlings’. On his tombstone in San Paolo in Compito it was claimed that he pursued a lifelong dedication to painting ‘inter seria’, again suggesting amateurism, though what his other more ‘serious’ activities were is unrecorded. Vasari calls him a ‘skilful and discerning artist’, which is faint praise. At his best he is a painter of great poetry and subtlety: see his Madonna and Child in the Poldi Pezzoli museum in Milan, and his Narcissus in the Uffizi. The poet Girolamo Casio, whose portrait Boltraffio painted, described him as the ‘unico allievo’ (‘only pupil’) of Leonardo: not literally, of course, but in the sense of ‘the only true disciple’.83 Marco d’Oggiono was the son of a prosperous goldsmith; the family came from Oggiono in the Brianza region north of Milan, but his father, Cristofero, was established in the city by the mid-1460s, and Marco was probably born there. By 1487 he had his own apprentice, Protasio Crivelli (possibly a relative of Lucrezia Crivelli, whose portrait Leonardo later painted). Like Boltraffio, he enters the aegis of Leonardo’s studio as a trained painter of independent means: they are not apprentices but young associates. Both are mentioned in a memorandum of Leonardo’s concerning the misdeeds of the ten-year-old Giacomo Caprotti, or Salai, who joined the household in the summer of 1490:

  On 7 September [1490] he stole a pen worth 22 soldi from Marco, who was living with me. This pen was silverpoint and he took it from Marco’s study…

  On 2 April [1491], Gian Antonio left a silverpoint pen on top of one of his drawings, and Giacomo stole it from him.84

  These are snapshots inside the walls of Leonardo’s studio – the assistant’s little work-room or studiolo; the silverpoint pen lying on top of a drawing; the kid who steals things whenever he can. Boltraffio’s brilliance with silverpoint can be seen in some extant drawings like his Christ (interpreted by some as a Bacchus) in Turin; this was
a drawing method little known in Lombardy, and was spread through Leonardo’s influence.

  Another early member of Leonardo’s bottega was the enigmatic Francesco Napoletano. Until recently his only certain work was the striking Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist and St Sebastian in the Zurich Kunsthaus, which is signed along the base of the Madonna’s throne. Both the saints show close acquaintance with Leonardo prototypes.85 We now know a little more of Francesco thanks to the archival research of Janice Shell and Grazioso Sironi.86 His name was Francesco Galli; he was born in Naples, at an unknown date, and he died in Venice in about 1501. At the time of his death he was living with a cohabitrix or partner named Andreina Rossini, and had two young children by her; one infers that he was not very old when he died. The date of his death shows that the strongly Leonardesco flavour of his output is not just a later imitation; he was active during the 1490s, imbibing the influence of Leonardo at first hand. He is almost certainly the Francesco Galli named as a designer of minting-dies for coinage in a ducal letter of 8 August 1494; another designer mentioned in the same letter is Leonardo’s colleague Ambrogio de Predis. This places Francesco in the milieu of Milanese portraiture. There were close links between the designing of medals and coins and the painting of portraits: the Lombard portrait convention was the full profile known to art-historians as the ‘numismatic model’.