Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  This is a convincing interpretation, but one still feels there is more to the drawing – a surreal or psychotic aura which makes it more than a simple scene of street-trickery. A painting of about 1520 by Quentin Massys incorporates three of the figures from the drawing, but the scene he displays is a ‘mock’ or ‘grotesque’ betrothal: the figures based on the two ‘gypsy women’ are now decidedly more male than female, while the actual ‘bride’ of the painting is an androgynous figure with long wavy hair suggestive of another Leonardo type, so it is possible that the betrothal is homosexual. Coins are spilling out of the elderly bridegroom’s money-bag: there is trickery afoot, but this is not a pickpocketing scene per se. I wonder if Massys knew something we don’t about the references of Leonardo’s drawing.

  Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, who assiduously collected memories of Leonardo in the decades after his death, recounts the following:

  There is a story told by men of his time, who were his servants, that he once wished to make a picture of some laughing peasants (though in the event he did not paint it, but only did a drawing). He picked out certain men whom he thought fitted the bill, and having become acquainted with them he arranged a party for them, with the help of some friends, and sitting down opposite them, he started to tell them the craziest and most ridiculous things in the world, in such a way that he made them fall about laughing. And so without them knowing he observed all their gestures and their reactions to his ridiculous talk, and impressed them on his mind, and after they had left he retired to his room, and there made a perfect drawing which moved people to laughter when they looked at it, just as much as if they were listening to Leonardo’s stories at the party.

  One cannot quite discern the ‘Five heads’ in this – only two of the heads are laughing, and anyway the mood is different – but the story encapsulates the idea of Leonardo’s belief in first-hand observation, the underpinning of visual reportage which makes even these surreal drawings so vivid and tactile. Cristoforo Giraldi, a Ferrarese at the court in Milan, a contemporary of Leonardo’s, says much the same:

  When Leonardo wished to depict some figure… he went to the places where he knew people of that kind gathered, and he observed their faces and manners, and their clothing, and the way they moved their bodies. And when he found something which seemed to be what he was after, he recorded it in metalpoint pen in a little book which he always had hanging at his belt.16

  ‘OF SHADOW AND LIGHT’

  ‘On 23 April 1490 I began this book’ – the ‘book’ being the manuscript now known as Paris MS C. It is composed of fourteen sheets, folded to form twenty-eight folios; the paper is large-format, quite thin, and bears a curious watermark consisting of a small circle with two wavy lines – it looks like a tadpole with two tails, but the reference is doubtless to the Visconti serpent, a traditional Milanese emblem. This is the first of Leonardo’s manuscripts which can be described as a concerted treatise: its subject is the behaviour of light. It is summed up by Francesco Melzi as ‘a book of shadow and light’.17 But though it has a lot of detailed material on this subject, Leonardo cannot stay on one track for long, and there are plenty of notes and drawings on other topics – physics, acoustics, games and jokes, water, and so on. Some pages contain small, highly specific drawings of objects (hammers, bells, knives, a wine-barrel, an axe splitting a log, etc.) which are a relief from the austere diagrams of the main text. It is a highly scientific work: a rigorous blend of optics and geometry. The writing is neat; the diagrams are painstaking, with subtle gradations of light and shade suggested by meticulous parallel hatching in pen and ink. It comes to us direct from Leonardo’s desk at the Corte Vecchia in 1490–91, broadly contemporary with his portrait of the musician, with its bold chiaroscuro (‘bright and dark’) effects.

  Like the anatomical treatise planned in 1489, Leonardo’s ‘book of shadow and light’ is part of his complete-science-for-the-painter project, and belongs within the studio ethos of these years: the maestro imparts his wisdom. And, as with the early anatomy studies, there is a dangerous blossoming of the subject, a Hydra-like proliferation of the tasks in hand. It soon appears that the current text is only a beginning. On a closely written folio in the Codex Atlanticus is set down an ambitious programme for seven ‘books’ on the subject:

  In my first proposition concerning shadows I state that every opaque body is surrounded, and its surface clothed, in shadow and light; and on this I build the first book. Then also, these shadows are in themselves composed of varying qualities of darkness, because they are caused by the absence of varying quantities of light rays; and these I call primary shadows [ombre originale], because they are the first shadows, which cover an object and are fastened on to it, and on this I will build my second book.

  The third book will be on ombre derivate, or secondary shadows, and so on, through to the seventh.18

  In another manuscript of this period Leonardo defines different kinds of light-source (‘secondary light’, ‘luminous reverberation’, etc.) and different qualities of light, such as the ‘constrained air’ (aria restretta) of light entering through a window, and the ‘free light’ (lume libero) out in the countryside.19 He uses the word perchussione – percussion – for the falling or striking of light on an object. This conveys a sense of light as something dynamic. Elsewhere he defines light as one of the ‘spiritual powers’, in which ‘spiritual’ has the Aristotelian meaning of ‘immaterial’ or ‘imperceptible’: energy without mass.20

  Thus drily and rather doggedly Leonardo sets out the rules for depicting shadow and light, which ‘are the most certain means by which the shape of any body comes to be known’ and are therefore essential to ‘excellence in the science of painting’.21 We find here the scientific basis of the most subtle and elusive effects of Leonardo’s sfumato or ‘smoky’ style, in which (in his own definition) ‘shadows and highlights fuse without hatching or strokes, as does smoke’.22 This nuanced style of sfumatura is exemplified in the Mona Lisa, in which it becomes something more than a depiction of light and shade – it is a mood or atmosphere, an autumnal suffusion of transience and regret. The gradations of sfumatura are also a mode of depicting distance, and thus an adjunct to perspective. In the Trattato Leonardo considers the depiction of things as they are ‘lost because of distance’ – nearer objects are ‘bounded by evident and sharp boundaries’, while those more distant have ‘smoky, blurred boundaries’.23 He calls this the ‘prospettivo de’ perdimenti’ – ‘the perspective of loss’ (as distinct from the perspective of size). This resonant phrase again suggests a mental atmosphere as much as a visual phenomenon: the distances that stretch behind the figure of Mona Lisa are a poetic distillation of this ‘perspective of loss’.

  Also on his desk at this time was a smaller, thicker notebook, in standard octavo format, now Paris MS A. It originally had 114 folios, consecutively numbered by Leonardo, but it later suffered from the attentions of Count Libri, who tore out a section of fifty folios, of which seventeen have never been seen since.24 MS A is essentially a painter’s manual, though very different from the traditional Florentine manuals like Cennino Cennini’s. It deals directly with painting techniques, and treats various subjects – optics, perspective, proportion, movement, mechanics, etc. – from a painter’s point of view. It also has more on the subject of light and shade, including this, which makes one think once again of the Mona Lisa:

  When you wish to make a portrait of someone do it in dull weather, or as evening falls… See in the street towards evening, or when the weather is bad, how much grace and sweetness can be seen in the faces of the men and women. Therefore, O painter, use a courtyard where the walls are coloured black, with some kind of overlapping roof… and when it is sunny it should be covered with an awning. Alternatively work on the painting towards evening, or when it is cloudy or misty, and this will be the perfect atmosphere.25

  These are the practicalities of Leonardo’s more subtle and sombre tonality, so different from the sharp-edged,
sunlit aesthetic of his Florentine training.

  Among the technical details to which the notebook is mainly devoted there is an unexpected glimpse of Leonardo’s imaginative processes, the ‘arousing’ as he puts it, ‘of the mind to inventions’:

  Look at any wall marked with various stains, or at a stone with variegated patterns, and you will see therein a resemblance to various landscapes… or to battles with figures darting about, or strange-looking faces and costumes: an endless variety of things which you can distil into finely rendered forms. And the same thing that happens with walls and stones can happen with the sound of bells, in whose peal you will find any name or word you care to imagine.26

  The same idea surfaces, in different wording, in the Trattato, where it is part of one of his disputes with Botticelli: ‘Merely throwing a sponge soaked in various colours at a wall will leave a stain in which a beautiful landscape can be seen… I say that a man may seek out in such a stain the heads of men, animals, battles, rocks, seas, clouds, woods and other similar things.’ This kind of visual fantasy or free association channels into productivity that side of Leonardo which is the dreamer and the drifter: ‘confused things kindle the mind to great inventions’.27

  In MS A we find the first blueprint for the Trattato della pittura, and it was used by Melzi more extensively than any other source when compiling material for the Trattato. Leonardo himself may have elaborated the notebook into a more formal text. In 1498, in the dedicatory epistle of Divina proportione, the mathematician Luca Pacioli states that Leonardo has ‘already finished’ a ‘worthy book on painting and human motion’ (degno libro de pictura e movimenti humani). This may be the same as the ‘book’ referred to later by Lomazzo, who speaks of Leonardo discussing the relative merits of painting and sculpture ‘in a book of his which I read a few years ago, which he wrote with his left hand, at the request of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan’. This comparison between painting and sculpture, which features at the beginning of the Trattato, is found in draft form in MS A. These comments suggest that sometime before 1498 Leonardo copied material from MS A into a ‘book’ – i.e. a bound manuscript – for the delectation of the Moor.28

  On the first page of MS A is a small drawing showing the ‘shadow made by a man’, illustrating a point about the penumbra of shadows. Beneath it the explanatory text begins, ‘If the window a–b lets sunlight into a room, the sun will make the window appear bigger and will also diminish the shadow of a man, in such a way that when the man compares this reduced shadow of himself with…’ I omit the rest, which gets complicated, because an incidental point is altogether more arresting. This tiny perfunctory sketch is a kind of self-portrait: the man whose shadow will be shaped ‘exactly as shown above’ must also be the man who is making the drawing, and that man is certainly Leonardo da Vinci. It does not show his features, only his silhouette, ‘clothed’ in shadow, as he stands in front of an arched window, perhaps at the Corte Vecchia, on a sunny day in the early 1490s.

  Leonardo’s shadow.

  The carefully laid-out pages of the Paris notebooks C and A, with blocks of text and illustrations, suggest that Leonardo had in mind something similar to the technical manuscripts of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the Sienese architect and engineer. Leonardo certainly knew these – one which he actually owned is now in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, with his notes and doodles in the margin29 – and the fact that Martini was in Milan at this time makes me think the influence is specific. He was certainly there by 1489, when he was preparing a model for the tiburio of the cathedral, and in the summer of 1490 he and Leonardo travelled together to Pavia. Martini was now in his early fifties, a man of immense experience. We have some interesting details of the trip, and a strong sense that Leonardo enjoyed it – a break from the easel and the desk.

  In early June 1490 Martini was invited by the works department of Pavia cathedral to advise about rebuilding works there, and at Ludovico’s suggestion Leonardo went with him. On about 18 June they set off from Milan, on horseback, with a retinue of ‘engineers, associates and servants’, among which we may perhaps include Zoroastro, the resident engineer and special-effects man of Leonardo’s entourage. It is no great distance to Pavia: about 20 miles. On arrival they put up at an inn called Il Saracino (The Saracen). Their bill, amounting to 20 lire, was settled by the fabbriceria on 21 June: the document describes them as having been ‘invited for a consultation’ – they are consultants.30

  Politically a satellite of Milan, Pavia was a small, proud city which called itself civitas centum turrium, the city of a hundred towers. Its famous university, founded in the fourteenth century, included Petrarch and Christopher Columbus among its alumni. The place seems to have invigorated Leonardo. I have already mentioned his elated reaction to the equestrian statue, Il Regisole, which set in train new thoughts for the Sforza Horse, but there are many other small traces of the visit in his notebook, and these in turn reflect back to us an image of Leonardo himself, on this pleasant-seeming summer jaunt, observing and inquiring, penetratingly interested in everything. Here he is down on the riverside, watching some excavation-works:

  I was watching them strengthening the foundations of a stretch of the old walls of Pavia, which are on the banks of the Ticino. Of the old piles which were there, those of oak were as black as charcoal, while the ones made of alder were as red as brazil-wood [verzino], and were still quite heavy, and hard as iron, and not stained at all.31

  And here he is outside the old Visconti castle, observing that ‘The chimneys have six rows of openings, each distant from the next by one braccio.’ We follow him into the castle’s famous library, assembled by Galeazzo Visconti II, where he finds a manuscript by the Polish mathematician Witelo, and notes, ‘In Vitolone there are 805 conclusions in perspective.’ Later, back in Milan, he will write, ‘Try to get Vitolone, which is in the library at Pavia, and which treats of mathematics.’32 The manuscript coveted by Leonardo cannot be identified, as the contents of Pavia library were dispersed during the French occupation of 1500.

  Among these Pavian notes is an unexpected little sketch: a swift ground-plan marked lupinario – a brothel. Is this from Pavia too? Did he visit it? Perhaps. If not for the traditional reason, then because a brothel was as worthy of interest as a cathedral or a riverside building-site or a manuscript by the learned Witelo. Also because brothels were a likely, indeed traditional, source of artist’s models – I will look later at the possibility that the model for Leonardo’s lost Leda was a prostitute.

  LITTLE DEVIL

  I fed you with milk like my own son.

  Codex Atlanticus, fol. 220v–c

  Leonardo was back in Milan by mid-July, as is shown by a note, written in an offhand style which conceals its emotional significance: ‘Jachomo vene a stare cho mecho il dí della madalena nel mille 490’ – ‘Giacomo came to live with me on St Mary Magdalen’s day [22 July] 1490.’33

  ‘Giacomo’ was a ten-year-old boy from Oreno, near Monza, a few miles north of Milan. His full name was Giovanni Giacomo (or Giangiacomo) di Pietro Caprotti, but he is better known to the world by his nickname, Salai. Not much is known of his father, Pietro: he was certainly not well-off, and we know of no connection with a trade, but he may not have been quite the humble peasant – nor Giacomo quite the enfant sauvage – that is usually depicted. In a legal document Pietro is described as ‘filius quondam domini Joannis’ – ‘Son of the late Master Giovanni’. The honorific ‘dominus’ is loose, but suggests that Salai’s grandfather Giovanni, after whom he was named, owned some land and had some status. At any rate, Pietro was prepared to pay for Giacomo’s upkeep at the studio of the great Leonardo da Vinci – perhaps because the boy showed talent; perhaps because he wanted to be rid of him; perhaps because Leonardo had spotted him and wanted him. Giacomo seems to have been an only son, though there is a pair of greedy sisters who appear later in the story.34

  The boy was taken on, presumably, as a famiglio – servant, errand-boy, dogsbody
and, frequently, studio model – but also with a view to training him up as a painter, and indeed he became a very competent painter in the ‘Leonardesco’ mould. He was also, in the meantime, what we would nowadays call a handful, or indeed a right little tearaway, and it was not long before he had acquired his lifelong nickname, Salai. It first appears in a note of payment written by Leonardo in January 1494. The name means ‘Little Devil’ or ‘Demon’, or perhaps ‘Imp’ – linguistically it appears to be an import from Arabic; more immediately it occurs in Luigi Pulci’s evergreen comic epic Morgante maggiore, a work which appears in every book-list Leonardo compiled. The diminutive, Salaino, was also used, causing later confusion with the Leonardesco painter Andrea Solario: a mythical ‘Andrea Salaino’ flits through nineteenth-century accounts of Leonardo’s circle in Milan.35

  The list of Giacomo’s misdemeanours during his first year of service or pupillage at the Corte Vecchia is probably the longest continuous account of another person’s activities to be found in all Leonardo’s writings. (I exclude his attempts at literary narrative.) Its intention is precisely an account, since it itemizes the expenses arising from the boy’s misdeeds; it also includes a list of his clothing expenses. The last date in it is September 1491, and it seems to have been written at a single sitting – the ink colour is a uniform dark brown – so the whole passage was actually written down about fourteen months after Giacomo’s arrival. It was no doubt intended for the father, who was to foot the bill, but it acquires in extenso a curiously personal coloration, a tone of exasperated fondness, so that what is intended as a rather crotchety list of complaints achieves a quality almost of reverie.