Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  It was certainly the Horse which was associated in people’s minds with Leonardo’s tenancy of the Corte. The Milanese court poet Baldassare Taccone writes stirringly:

  Vedi che in Corte fa far di metallo

  Per la memoria di padre un gran colosso

  [See in the Corte how he [Ludovico] is having a great colossus made out of metal in memory of his father.]120

  And in his famous eyewitness account of Leonardo at work on the Last Supper Matteo Bandello speaks of seeing Leonardo ‘leaving the Corte Vecchia, where he was working on his marvellous clay horse’.121

  But it was not only the horse that required such space – there was also the ornithopter or flying-machine. A tantalizing page of the Codex Atlanticus has rough sketches showing a wide-spanned flying-machine, and a ladder leading up to it, and a note which reads, ‘Close up the large room above with boards, and make the model large and high. It could be placed up on the roof above, which would be in all respects the most suitable place in Italy. And if you stand on the roof, on the side where the tower is, the people on the tiburio won’t see you.’122 This is clearly the roof of the Corte Vecchia – close enough to the tiburio of the Duomo to be seen by the men at work up there. The tower which serves to conceal his activities from them would be either a tower of the Corte itself or the bell-tower of the adjacent church of San Gottardo, which had served as the Visconti’s chapel when the Corte was their palazzo. The presence of workmen on the tiburio would be more probable after 1490, when the building of it began.

  Leonardo may have actually tested a flying-machine in Milan. The mathematician and philosopher Girolamo Cardano, who thought Leonardo an ‘extraordinary man’, states unequivocally that he ‘tried to fly, and failed’. Cardano was born in nearby Pavia in 1501; he was twelve when Leonardo left Milan for the last time. He may be recording some personal knowledge.123

  It would also be the Corte Vecchia referred to in a note about fossils in the Codex Leicester: ‘In the mountains of Parma and Piacenza are to be found a multitude of shells and corals. When I was making the great horse in Milan, a large sackful of them was brought to me in my factory by some peasants.’124 The word Leonardo uses is fabbrica, which gives a sense of size and activity: a factory, or indeed a complex organization of specialist workers like the fabbriceria or works department of the cathedral nearby.

  So this was now Leonardo’s home in Milan – a grand but rather aged palazzo, with colonnaded courtyards and draughty corridors, situated on the edge of the Piazza del Duomo. Here were his hangar-like workshops for the Horse and the flying-machine, his studio turning out court portraits and comely Madonnas, his study full of notebooks and manuscripts, the little rooms or studioli of his assistants, his laboratory for Zoroastran experiments, his shelves and chests and curios, his larders and stables, his cupboards full of pewterware – the 11 small bowls, 11 larger bowls, 7 dishes, 3 trays and 5 candlesticks carefully inventoried in a notebook of the early 1490s.125

  There is a makeshift element to his accommodation – a disused Italian palazzo is not a homely place – but one knows also of Leonardo’s desire for cleanliness and order, his domestic fastidiousness. On a folio dated 23 April 1490, and therefore quite possibly written at the Corte, he says, ‘If you want to see how a person’s soul inhabits his body, look at how his body treats its daily abode; if the latter is disordered, so the body will be kept in a disordered and confused way by the soul.’ In another text written around this time he envisages the painter at work in ‘his dwelling full of charming pictures, and well-kept, and often accompanied by music or readings of various fine works’.126 One hears for a moment the tune of a lira da braccio floating out into the courtyard. This is an idealized picture, of course. It omits the carpenter who wants paying, the courtier inconveniently dropping by, the missing silverpoint pens, the dog scratching its fleas in the corner – the daily life of this busy, flourishing studio which is his creation and his livelihood.

  PART FIVE

  At Court

  1490–1499

  When Fortune comes grasp her with a firm hand – in front, I tell you, for behind she is bald…

  Codex Atlanticus, fol. 289v

  THEATRICALS

  The new decade dawned auspiciously with a theatrical entertainment to celebrate the recent wedding of Duke Gian Galeazzo to Isabella of Aragon.1 It was a masque or operetta entitled Il Paradiso – words by Bernardo Bellincioni, set and costumes by Leonardo da Vinci. It was performed in the Sala Verde of the castle on the evening of 13 January 1490 – the earliest documented piece of theatre in which Leonardo was involved.

  Gian Galeazzo was now twenty years old, a pale, studious, melancholy young man: his relationship to his overbearing uncle Ludovico can be seen graphically in a document bearing both their signatures. Isabella of Aragon, a year younger, was his beautiful royal cousin: her father, Alfonso, was heir to the kingdom of Naples; her mother was Ludovico’s sister Ippolita Maria. Isabella’s beauty was much commented on: she was ‘so beautiful and radiant that she seemed like a sun’ said the Ferrarese ambassador Jacopo Trotti (whose appreciation of such matters we hear also in his comments about Cecilia Gallerani). An exquisite red-chalk drawing by Leonardo’s assistant Boltraffio is traditionally said to portray her.

  In the first edition of Bellincioni’s poems, published posthumously in Milan in 1493, the text of Il Paradiso is introduced as follows:

  The following operetta was composed by Messer Bernardo Belinzon for a festivity or rather representation called Paradiso, which was done at the request of Lord Ludovico in praise of the Duchess of Milan, and it was called Paradiso because there was made for it, with the great genius and skill of Maestro Leonardo Vinci the Florentine, a Paradise with all the seven planets orbiting round. The planets were represented by men having the appearance and costume described by the poets, and these planets all speak in praise of the said duchess Isabella, as you will see when you read it.2

  Reading between the lines of this blurb it seems that Leonardo’s visuals were the memorable thing about the show, rather than the perishable poetics of Master Belinzon or Bellincioni, and fortunately we have an eyewitness account from the observant Ambassador Trotti.

  Red-chalk portrait by Boltraffio, believed to show Isabella of Aragon.

  The hall was draped with festoons of evergreen foliage; the walls covered with silk. On one side was a sloping stage, 40 feet long, covered in carpets, and below it a lower stage for the musicians. On the other side was the ‘Paradise’ itself, veiled behind a silk curtain until the moment of revelation. The evening began at eight; the musicians – pipes, trombones, tambourines – struck up a Neapolitan tune in honour of the radiant young Duchess, who danced beautifully. There followed a series of pretended ‘embassies’ to her, each a pretext for dances and masques: Spanish and Turkish, Polish and Hungarian, German and French. It was nearing midnight when the actual rappresentazione began. The lights went down, the silk curtain was drawn back and there was the Paradise:

  Il Paradiso was made in the shape of a half egg, which on the inner part was all covered with gold, with a very great number of lights, as many as stars, and with certain niches [fessi] where stood all the seven planets according to their degree, high and low. Around the top edge of this hemisphere were the twelve signs [of the Zodiac], with certain lights behind glass, which made a gallant and beautiful spectacle. In this Paradiso were heard many songs and many sweet and graceful sounds.3

  A collective gasp at this shimmering apparition, and then the annunziatore steps forward – a boy dressed up as an angel, as in the Florentine sacre rappresentazioni familiar to both Bellincioni and Leonardo – to begin the show.

  Il Paradiso shows us Leonardo the courtly spectaculist, the special-effects man. It was the multimedia extravaganza of its day – physically constructed out of wood and cloth, transformed and animated into something ethereal by a combination of colour, lighting, music, ballet and poetry. The show was reprised later in the year for another hi
gh-society wedding. In the notebooks a few brief snatches are all that remain – a sketch showing ‘white and blue cloths woven in chequers’ to ‘make a heaven in a stage set’, and a list of expenses including ‘gold and the glue to affix the gold’, and 25 pounds of wax ‘to make the stars’.4

  Almost exactly a year later Leonardo was involved in the joint nuptial celebrations of Ludovico’s wedding with Beatrice d’Este and that of his niece Anna Sforza with Alfonso d’Este (Beatrice’s brother). As part of the festivities a joust was organized by Galeazzo Sanseverino, the dashing young captain who was now the Moor’s son-in-law (he had married Ludovico’s illegitimate daughter Bianca on 10 January 1490; they were doubtless among the guests of honour at the performance of II Paradiso three days later). His prowess at riding, jousting, wrestling, vaulting and the ‘handling of various weapons’ is recorded in Castiglione’s The Courtier in a passage beginning, ‘Consider the physical grace and agility of Signor Galeazzo Sanseverino.’5 On 26 January 1491, Leonardo notes, ‘I was at the house of Messer Galeazzo da San Severino to organize the pageant for his joust.’ He mentions some of Sanseverino’s footmen putting on their costumes as ‘omini salvatichi’, or wild men.6 The uomo selvatico was a popular folklore figure, cognate with the Green Man of medieval England – an image of the irreducible power of Nature, and of man in a state of primitive innocence. He wore caveman garments – animal skins, or leaf and bark – and flourished a knotty club: these would be the traditional template for Leonardo’s costume-design. (One recalls Zoroastro’s ‘outfit of gall-nuts’.) Contemporary accounts of the joust describe ‘a great company of men on horses, accoutred like wild men, with huge drums and raucous trumpets’. Sanseverino himself carried a golden shield painted with an image of a bearded man, thus a ‘barbarian’, and presented himself at the ducal dais announcing he was ‘the son of the King of the Indians’. In 1491 this must refer to India itself rather than the New World – Columbus and his caravel Santa Maria had not yet left Spain – but it is prophetic of how the imagery of the wild man would become associated with native Americans. Onlookers particularly noted his splendid golden helmet with spiralled horns, and on top of it the figure of a winged serpent, with a long tail stretching right down to the back of his horse – a Leonardo ‘dragon’, in short. The whole ensemble ‘demonstrated ferocity’.7

  Like his dragons, Leonardo’s wild men were designed to be bizarre and scary. Leonardo’s theatrical work gives him access – in the way that paintings did not – to the purely fantastical, the exotic, the grotesque. In the Trattato della pittura he writes:

  If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrous things which are frightening, or buffoonish, or ridiculous or really pitiable, he can be lord and creator thereof… If a painter wishes to depict creatures or devils in hell, with what an abundance of invention he teems.8

  He uses the word ‘painter’ generically, but in fact none of his paintings contains this grotesque or hellish sort of material with which – so he says – his imagination ‘teems’. (The nearest one gets are the Adoration, where the swirl of faces tends to the sinister, and the lost Leda, whose subject-matter is erotically grotesque.) It is in his drawings that his fantasy is given free rein, and most of his ‘monstrous’ creations on paper can be related to his role as a creator of masques and pageants. A typical example is the black-chalk sketch at Windsor showing a masquerader wearing an elephant’s head with a trumpet coming out of the top of it, and playing a pipe or flute which is fashioned as the elephant’s trunk. Possibly the whole apparatus is a kind of bagpipe, with the bag contained in the pot-belly of the costume and the overhead trumpet as the drone.9

  The elephant-musician is witty, but other drawings are harder to fathom: they shift meanings as you look at them. A pair of animal masks seem to be nightmare versions of dogs: one a shaggy, demented-looking pug or Pekinese, the other an idiotic hound with coiffed hair, dead eyes, and a distended lower lip lolling open to reveal ovine teeth.10 We are in horror-story terrain: strange laboratory hybrids. If you turn the ‘pug’ upside down the face becomes a bat. This creature has some kind of bit and bridle attached: this may indicate a mask to be worn by a costumed servant pulling a chariot or float. The drawing style suggests the early 1490s, so this was probably for a Sforza festivity also.

  Leonardo’s theatrical skills were remembered by his Milanese biographer Paolo Giovio, who describes him as ‘the inventor and arbiter of all refinement and delights, especially theatrical ones’. This stresses the elegance of his creations – as no doubt seen in Il Paradiso – but there is this other, more bizarre side to them: these wild men and monsters which give vent to the darker fantasies of their creator. At the least these courtly ephemera offered Leonardo an excuse for a tonic bit of melodrama, so different from the cool, reined-in style of the Milan studio works.

  These theatrical monsters and hybrids are closely akin to another genre in which he was particularly active in the late 1480s and early 1490s – his

  Monsters. Two festive masks of the 1490s (above), and a grotesque portrait of an old woman, in a later copy by Francesco Melzi.

  grotesques, showing hideously exaggerated and caricatured features, particularly of old men and women, mostly in profile, mostly in pen and ink. There is an element of satire in them: a private revenge, perhaps, on the snobberies and pomposities of court life. But while some may be caricatures of specific individuals, more often they seem to be pure meditations on ugliness and deformity, suggesting a slightly obsessive fascination with, in his own words, the ‘buffoonish, ridiculous and really pitiable’. These swollen, elongated, imploded faces are the flip side of his Vitruvian studies of ideal human proportions: paradigms of physiological discord. They are scattered through the Windsor collection, some original and some by a copyist, probably Francesco Melzi. The copies, which catch the humour but not the nuances, could appear without demur in a children’s comic like the Beano. Engravings of Leonardo’s grotesques by Wencelaus Hollar circulated in England in the seventeenth century; one of these – a corpulent, frog-like dame – has passed into English visual folklore as the Ugly Duchess in Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.11

  The cartone, or cartoon, has a Quattrocento meaning, but these grotesques of Leonardo’s are essentially cartoons in the modern sense. They are antecedents of the merciless physiological exaggeration found in cartoonists from Gillray to Robert Crumb, and they have the capacity of great cartoons to be funny and then something more: there is a stratum of disquiet amid the laughter. Most disquieting of all, the masterpiece of this genre, is the Windsor pen-and-ink group of five grotesque heads, generally dated to the early 1490s (Plate 18). The drawing is intrinsically dramatic, but the narrative of the scene is unclear, and this elusiveness of meaning compounds the air of threat which emanates from the drawing. Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is: it is like a scene from a nightmare or hallucination, or indeed a lunatic asylum – one thinks of the mad courtroom scene in King Lear, or of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. The central character is crowned with a wreath of oak leaves, as if a victorious Roman emperor, but you know from looking at him that he is not an emperor, just a deluded old man who somehow thinks he is. Around him press four figures in a mode collectively menacing: two full-face figures, one manically laughing or yelling, the other fixedly or inanely curious, and two figures either side of him, one hideous, hook-nosed and blubbery, the other a thin malevolent crone with gap-teeth and a headscarf. Both are usually described as women, though this seems to me ambiguous. The old man is the centre of their attention: there is a sense of malevolent encouragement – the hand of the crone on the left seems to push and hold him there in the centre of the group. Comedy, derision, cruelty, pathos: the viewer is left to choose his reaction. The old man with his toothless ‘nutcracker’ profile is a recurrent character in Leonardo’s sketchbooks, and here (as elsewhere) one feels it to be a kind of cipher of
Leonardo himself: the impotent, paltry, self-deluding figure who is the dark twin of the great Renaissance achiever.

  The drawing was famous, and the figures are closely echoed in two paintings by the contemporary Flemish master Quentin Massys, and later in engravings by Hollar.12 In the eighteenth century the four figures surrounding the old man were seen as ‘illustrations of the passions’, or of the four ‘temperaments’ or ‘humours’. Jean-Paul Richter gave this a more modern, psychiatric twist, claiming they represented (from right to left) dementia, obstinacy, lunacy and imbecility, with the crowned central figure a ‘personification of megalomania’.13 These interpretations seem too schematic. Martin Clayton, the current librarian at Windsor, has recently titled the drawing, A Man Tricked by Gypsies. He interprets the creature to the right as reading the old man’s palm. There has probably been some loss of paper along the right-hand edge, but what remains of the man’s arm and the woman’s hand could certainly suggest this. The woman on the left, whom Kenneth Clark interpreted as ‘putting her arm round the central figure’, is in Clayton’s view reaching round under his sleeve to steal his purse. He relates this to various contemporary accounts of gypsy trickery, and particularly to an edict of April 1493 ordering the banishment of gypsies from Milan, ‘on pain of the gallows’, because of their criminal behaviour as ‘bandits, ruffians and charlatans’.14 It is possible that the drawing belongs in this context of official hostility to the gypsies – indeed, it is possible that Leonardo himself had some experience of their wiles. In a list of household expenses in the Codex Atlanticus occurs the surprising notation ‘for telling a fortune… 6 soldi’, and in the Madrid book-list are two works on chiromancy or palmistry (‘de chiromantia’ and ‘de chiromantia da Milano’).15