Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Looking through the pocket-book Forster III, in which he recorded the arrival of Caterina, one finds Leonardo in philosophical mood. Among the brief maxims and musings which he jots down in its pages are these:

  Wisdom is the daughter of experience…

  This is the supreme folly of man – that he stints himself now so he will not have to stint later, and his life flies away before he can enjoy the good things he has laboured so much to acquire…

  In some animals Nature seems a cruel stepmother rather than a mother; and in others not a stepmother but a tender mother…

  Necessity is mistress and governess of nature…

  The mirror vaunts itself when it has within it the reflection of a queen, but when she is gone the mirror is base once more…

  The plant complains about the old dry stick placed beside it, and the old brambles which surround it. But the one makes it grow straight, and the other protects it from bad company.70

  Also in use during the years 1493–4 were the three pocket-books now bound together as Paris MS H, in which are similar gnomic utterances:

  Do not be a liar about the past…

  All hurts leave a pain in the memory except for the greatest hurt of all, which is death, which kills the memory along with the life.71

  Such pensées are scattered through his manuscripts, but this is a particular concentration of them. They belong to the time when the mysterious Caterina was living with him at the Corte Vecchia. Their imagery (mother, stepmother, governess, queen) and their themes of memory, transience and death add strength to the notion that this Caterina was indeed his mother. They reflect, with characteristic brusqueness, this autumnal reunion and the feelings which it brings to the surface.

  ECHOES OF WAR

  In 1494, amid the preparations for casting the Horse, and the disputes over the Virgin of the Rocks, and the revived emotions of his relationship with his mother, and the intricate mechanical studies of the Madrid codices, Leonardo pursued a round of daily life in which can be discerned some aspects of business and some of pleasure, and of which a few fragments remain in his pocket-books:

  29 January 1494 – cloth for stockings

  4 lire 3 soldi

  lining

  16 soldi

  for making them

  8 soldi

  a jasper ring

  13 soldi

  a crystal [pietra stellata]

  11 soldi

  2 February 1494 – At the Sforzesca [Ludovico’s summer palace at Vigevano] I drew 25 steps each of 2/3 of a braccia and eight braccia wide.

  14 March 1494 – Galeazzo came to live with me, agreeing to pay 5 lire a month for his expenses… His father gave me 2 Rhenish florins.

  20 March 1494 – Vineyards of Vigevano… In the winter they are covered with earth.

  6 May [?1494] – If at night you place your eye between the light and the eye of a cat, you will see that its eye seems to be on fire.

  [1494 – Estimate for decoration work, probably at Vigevano:]

  item: for each small vault

  7 lire

  outlay for azure and gold

  3½ lire

  time

  4 days

  for the windows

  1½ lire

  the cornice below the windows

  6 soldi per braccio

  item: for 24 pictures of Roman history

  14 lire each

  the philosophers

  10 lire

  for the pilasters, one ounce of azure

  10 soldi

  for gold

  15 soldi72

  Leonardo is glimpsed at Vigevano as the Sforza’s interior designer, and he is also called upon to produce a different kind of design: propagandist political emblems – work that brings him into the realm of the Moor’s image-maker. Ludovico’s popularity was declining. In the clannish milieu of Quattrocento politics there were always those who felt themselves excluded and who formed a nucleus of resentment, and increasingly they had a focus. Ludovico’s hunger for absolute power was by now quite blatant. He kept Gian Galeazzo and Isabella isolated in the gloomy fastness of the Certosa at Pavia, where the young Duke’s health was failing. He severed relations with the King of Naples, who had protested against this treatment of his granddaughter. He courted the Emperor, who had the power to proclaim him the rightful Duke – the half a million ducats of dowry brought by his niece Bianca when she married the Emperor was widely seen as a bribe, at the taxpayer’s expense, to obtain the dukedom.

  Various sketches can be interpreted as ideas for political emblems, designed to express the official line that Ludovico was the only viable ruler of the dukedom and should therefore be recognized as such. One shows a dog warily confronting an aggressive-looking snake; the motto reads ‘Per non disobbedire’ – ‘Not to disobey’.73 The snake or serpent (the heraldic device of the Visconti) is Milan; the dog traditionally represents fidelity or loyalty. The emblem seems to convey the message that Milan should not ‘disobey’ its faithful guardian Ludovico; the scroll carried round the dog’s neck perhaps signifies that his leadership is sanctioned by the writ of law. Another sketched emblem shows a sieve with the motto ‘Non cado per essere unito’ – ‘I do not fall because I am united’: a similar message of political unity.74

  There is also an allegorical composition (as distinct from an emblem) – ‘Il Moro with the spectacles, and Envy depicted together with False Report, and Justice black for Il Moro’,75 on a loose sheet now in the Bonnat Collection in Bayonne. The black-faced Moor holds spectacles, a symbol of truth, out towards Envy, who holds a banner depicting a bird pierced by an arrow. This is probably an idea for a piece of propagandist pageantry – a costumed, three-dimensional allegory. A similar description is found in a later notebook of c. 1497: ‘I1 Moro in the form of Fortune’ with ‘Messer Gualtieri [Gualtiero Bascapé, the Duke’s treasurer] reverently holding up his robes behind him’. The ‘terrifying form of Poverty’ – female, like the depictions of Envy, Slander, etc. – is shown running towards a ‘young lad’; the Moor ‘protects him with his robe, and menaces this monster with a golden sceptre’.76 Leonardo mentions Bascapé in a fragmentary draft of a letter of c. 1495 complaining of unpaid money: ‘Perhaps Your Excellency did not give further orders to Messer Gualtieri, believing that I had money enough…’77

  These political emblems and allegories seem trivial as drawings and unsubtle in the meanings they convey. One suspects that being part of the Moor’s propaganda-machine was not particularly congenial to Leonardo. He has a vested interest in the continued ascendancy of his patron, and is ready to lend his skills to that end. He collaborates, as he later did with the ruthless warlord Cesare Borgia. His livelihood depended on such collaborations, of course, but one should register the element of acquiescence, the shrug of political indifference. He is a man without illusions: he knows the harsh realities of power, and he learns to live with them. Opportunism is all: Fortune must be grasped by the hair as she passes – not a moment too late, ‘for behind she is bald’. Perhaps his ambivalent feelings are in the emblem he sketches showing a blackberry-bush, with the motto ‘Dolce e agro e pungente’ – ‘Sweet and bitter and thorny’. Above it is written the word more, blackberries, punning on amore, love, but a further pun on Il Moro is hard to ignore, and with it perhaps an idea of the private bitterness of the artist in the pay of a despot.78

  15 September 1494 – ‘Giulio began the lock for my studio.’79

  The locksmiths were busy in Milan at this time. Foreign troops were in the land – the French, en route for the Kingdom of Naples, to assert with force of arms their claim to that territory. Ludovico had welcomed them in: allies against the hostile Neapolitans. He and Beatrice entertained the French king, Charles VIII, with pomp and revelry at Pavia. The bravados of one of his generals, the Duc d’Orléans – whose grandmother was a Visconti, and who claimed therefore a right to the duchy of Milan – were ignored; Orléans was currently occupied in occupying Genoa. In Pavia Duke Gian Ga
leazzo lay dying. King Charles visited him, and pitied him, but was embarrassed by the Duchess Isabella, who tearfully pleaded with him to have mercy on her father, Alfonso, now King of Naples after the death of Ferrante a few months before. ‘She had better have prayed for herself, who was still a young and fair lady,’ observed the historian Philippe de Commines, who was in Charles’s retinue. In these last days Gian Galeazzo seemed pathetically in Ludovico’s thrall – ‘longing on his deathbed for the uncle, who is far away, riding in splendour beside the French king’; asking one of Ludovico’s gentlemen ‘whether he thought his Excellency the Moor wished him well and whether he seemed sorry that he was ill’.80

  21 October 1494 – Gian Galeazzo, aged twenty-five, dies at the Certosa di Pavia. Suspicions are rife that he has been poisoned by Ludovico.

  22 October 1494 – Ludovico is proclaimed Duke at the Castello Sforzesco.

  1 November 1494 – Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, father-in-law of Ludovico, arrives in Milan. He is alarmed, as many are, by Ludovico’s rapprochement with the French. He is keen to bolster his defences against the possibility of French incursion (or against the aggression of Venice, also mobilizing in response to the French presence). The Duke is also a powerful creditor – Ludovico is in debt to him to the tune of 3,000 ducats. Under pressure, Ludovico offers him a ‘gift’: a large quantity of bronze suitable for casting into cannon.

  17 November 1494 – A diplomat in Milan writes:

  The Duke of Ferrara… has ordered Maestro Zanin di Albergeto, to make him three small cannon, one in the French style and two in another style. He has received from the Duke [i.e. Ludovico] a gift of 100 meira of metal, which had been purchased to make the Horse in memory of Duke Francesco. The metal has been transported to Pavia, and thence down the Po to Ferrara, and the said Maestro Zanin has accompanied the Duke back to Ferrara to make the artillery.81

  Thus casually a diplomatic report announces the requisitioning of the bronze which had been set aside for the casting of the Horse – a tremendous blow for Leonardo and his studio, and an irony he could hardly fail to note: the great martial creation of the Horse rendered down into actual weaponry. How brittle and insubstantial the works of the imagination when confronted with the necessities of war!

  Around the same time news was reaching Milan of events in Florence: the French were camped outside the city; Piero de’ Medici – Lorenzo’s son and successor – had signed a disgraceful treaty granting them control of Pisa and other possessions; the citizens had risen in fury. On 9 November Piero and his two brothers, Giovanni and Giuliano, slipped out of the San Gallo gate, on foot, heading for sanctuary in Bologna. The Medici had fallen. Resentful mobs swarmed into the Palazzo Medici, smashing and looting – a foretaste of the destruction to come, as the power-vacuum was filled by the charismatic theocracy of Girolamo Savonarola, the fiery Dominican friar who had been a figurehead for reform in Florence, and whose pulpit-rhetoric of moral purification now became the reality of the ‘Bonfires of the Vanities’, in which many paintings, books and manuscripts were destroyed.

  Thus the year which had begun pleasantly enough for Leonardo, measuring the water-stairs at Vigevano, ends amid distant echoes of war from his homeland, and the great defining project of the Sforza years in ruins. Fuming in his studio at the Corte Vecchia, he drafted a letter to Ludovico, but the page on which he wrote it has been torn in half, vertically, and on the half that remains we read only truncated stuttering sentences:

  And if any other commission is to be given me by some…

  Of the reward of my service, because I am not in a position to…

  Not my art which I wish to change…

  My Lord, I know your Excellency’s mind is much occupied…

  to remind your Lordship of my small necessities, and the arts put to silence…

  that for me to remain silent would make your Lordship think worthless…

  my life in your service, holding myself always in readiness to obey…

  Of the horse I will say nothing because I know the times…

  And so on, to the last plaintive lines:

  Remember the commission to paint the rooms…

  I brought your Lordship, only asking that you…82

  But enough. In theory the mutilation of the manuscript may have occurred at any time before the compilation of the Codex Atlanticus by Pompeo Leoni in the 1580s, but let us allow Leonardo da Vinci his moment of petulance, and the fleeting minor satisfaction of ripping the paper in half and stalking off to pace upon the roof of the Corte Vecchia, where on this day none will dare to disturb him.

  THE MAKING OF THE LAST SUPPER

  As a boy in the 1490s, the future novelist Matteo Bandello was a novice monk at the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where his uncle Vincenzo was the prior. There he would pass the time watching Leonardo da Vinci at work on the north wall of the refectory, painting the great masterpiece of the Sforza era, the Cenacolo or Last Supper.

  He would arrive early, climb up on to the scaffolding, and set to work. Sometimes he stayed there from dawn to sunset, never once laying down his brush, forgetting to eat and drink, painting without pause. At other times he would go for two, three or four days without touching his brush, but spending several hours a day in front of the work, his arms folded, examining and criticizing the figures to himself. I also saw him, driven by some sudden urge, at midday, when the sun was at its height, leaving the Corte Vecchia, where he was working on his marvellous clay horse, to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie, without seeking shade, and clamber up on to the scaffolding, pick up a brush, put in one or two strokes, and then go away again.83

  Bandello was writing this decades after the event. There is some telescoping: Leonardo probably began painting the Last Supper in 1495, and was not therefore ‘working on’ the clay horse – exhibited in late 1493 – at the same time. But this is none the less an authentic glimpse of the maestro at work. It expresses his creative rhythm, the bursts of strenuousness interspersed by those puzzling spells of silent cogitation which others – particularly those who were paying him – tended to mistake for dreamy inactivity. And it gives us that marvellous image of Leonardo striding through the streets, under the noonday sun, not thinking of comfort or shelter or indeed anything else except a suddenly achieved solution to some tiny problem of compositional detail. Those ‘one or two strokes’ remind us of the painstakingly cumulative nature of his art. That massive sweep of visual narrative which one sees on the wall of the Grazie is made up of thousands of tiny brush-strokes, thousands of microscopic decisions. The familiarity of a world-famous painting makes it seem somehow inevitable – how could it be other than it is? – but every inch has been fought for.

  The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie lay beyond the old Porta Vercellina to the west of the castle. For some years (you might have heard it muttered) it had been a virtual building-site. In 1492 the choir and apse were demolished to make way for a new tribune and cupola, designed by Bramante, and in tandem with this it was decided to enlarge the contiguous monastery buildings. The renovation of the refectory was certainly completed by 1495 – this is the date inscribed on Donato di Montorfano’s Crucifixion fresco which adorns the south wall. The Last Supper, on the opposite wall, was probably begun in this year. This whole renovation programme was commissioned and paid for by Ludovico, who intended the new setting to serve as a future Sforza mausoleum, a fitting monument to the ducal dynasty. This motivation became more pressing with the sudden deaths of his wife, Beatrice, and his daughter Bianca in 1497. These losses weighed heavily on the Moor, and introduced a period of sombre religiosity: his investment in the Grazie became emotional as well as financial, and he often took his meals at the refectory. Leonardo’s great mural – it is not technically a fresco, since it was painted in oils – was thus the pièce de résistance of a prestigious Sforza project: a thoroughly modern work to crown this elegant modernization.84

  To trace the making of ‘this res
tless masterpiece’, as Burckhardt called it, one must first turn to a sheet at Windsor which has an early compositional study in pen and ink.85 It is still rooted in traditional Last Supper iconography – Judas in the excluded position, seen from behind, on the near side of the

  Studies for the Last Supper. Above: early compositional sketches on a sheet at Windsor. Below: studies for the heads of Judas (left) and St James the Elder.

  table, and St John shown asleep next to Christ, a reference to his ‘leaning on Jesus’s bosom’ when the announcement of betrayal was made. Both these figures would be jettisoned in the final version.