As is well known, Leonardo’s great mural was innovative in less auspicious ways. He used a mix of oil and tempera for the painting, instead of the traditional buon fresco technique of painting on fresh plaster. This enabled him to work more slowly, and to repaint, but its disadvantages soon became apparent as the paint began to flake off. An inherent problem with damp exacerbated the situation. The deterioration of the paint surface was already visible during his lifetime. In 1517 the diarist Antonio de Beatis noted that the mural was ‘beginning to spoil’, and by the time Vasari saw it in the 1550s, there was ‘nothing visible except a muddle of blots’.104 This is doubtless a reason for the many early copies made of it, two of them Marco d’Oggiono’s and Giampietrino’s – by painters who were probably involved in the creation of the original. It is also the reason for the extensive and intrusive restoration projects; the earliest which is documented was done in the early eighteenth century, but was probably not the first. In the 1930s, comparing the current state of the mural with these early copies, and with the preparatory studies in Windsor, Kenneth Clark lamented the loss of subtle nuances of expression beneath the deadening hand of the restorer: he thought ‘the exaggerated grimacing types, with their flavour of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement’, suggested ‘a feeble mannerist of the sixteenth century’.105
The painting’s inherent, self-inflicted fragility seems now part of its magic. Reduced within a few decades to a ‘muddle of blots’, vandalized by Napoleonic soldiers in the early nineteenth century, and narrowly missed by Allied bombs in the summer of 1943, it is a miracle that it has survived at all.
The latest and most ambitious restoration, under Pinin Brambilla Barcelon, was unveiled in 1999, after more than twenty years’ work at an estimated cost of 20 billion lire (approximately £6 million). Much of it was targeted at removing the superimpositions of previous restorations: an encrustation of varnishes and over-paintings which were teased away, scab by microscopic scab, in the hope that some original pigment remained beneath. In the words of Brambilla Barcelon, the painting was treated ‘as if it were a great invalid’.106 The restoration had its critics, as always – it had ‘lost the soul’ of the original – but what we now see is much closer to what Leonardo and his assistants painted on that wall, watched by the wide-eyed boy Bandello, just over 500 years ago. Closer, but of course partial – only about 20 per cent of the original picture surface survives. The painting hovers like a ghost on the wall, vestigial yet ravishingly restocked with expressions and gestures, and with the simple yet compelling details of that last meal: the half-filled beakers of wine, the filigree weave on the tablecloth, the knife which in the emotion of the moment St Peter grips like a murder-weapon.
THE ‘ACADEMY’
Let no one read me who is not a mathematician…
Forster III, fol. 82v
The year 1496, shadowed with the great enterprise of the Last Supper, saw also the blossoming of a great friendship, with the arrival in Milan of the mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli – ‘Maestro Luca’ as Leonardo calls him.
Pacioli, from the small town of Borgo San Sepolcro on the southern edge of Tuscany, was in his early fifties. In his youth he had studied under Piero della Francesca, who had a studio there; he was deeply influenced by Piero’s mathematical writings on perspective, and in Vasari’s view he plagiarized them in his own later writings. In the mid-1470s he threw up a promising career as an accountant to become a friar of the Franciscan order, vowed to poverty, and for twelve years he was a wandering scholar, lecturing on philosophy and mathematics; he is glimpsed at Perugia, Naples, Rome, Urbino and Zadar in Venetian Croatia. In 1494 he published his first book, the encyclopedic Summa de arithmetica, geometria e proportione. Covering 600 close-printed pages in folio, it is written in Italian and is thus part of the modernizing drift away from Latin. A note in the Codex Atlanticus records Leonardo’s purchase of a copy (‘Aritmetrica di Maestro Luca’) for 6 lire, and there are many extracts from it in his notebooks, some of them possibly related to the compositional geometry of the Last Supper.107 As its title states, it is a summary rather than a work of great originality. It has sections on theoretical and practical arithmetic, and on algebra, geometry and trigonometry; it has a treatise of thirty-six chapters on double-entry bookkeeping, some interesting discussions on games of chance, and a conversion-table showing the currencies, weights and measures used in various Italian states. For all his contemporary status as a philosopher, there is a strong practical streak in Fra Luca; he is remembered for his adage that ‘regular accounting preserves long friendships.’
The portrait of him by Jacopo de’ Barbari is dated 1495. It shows him in the Franciscan habit and cowl, one hand resting on a book of geometry, the other pointing to a slate bearing a geometrical figure and the name ‘Euclides’ inscribed on the side. On the desk are the tools of the geometer’s trade – chalk and sponge, set-squares, compass. A 3-D model of a polyhedron hangs like a giant crystal above his right shoulder. The large leather-bound book on the table, inscribed ‘LI. RI. LUC. BUR.’ (i.e. Liber reverendi Luca Burgensis – The book of the reverend Luca of the Borgo) refers to his
Fra Luca Pacioli in the portrait by Jacopo de’ Barbari, c. 1495.
Summa, published the previous year. The handsome young man standing behind him is probably Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, to whom the Summa was dedicated.
Pacioli arrived in Milan in late 1495 or 1496, so this fine portrait shows him much as he was when Leonardo first knew him. He was personally invited by the Moor, but it is possible that Leonardo was instrumental in recommending this new mathematical guru. They seem to have swiftly become friends, and by the following year they were collaborating. Pacioli was writing his masterwork, Divina proportione, and Leonardo was supplying the geometric illustrations. The first of its three books was completed by the end of 1498; two manuscript copies dated 14 December 1498 were presented to Ludovico and to Galeazzo Sanseverino. In the preface to the printed edition of 1509 Pacioli asserts that the diagrams illustrating ‘all the regular and dependent bodies’ (i.e. regular and semi-regular polygons) were ‘done by that most worthy painter, perspectivist, architect, musician and master of all accomplishments [de tutte le virtù doctato] Leonardo da Vinci Fiorentino, in the city of Milan, where we worked together at the charge of the most excellent Duke of that city, Ludovico Maria Sforza Anglo, in the years of our health 1496 until 1499’.108 In the presentation manuscripts these drawings are in ink and watercolour: they are probably copies by assistants. Engravings of them appear in the printed text of 1509; thus these obscure polygons and polyhedrons qualify as the first works of Leonardo to be published within the covers of a book: the first mass-production.
Dodecahedron designed by Leonardo, in an engraving from Pacioli’s Divina proportione (1509).
Mathematics, wrote Leonardo, offers ‘the supreme certainty’.109 It had been a part of his basic studio training, but now, under the wing of Luca Pacioli, he begins to plumb the more abstract world of geometry, the rule-book of harmony and proportion. His close study of Euclid can be found in two pocket-books of the late 1490s – Paris MSS M and I – though he was also conscious of lacunae in his knowledge of more elementary procedures, and issued one of his self-instructive memoranda: ‘Learn from Messer Luca how to multiply square roots.’110
The collaboration between Leonardo and Luca Pacioli – evidenced in Leonardo’s notebook and explicitly recalled in Pacioli’s preface to the Divina proportione – is one of the historical foundations of Leonardo’s elusive ‘academy’. The existence of this academy is much disputed: the most one can say for certain is that it exists on paper, in that series of beautiful knot-designs which feature the words ‘Academia Leonardi Vinci’ (variously spelt, sometimes abbreviated). They seem to be intended as a device or emblem for this august-sounding body, but many believe this was just a Leonardo pipe-dream.
The designs are known exclusively from engravings (see page 41), almost certainly done in Venice i
n the first years of the 1500s: there is strong evidence that Albrecht Dürer saw prints of them on his visit to Venice in 1504–5.111 The original drawings on which they are based do not survive, but a plausible account of them is that they were done in Milan in the late 1490s and that Leonardo brought them with him when he visited Venice – for the first time, as far as we know – in 1500. The originals would thus be contemporary with the complex interlacings of the Sala delle Asse ceiling, which Leonardo was working on in 1498, and which Lomazzo described as a ‘beautiful invention’ of ‘bizarre knot-patterns’. They would also be contemporary with the polyhedric designs done for Pacioli’s Divina proportione, which were drawn in Milan in or before 1498, and were also later engraved in Venice.
The original designs for the ‘academy logo’ seem to belong within the context of Leonardo’s collaboration with Pacioli. The idea that the two men were the nucleus of a definable intellectual group or sodality has perhaps been dismissed too easily. There is in fact an independent sighting of it in an obscure little book published in the early seventeenth century: Il supplimento della nobilita di Milano, by Giralomo Borsieri. In this the author refers to ‘the Sforza academy of art and architecture’, and to Leonardo’s role in it: ‘I myself have already seen, in the hands of Guido Mazenta, several lectures [lettioni, literally ‘lessons’] on perspective, on machines, and on buildings, written in a French script but in the Italian language, which had previously issued from this academy, and which were attributed to Leonardo himself.’112 The bibliophile Mazenta, who certainly owned many Leonardo manuscripts, died in 1613. Sometime before this date he showed Borsieri a manuscript containing certain lectures or lessons attributed to Leonardo. The manuscript appears to be sixteenth-century – its ‘French script’ implies that it was produced during the period of French rule in Milan – but the lectures it contains were originally delivered, or ‘issued’, under the aegis of this ‘Sforza academy’, which can only have existed before the fall of Ludovico Sforza in 1499. All this is taking Borsieri’s account at face value. The manuscript he describes has disappeared, and his description of its provenance cannot be verified. None the less, this is an independent account of Leonardo’s ‘academy’ and of the subjects discussed there: perspective, mechanics, architecture.
Who else might be seen at a meeting of this high-level talking-shop? One obvious candidate is Leonardo’s colleague Donato Bramante, architect of the Grazie, adept of Euclidian geometry, interpreter of Dante, and indeed another skilled creator of groppi or knot-patterns. (A manuscript note of Leonardo’s refers precisely to certain ‘groppi di Bramante’, and Lomazzo mentions his skill in this technique.) 113 Another possible luminary is the intellectual court poet Gaspar Visconti. He was a close friend of Bramante, of whom he wrote, ‘You could more easily count the holy spirits in the heavens than reckon up all the knowledge Bramante has in him.’114 Leonardo owned a copy of the ‘Sonetti di Messer Guaspari Bisconti’ (described thus in the Madrid book-list), probably referring to Visconti’s Rithmi, published in Milan in 1493. We might also include the brightest of Leonardo’s followers – Boltraffio or Bramantino perhaps – though whether there is room for the Zoroastrian showmanship of Tommaso Masini I am not sure. Other potential members can be found in Pacioli’s mention of a debate – ‘a notable scientific duel’, as he puts it – which took place at the castle, in the presence of the Duke, on 8 February 1498.115 Among the participants were the Franciscan theologians Domenico Ponzone and Francesco Busti da Lodi, the court astrologer Ambrogio Varese da Rosate, the doctors Andrea da Novara, Gabriele Pirovano, Niccolò Cusano and Alvise Marliano, and the Ferrarese architect Giacomo Andrea.
The last three on this list were certainly known to Leonardo. Niccolò Cusano, physician to the Sforza court, is briefly mentioned in a note (‘Cusano medico’), as is his son Girolamo, to whom Leonardo sends his commendations via Melzi in c. 1508.116 The Marliano family is mentioned frequently in his notes, mostly in connection with books –
An algebra, which the Marliani have, written by their father…
Concerning bones, by the Marliani…
Alchino on proportions, with notes by Marliano, from Messer Fazio…
Maestro Giuliano da Marliano has a beautiful herbal. He lives opposite the Strami, the carpenters…
Giuliano da Marliano the doctor… has a steward with one hand.117
Giuliano is the celebrated physician and author of Algebra; Alvise, who debated at the castle in 1498, is one of his sons. The architect Giacomo Andrea was Leonardo’s host, in the summer of 1490, at that supper where the urchin Salai broke the oil-flasks.
Also present at this symposium at the castle is the Moor’s son-in-law Galeazzo Sanseverino. Handsome, fashionable, intellectual, the famous champion of the tourney lists, and an accomplished singer, he was the ‘prime favourite’ of the Moor. Leonardo had known him at least since 1491, when he designed the ‘wild-men’ pageant for Galeazzo’s joust, and when he was keenly interested in the horses in his stable as possible models for the Sforza Horse. Galeazzo was also a patron of Pacioli’s, who was accommodated in his house when he arrived in Milan; one of the manuscripts of Divina proportione is dedicated to him. Pacioli also states that, among the sixty geometrical bodies designed by Leonardo for that treatise, a set of them was done for Galeazzo. If one is looking to give some reality to this fugitive little academy I would say that Sanseverino is a plausible patron or figurehead for it. Pacioli seems to say as much in his preface to the Divina proportione: ‘In the circles of the Duke and of Galeazzo Sanseverino are philosophers and theologists, physicians and astrologists, architects and engineers and ingenious inventors of new things.’
A Leonardo manuscript now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York has a cast-list for a masque on the subject of Jupiter and Danae, with sketches. The play is almost certainly the ‘commedia’ performed at the house of Sanseverino’s elder brother Gianfrancesco, Count of Caiazzo, on 31 January 1496, with the Duke present.118 It was written, in a mixture of ottava and terza rima, by Ludovico’s chancellor, Baldassare Taccone (whose poem on the Sforza Horse I mentioned earlier). Leonardo’s cast-list also names him – ‘Tachon’ – as one of the actors. A boy called Francesco Romano plays Danae; the priest Gianfrancesco Tanzi, former patron of the poet Bellincioni, plays Jupiter. This refined little cabaret on a classical theme, performed chez Sanseverino, is perhaps another emanation of the ‘Sforza academy’.
The words ‘Academia Leonardi Vinci’ emblazoned on those labyrinthine knot-designs may not refer to a formally constituted ‘club’, but it seems to be something more than a pipe-dream. For Leonardo the word accademia would recall that Platonic academy of Ficino’s, which he had known in Florence twenty years earlier – a nostalgia perhaps sharpened by the current fundamentalist climate of Savonarola’s Florence. We might think of this Milanese ‘academy’ as a version of that Ficinian prototype: its scope perhaps broader, more multi-disciplinary, more ‘scientific’. Pacioli’s influence may be discerned here – the philosopher-mathematician reintroducing Leonardo to Platonic ideas which he had earlier rejected in favour of a more Aristotelian regime of experiment and inquiry. One sees the ‘academy’ as a loosely knit group of intellectuals who meet and discuss and give lectures and readings, sometimes at the castle and sometimes at the house of Galeazzo Sanseverino outside the Porta Vercellina, and sometimes no doubt at the Corte Vecchia, that great factory of marvels where there is always some curious new gadget to inspect, where there are drawings and sculptures to look at, and books to refer to, and music to call for. The rackety element of the retinue – that ‘gang of adolescents’ – is banished to the periphery; Zoroastro is under orders to behave himself. The shabby old ballroom looks good in the torchlight, though once these ‘academics’ get going sheer brain-power would serve to illuminate it.
Two curious works – a poem and a fresco – seem to belong within the ambit of this Milanese ‘academy’.
The poem is an anonymous eight-page booklet cal
led Antiquarie prospetiche Romane (The Antiquities of Rome in Perspective).119 It is undated, but internal evidence suggests it was written in the late 1490s – it cannot be earlier than 1495, since it mentions an incident when Charles VIII’s troops were in Rome (December 1494). The anonymous author styles himself ‘Prospectivo Melanese depictore’, which one can either take as a comic alias (‘Prospectivo Melanese the painter’) or as a self-description (‘the Milanese perspective painter’). The poem is written in what a recent editor calls ‘semi-barbarous terzine’, full of obscure Lombard colloquialisms, but among its obscurities one thing is certain: the poem is addressed, in very friendly terms, to Leonardo da Vinci – ‘cordial caro ameno socio / Vinci mie caro’ (‘dear cordial delightful colleague, my dear Vinci’). The author thus places himself as a member of Leonardo’s circle, and he refers to at least one other member of that circle – ‘Geroastro’, who is presumably Zoroastro. There is also a cryptic allusion to the ‘zingara del Verrocchio’ – ‘Verrocchio’s gypsy-woman’.
The poem is a sort of travelogue, describing the classical antiquities of Rome, and inviting Leonardo to meet the author there, to explore with him ‘the vestiges of the Antique’. (Whether it was actually written in Rome is debatable: it is clearly addressed to a Milanese readership, and may have been written in Milan.) It contains much fulsome praise of Leonardo, including the usual puns on Vinci and vincere, to conquer. He is particularly praised as a sculptor who is ‘inspired by antiquity’: he can fashion ‘a creature with a living heart and an aspect more divine than any other carving’ – presumably referring to the Sforza Horse. He is also praised, interestingly, as a writer or speaker:
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