Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  To these names can be added Tommaso Masini or Zoroastro, who is probably the ‘Maestro Tommaso’ mentioned in a note of September 1492; he is described as having ‘returned’ to the studio at that date, and was therefore part of it sometime before. And there is the German called Giulio who was a new arrival in March 1493.87 These two were not painters, however, but metalworkers.

  In the draft of a huffy letter to Ludovico complaining about money owed to him (‘It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living…’), Leonardo refers to the financial burden of having supported six dependants for three years: ‘Ho tenuto 6 bocche 36 mesi’ – precisely the language of the catasto, as if this little group of apprentices and assistants were indeed his family.88 The draft, undated, is probably from about 1495. These six bocche, or dependants, he was supporting in the early 1490s might be Boltraffio, Marco d’Oggiono, Francesco Napoletano, Salai, Zoroastro and Giulio the German. (Ambrogio de Predis was a collaborator but not an assistant receiving board and lodging.)

  Later lists show a fairly continuous influx of new apprentices during the later 1490s – Galeazzo, Benedetto, Ioditti, Gianmaria, Girardo, Gianpietro, Bartolomeo.89 Only the last two, who appear on a list of c. 1497, are identifiable. Gianpietro is probably Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, known as Giampietrino, who became one of Leonardo’s most brilliant assistants during the second Milanese period; and Bartolomeo may be Bartolomeo Suardi, the follower of Bramante known as Bramantino. There were also many younger Lombard painters who were profoundly influenced by Leonardo and who are called his ‘disciples’, among them Cesare da Sesto, Bernardino Luini, Andrea Solario and Giovanni Bazzi (a.k.a. Il Sodoma), though none of them can be shown to have actually studied under the maestro. These are the ‘Leonardeschi’, whom Kenneth Clark dubbed ‘the smile without the Cheshire cat’. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo has these later disciples in mind when he has Leonardo say, ‘In the conception and design of religious subjects I was so perfect that many people tried to take the spirit of those figures which I had previously drawn.’90

  From Leonardo’s Milanese studio there emanated a series of courtly portraits and religious paintings of a high quality which doubtless commanded high prices. The portrait of Cecilia Gallerani is one. Three other paintings are also considered wholly or largely Leonardo’s.

  The Musician (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan) is one of the most vivid of the studio portraits (Plate 13). A small half-length panel-portrait in oils, it shows a handsome young man with long, curling, fairish hair under a bright red berrettino. It is Leonardo’s only known portrait-painting of a man, though there are many portrait-drawings in his sketchbooks. The painting was not listed among the pictures of the Borromeo bequest of 1618 which forms the nucleus of the Ambrosian collection. It is first heard of in the catalogue of 1686, where it is described as a ‘portrait of a Duke of Milan’ and is attributed to Bernardino Luini. In 1905 the painting was cleaned, revealing a musical score in the sitter’s right hand, and from this comes the portrait’s customary title.91

  It is often said that the musician portrayed by Leonardo is Franchino Gaffurio, who was choirmaster of Milan cathedral from 1484 until his death nearly forty years later. Compositions by him, for three, four and five voices, are extant in the cathedral archives. He was also a prolific author, one of the first to expound musical theory in vernacular Italian. A note of Leonardo’s about a ‘book of musical instruments’ may refer to Gaffurio’s De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum (1508).92 The musical score in the portrait has mostly disappeared, but a stave can faintly be seen, and the letters ‘Cant. Ang.’. According to Serge Bramly, this refers to a composition by Gaffurio called the Canticum angelicum, but this seems to be a misreading. There was a book of music theory by Gaffurio, Angelicum ac divinum opus musicae, but it was not published until 1508, some twenty years after the probable date of the portrait, and is too tenuous a link to explain the phrase.

  Gaffurio was known to Leonardo, and was the kind of high-ranking Milanese figure who might be expected to sit for a studio portrait, but doubts remain. There are other portraits of him – a painting at Lodi, his birthplace, and a woodcut on the title-page of his De harmonia – and neither of them particularly resembles the man in the Leonardo portrait. There is also the question of his age. The portrait is conventionally dated to the same period as the portrait of Cecilia, c. 1488–90: Gaffurio was then in his late thirties, which seems too old for the musician in the Ambrosiana.

  Another possibility is that the portrait shows a young musician and singer whom Leonardo knew well – his former pupil Atalante Migliorotti.93 In 1490 Atalante performed the title-role of Poliziano’s operetta Orfeo in a performance at Marmirolo, near Mantua, commissioned by Isabella d’Este. It is possible that Leonardo was involved in the production (he later staged a production of Orfeo at Milan), and plausible that he was commissioned to portray the handsome, alert face of its young star. We know he had done so before – that ‘portrait of Atalante raising his face’, probably a drawing, in the list of works of c. 1482. Atalante was about twenty-four in 1490, and seems to me a more likely candidate for Leonardo’s Musician than the cathedral choirmaster and musicologist Gaffurio.

  Parts of the Musician – the paintwork of the tunic, for instance – seem perfunctory. The painting is sometimes described as ‘unfinished’, but this may be the result of an artistic decision of Leonardo’s – a deliberate casualness at the periphery which frames the intensely finished face at the centre. There is a similar question about the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani: is the poor formation of her left hand due to later botching (perhaps in the early nineteenth century, when the inscription was added), or was it purposely left like that by Leonardo? Scarcely delineated, the hand merges into the darkness which surrounds the lit central group of the woman and her four-legged friend; more precisely figured it would have altered the shape and emphasis of the composition. Such blurred or squiggled peripheries were extremely common in drawings, but not in painting, where a uniform finish was conventional. X-ray examination reveals a window in the background, similar to the one in the Benois Madonna; this was later covered with the dark paint of the background, perhaps with the same motive of minimizing distractions. This is a feature of the Milan portraits – soothing, velvety backgrounds against which the foreground figures seem spotlit, as if performing in some subtle metaphorical cabaret or show.

  The sultry full-face portrait called the Belle Ferronnière (Plate 14), now in the Louvre, probably dates from the mid-1490s. It is less engaging and subtle than the Lady with an Ermine, but may belong with it in a particular sub-group of Leonardo’s output – portraits of Sforza concubines. This beautiful lady with her sensual mouth and her direct challenging gaze – unusually focused on the viewer rather than some patch of ether beyond – is almost certainly a portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, the successor to Cecilia Gallerani in the Moor’s extramarital affections. There is independent evidence that Leonardo painted her portrait, and of his extant works this is the most likely to be the result.94 As with Cecilia, the young lady’s pregnancy signalled a change in her status and provides an approximate terminus ad quem for the painting. Lucrezia gave birth to a son, Giovanni Paolo, acknowledged as Ludovico’s, in March 1497. In the same year Ludovico’s wife Beatrice died suddenly, and he entered a period of melancholy retreat: she was sparky and popular, and was loved if not always well treated by the Moor. The painting of Lucrezia, and the poet’s casual reference to her as the Moor’s ‘lover’, are more likely to be before these events, perhaps c. 1495–6.

  The breast-feeding Madonna, known after its nineteenth-century owner Duke Antonio Litta as the Litta Madonna, is a mysterious painting but in many ways a typical studio production. Her head is closely based on a famous drawing in the Louvre, which is certainly authentic Leonardo, but the painting is generally attributed to a Milanese assistant, perhaps Marco d’Oggiono rather than the more idiosyncratic Boltraffio, though it is possible that both had a hand in it.95 How much of the finished painting
is Leonardo’s can only be guessed at. There is a certain cloying sweetness in the big-eyed, full-lipped child which seems inauthentic. Sentiment in Leonardo can hover on the brink of sentimentality – the Madonna of the Yarnwinder is another instance – and this tendency easily becomes a sickliness in Leonardesco works by second-rate followers like Marco d’Oggiono. (His kissing Holy Children at Hampton Court is a glaring example of Leonardesco chocolate-box; one of the children is similar to the child of the Litta Madonna.) The landscape is perfunctory. The goldfinch revealed in the child’s left hand lacks the sprightliness and telling detail which Leonardo would give to it. Only the soft, subtle moulding of the Madonna’s face and neck, and the trademark shimmering of the bambino’s curls, suggests his intervention with the paintbrush. This is a studio piece precisely as observed in that description of Leonardo’s later Florentine studio: ‘Two of his assistants make copies, and he from time to time puts his own hand to them.’

  This sequence of paintings represents the lesser peaks of Leonardo’s output as a painter: a series of commercial productions lit with the maestro’s particular touch or aura. Many other paintings can be plausibly described as the products of his studio if not of his brush. There is Ambrogio de Predis’s beautiful profile portrait the Lady with a Pearl Necklace, sometimes identified as Beatrice d’Este, and his equally striking portrait in the National Gallery, London, showing a young man with gingery hair in the Milanese ‘page-boy’ bob and a coat with a leopard-skin collar, and dated 1494.96 There is Boltraffio’s beautiful Madonna and Child (Poldi Pezzoli, Milan), so Leonardesque in its dynamic dramatic pose, and his glittering, effeminate portrait of Girolamo Casio (so effeminate, in fact, that the seventeenth-century connoisseur Inigo Jones thought it was Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci: Jones read the letters woven on the sitter’s jacket as ‘G.B.’, but in fact they are ‘C.B.’ – probably a reference to Casio’s innamorata, Costanza Bentivoglio).97 There is Marco d’Oggiono’s bland but faithful copy of the Virgin of the Rocks. There are the various Milanese versions of a Salvator Mundi (or Christ the Saviour) which probably refer back to an original Leonardo composition.

  In one case we have a documented contract. On 14 June 1491 Boltraffio

  The Milanese studio. Upper left: Leonardo’s silverpoint study for the Litta Madonna. Upper right: the Litta Madonna, a collaborative studio production of c. 1490. Lower left: Ambrogio de Predis, Lady with a Pearl Necklace, perhaps a portrait of Beatrice d’Este. Lower right: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Madonna and Child.

  and Marco d’Oggiono were commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the Milanese church of San Giovanni sul Muro. The clients were the Grifibrothers, who had endowed a chapel there in memory of their father, Leonardo Grifi, Archbishop of Benevento. The painters were contracted to deliver the altarpiece by the November following (in time for the feast-day of St Leonard, to whom the chapel was dedicated), but failed to do so; it was not finished till 1494. The painting is the Resurrection of Christ with Saints Leonard and Lucy, now in Berlin.98 The upper half is attributed to Marco, and the kneeling saints to Boltraffio. The whole work is shot through with Leonardo influences: the pyramidic composition, the spiralling contrapposto of the risen Christ, the rocky striations of the landscape. The contract describes the two painters as compagni or partners. There is no mention of Leonardo in the document, but we know from the Salai memorandum that both artists were part of the Leonardo bottega in 1491. It is an independent commission within the aegis of the studio, much as Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra was an independent commission within the aegis of Verrocchio’s studio. The agreed fee for the Grifialtarpiece was 50 ducats – not a huge sum (compare the 200 ducats offered to Leonardo and the de Predis brothers for the Virgin of the Rocks in 1483).99 This reflects its status: a workshop production entrusted to the secondary rank of artists within the studio. It is, as Leonardo puts it, ‘quite cheap’.

  THE ANATOMIST

  The earliest datable signs of Leonardo’s interest in anatomy – the first drawings, the first purposeful notes – belong to the late 1480s. These are the outset of one of his most profound achievements. In terms of what he actually contributed – of the difference he made – his work as an anatomist is far more significant than his work as an engineer, or inventor, or architect. He mapped and documented the human body more rigorously and specifically than had been done before; his anatomical drawings constituted a new visual language for describing body-parts, as his mechanical drawings did for machines. There is a certain dogged courage in these investigations, which were beset by taboos and doctrinal doubts, and which depended on the stressful and repulsive procedures of post-mortem examination in pre-refrigeration circumstances. Leonardo’s anatomy exemplifies his belief in practical, empirical, hands-on investigation: a probing and revaluing of the received wisdom of the ancients – Galen, Hippocrates, Aristotle – who were still the mainstay of the ‘medical schools’.

  The orthodox felt that anatomy was a curiosity too far: man was made in God’s image, and should not be stripped down like a piece of machinery. Anatomy reveals what ‘Nature has carefully concealed’, wrote the early humanist Colluccio Salutati, ‘and I do not see how the caverns of the body can be viewed without effusion of tears.’ At least once Leonardo’s activities brought him into confrontation with the Church: in Rome in 1515 an ill-wisher ‘hindered me in anatomy, denouncing it before the Pope and also at the hospital’.100

  Leonardo’s anatomical studies belong under the heading ‘Leonardo the scientist’, but are also vitally connected with Leonardo the artist: they bridge the gap between those roles, or show that it is not really a gap at all. Anatomy was one of the building-blocks of painting, like geometry and mathematics. Beneath an anatomical drawing showing the nerves of the neck and shoulders Leonardo writes, ‘This demonstration is as necessary to good draughtsmen as is the origin of words from Latin to good grammarians.’101 One thinks of the Last Supper with its taut, twisting, tensing neck-muscles expressing the drama of the moment. His interest in anatomy thus arises – like the slightly later interest in optics – as a corollary to his work as a painter, and perhaps more particularly to his role as a teacher of painting to the pupils and apprentices of his Milanese studio. Here dawns the ideal of the ‘painter-philosopher’, whose art is based on a profound scientific knowledge of everything he depicts; here begin the painstaking tracts and treatises later incorporated into his great posthumous handbook, the Trattato della pittura. For the early biographers this programme was a mixed blessing: Giovio had no doubt that Leonardo’s small output as an artist was due to his time-consuming study of the ‘subordinate branches of his art’, chief among them anatomy and optics. Vasari too regarded these investigations as tangential and ultimately debilitating.

  Leonardo would probably have studied anatomy under Verrocchio. The Florentine figurative style of the 1470s – Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s paintings, Verrocchio’s sculptures – was strong on anatomical detail and drama. Pollaiuolo made detailed studies of human musculature, apparently from dissections, before producing the famous Battle of the Nude Men.102 Leonardo would have known of, and perhaps known, the Florentine anatomist Antonio Benivieni, a friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Benivieni studied the functions of the heart and other internal organs, but his chief interest was dissecting corpses after execution, looking for anatomical indices of criminal behaviour. His treatise De abditis causis (Of Hidden Causes) reports his findings after twenty such dissections.

  There may be other Florentine sources to consider, but it is here in Milan that the interest in anatomy surfaces powerfully. In 1489, in fact, Leonardo was planning a ‘book’ – a manuscript treatise – on the subject. There is written evidence of this: vestigial drafts and contents-lists, one of them dated 2 April 1489. Leonardo later gave this projected book or treatise the title De figura umana (Of the Human Figure), again suggesting the link between anatomy and painting.103

  In 1489 the thirty-six-year-old Leonardo contemplated that
universal symbol of mortality, a human skull. On three sheets now at Windsor he drew eight studies of the skull – profiles, cross-sections, views at oblique angles from above.104 The drawings are delicate, beautifully shaded and rather eerie. Different studies select different details – one shows the blood-vessels of the face; another shows the relation between the orbit and the maxillary antrum (eye-socket and jawbone); another peers down into the empty cranium and traces the intercranial nerves and vessels. But the chief interest, as shown in the accompanying notes, is less scientific than metaphysical. One of the studies shows the skull squared for proportion, and beside it Leonardo writes, ‘Where the line a–m is intersected by the line c–b, there will be the confluence of all the senses.’

  This ‘confluence of the senses’ he is trying to pinpoint is the sensus communis postulated by Aristotle. It was the part of the brain where sensory impressions were coordinated and interpreted. It was described as the most important of the brain’s three ‘ventricles’, the others being the imprensiva, where raw sensory data were gathered, and the memoria, where the processed information was stored. ‘Ventricle’ suggests merely a place or cavity, but the sensus communis was active as well. In a computer analogy it was the CPU or central processing unit: both a physical entity and a metaphysical system. In some notes contemporary with the skull studies, Leonardo defines the classical theory thus:

  The common sense is what judges the things given to it by the other senses. The ancient speculators concluded that man’s capacity to interpret is caused by an organ to which the other five senses refer everything… They say that this common sense is situated in the centre of the head between the zones of impression and memory.