Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Part of the Sala delle Asse fresco.

  created a wonderful fantasia, a rhapsody in green. A dense tracery of intertwined branches covers the walls and ceiling, creating a lush interior bower; through the glossy foliage meanders a golden rope, looped and knotted. G. P. Lomazzo is no doubt describing this room when he says, ‘In the trees one finds a beautiful invention of Leonardo’s, making all the branches form into bizarre knot-patterns, a technique also used by Bramante, weaving them all together’ – a comment which links the Sala delle Asse with the intricate knot-patterns of the academy ‘logo’, the originals of which would have been created around the same time.

  The pattern is created by eighteen trees, their trunks beginning at floor level. Some ramify horizontally; two pairs curve inward to form leafy arches over the room’s two windows; and eight trunks ascend to the vaulted ceiling, there to converge on the central, gold-rimmed oculus bearing the jointed arms of Ludovico and Beatrice. The sturdy trees symbolize the strength and dynastic growth of the Sforza family (the rooted tree appears as a Sforza emblem in two roundels at Vigevano), while the golden thread running through the branches can be related to the d’Este fantasia dei vinci, and perhaps to the golden sleeve-patterns of the Lady with a Pearl Necklace, which may be a portrait of Beatrice by Ambrogio de Predis.139

  The vineyard. Detail from the Hoefnagel map of Milan, showing the old Vercellina Gate (the L-shaped structure to the right), and Santa Maria delle Grazie (top). The wide diagonal road at the centre is present-day Via Zenale; the vineyard lay within the walled area to the right of this.

  This dazzling mural was rediscovered in 1893, when the heavy whitewash which then covered the entire room was removed from one of the walls. (Who whitewashed it in the first place, and for what discernible reason, is not known.) Under the direction of Luca Beltrami (then superintendent of works at the castle) the decor was restored, and the Sala was reopened to the public in 1902. The restoration has been roundly condemned ever since – ‘in some ways almost an act of vandalism’ – because of what seem to be excessive interpolations and additions.140 The obvious interventions were removed in a later restoration (in 1954), but the relationship between what we now see and what Leonardo put there remains veiled.

  One area that escaped the overzealous restorer is a patch of the north-eastern wall, near the window which looks out on to the back of the Salette Negre. It is a monochrome section of under-painting, apparently unfinished. Beltrami thought it a later addition, and had it covered up with a wooden panel, but it is now considered to be the work of an assistant executing a conception direct from the maestro. It shows the roots of a giant tree wrapped powerfully through strata of stone, which seem to be the foundations of an ancient ruined building. One is reminded of Leonardo’s fable about the nut which lodges itself in the crannies of a wall, and germinates, ‘and as the twisted roots grew thicker they began to thrust the walls apart, and force the ancient stones from their places. And then the wall, too late and in vain, bewailed the cause of its destruction.’141

  If this was meant to suggest the rooted strength of the Sforza, events would swiftly give it another meaning. The dynasty celebrated so gorgeously in the spreading foliage of the Sala delle Asse was about to topple and fall, and with it the fortunes of many others, including Leonardo. There had been a note of contentment – the Last Supper completed and acclaimed, the camaraderie of the academy, the quiet pleasures of his garden. The features of that careworn philosopher in the Bramante fresco seem to have lightened a little. But this respite now proves to be brief, as in early 1499 news reaches Milan that the French are mustering an invasion-force under their new king, Louis XII – the former Duc d’Orléans, whose claim to the duchy of Milan Ludovico had unwisely laughed off five years previously.

  ‘SELL WHAT YOU CANNOT TAKE…’

  As the French troops mass on the frontiers of Italy, Leonardo begins to wind up his affairs. On 1 April 1499 he disburses money:

  Salai 20 lire

  For Fazio 2 lire

  Bartolomeo 4 lire

  Arigo 15 lire 142

  Of these, Fazio is probably Fazio Cardano, father of the mathematician Girolamo Cardano: he perhaps appears here as a creditor. The others are assistants: Salai, now nineteen; Bartolomeo, who may be Bramantino; and a certain Arigo, a new name, probably a German like Giulio. (‘Arrigo’ is essentially Harry, from Heinrich; one remembers Leonardo’s German godfather, Arrigo di Giovanni Tedesco.) The name appears again on a list of Leonardo’s dated c. 1506–8.

  On the same sheet, Leonardo grosses up the money in his cash-box, in various coinages – ducats, florins, grossoni, etc. It comes to a total of 1,280 lire. He then wraps the money up in paper packets, some white, some blue. He distributes them around the studio – one near the box where he keeps nails, others at either end of a ‘long shelf’, while in the cash-box itself he places only some ‘handfuls of ambrosini’, Milanese small change, wrapped in a cloth. This is vivid: the maestro arranging a little treasure-hunt; his placing of the coloured packages, just so. He is imagining the robbers or looters – they will be here soon enough. They will find the cash-box, of course, but not the packets casually concealed among the clutter. A cunning plan, though not without elements of that Freudian tic of ‘perseveration’, the disguising or deflecting of stress in fussy repetitive actions.

  In May the French enter Italy; by late July, they have taken Asti and are at the fortress of Arazzo, menacing the edge of the dukedom. Then comes the surprise defection of Gianfrancesco Sanseverino, brother of Galeazzo, at whose house Leonardo’s production of Jupiter and Danae had been performed. A note perhaps belongs to this time of military tension: ‘In the park of the Duke of Milan I saw a 700 pound cannon-ball shot from a height of one braccio. It bounced 28 times, the length of each bounce having the same proportion to the previous one as the height of each bounce had to the next.’143

  ‘On the first day of August 1499’ – Leonardo calmly writes on a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus – ‘I wrote here on movement and weight.’ The page is indeed filled with notes on this subject: studies connected with the mechanical investigations of Madrid I and the physics (‘scientia de ponderibus’) of the Forster notebooks. On the same sheet are sketches and notes for the ‘bath-house of the Duchess’, and in a contemporary notebook, under the heading ‘Bath-house’, he notes, ‘To heat the water for the stove of the Duchess add three parts of hot water to four parts of cold water.’144 The Duchess must be Isabella of Aragon, widow of Gian Galeazzo. She was a neighbour, quartered in another part of the Corte Vecchia, together with her sick son, Francesco, the ‘Duchino’. Perhaps Leonardo’s helpfulness on the matter of her hot-water supply has an overtone of expediency. She was no friend of the Moor, who had kept her a virtual prisoner and whom she suspected of having poisoned her husband; her son would be among the first to be ‘liberated’ after the French occupation. Leonardo was thus close to one who looked forward to the arrival of the invader.

  The French advance continued. Valenza fell on 19 August; next Alessandria. On 30 August Milan was in chaos, as a popular uprising was fomented by the anti-Sforza faction, led by Giangiacomo Trivulzio. The Duke’s treasurer Antonio Landriani was killed. On 2 September, needing no astrologer now to read the signs, Ludovico Sforza fled Milan. He headed north, for Innsbruck, where he hoped to rally support from Emperor Maximilian. The keeper of the castle, Bernardino da Corte, surrendered his post, and on 6 September, with no resistance offered, Milan fell to the French. The following day, the chronicler Corio relates:

  The mob gathered at the house of Ambrogio Curzio, and destroyed it completely, so that almost nothing of value could be found there; and the same was done to the garden of Bergonzio Botta, the Duke’s master of payments, and to the palazzo and stables of Galeazzo Sanseverino, and to the house of Mariolo, Ludovico’s chamberlain, recently built and not yet completed.145

  Leonardo knew all these men and their families. He knew their houses – he was probably the archit
ect of Mariolo’s, just round the corner from his vineyard. He knew each and every one of the terrified horses in Galeazzo’s stables.

  On 6 October Louis XII entered the city in triumph. He remained there about six weeks – dangerous weeks of occupation, especially for those associated with the Moor. Did Leonardo deal with the French? Did he parlay? Almost certainly he did. There is the puzzling case of the ‘Ligny memorandum’, a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus on which he writes, ‘Find Ingil and tell him that you will wait for him at Amor and that you will go to him to Ilopan.’146 The first coded name – in so far as writing it backwards is a code – is ‘Ligni’, who is the French military leader Louis de Luxembourg, Comte de Ligny. It is possible that Leonardo had met him in 1494, when Ligny accompanied his cousin Charles VIII on that earlier, more diplomatic, French incursion into Milan. Now Leonardo wants to speak with him, and indeed to accompany him on some projected expedition to Naples (‘Ilopan’). On the same sheet he determines to ‘get from Jean de Paris the method of colouring a secco, and his method for making tinted paper’. Jean de Paris was the noted French painter Jean Perréal, who had accompanied the expedition. Elsewhere in the Atlanticus is a ‘Memoria a M[aest]ro Leonardo’, in another hand, which exhorts him ‘to produce as soon as possible the report [nota] on conditions in Florence, especially the manner and style in which the reverend father Friar Jeronimo [Savonarola] has organized the state of Florence’.147 This request for political information may belong to the same rapprochement with the French.

  Two years later, back in Florence, Leonardo was painting the Madonna of the Yarnwinder for the French King’s favourite Florimond Robertet, and was turning down other commissions because of certain unspecified ‘obligations’ he had to the King himself. If these reflect personal contact with King Louis and with Robertet, that contact must have been made in Milan in 1499. He may also have met the charismatic Cesare Borgia, ‘Il Valentino’, currently in command of a French squadron, and later his employer in the theatre of war.

  Leonardo remained in Milan until December. The sheet with the Ligny memorandum also contains a list of things to do as he prepares for departure:

  Have 2 boxes made.

  Muleteer’s blankets – or better, use the bedspreads. There are 3 of them, and you will leave one of them at Vinci.

  Take the braziers from the Grazie.

  Get the Theatre of Verona from Giovanni Lombardo.

  Buy tablecloths and towels, caps and shoes, 4 pairs of hose, a chamois jerkin and skins to make others.

  Alessandro’s lathe.

  Sell what you cannot take with you.

  On 14 December he transferred the sum of 600 florins to an account in Florence at the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova. His Milanese bankers were the Dino family; the money was transferred by two bills of exchange for 300 florins each; some weeks would pass before the money was safely deposited in Florence.148 His departure was probably precipitated by rumours of the Moor’s imminent return to Milan. The French leaders had somewhat complacently decamped – Louis XII and Ligny to France; the army under Stuart d’Aubigny and Borgia to Ferrara – and loyalist factions were bruiting the Duke’s return, boosted with Swiss mercenaries and imperial backing from Maximilian.

  In the event the Moor’s comeback was brief and inglorious, but Leonardo did not wait around for it. He was one who had stayed during the French occupation, one who could be said to have ‘collaborated’ with the occupiers. He could not expect much sympathy from a reascendant Moor. It was thus as a fugitive from his former patron, as much as a refugee from circumstances, that Leonardo left Milan in the last days of 1499. The transfer of his savings on 14 December was probably his last act in Milan: the final reckoning, nearly eighteen years after his ambitious arrival with his sheaf of drawings and his custom-built lyre and his retinue of louche young Florentines. It is a different Leonardo who leaves now: forty-seven years old, his chamois jerkin buttoned up against the cold, quitting the uncertain accomplishments of the Sforza years for an even more uncertain future.

  PART SIX

  On the Move

  1500–1506

  Motion is the cause of all life.

  Paris MS H, fol. 141r

  MANTUA AND VENICE

  Leonardo’s first port of call was Mantua, and the court of the young marchioness, Isabella d’Este. He had doubtless met her already in Milan: she was there in 1491, at the wedding of her sister Beatrice to Ludovico, and again in early 1495, when news came of the French victory over Naples – a matter that touched her more nearly because her husband, Francesco Gonzaga, was among those fighting the French. She knew of Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, which she had had sent to her so she could compare it with portraits by the Venetian maestro Giovanni Bellini; and she knew of Leonardo’s musical protégé Atalante Migliorotti, whom she had summoned to Mantua in 1490 to sing the title role in a performance of Poliziano’s Orfeo. In short, she and Leonardo were au courant, though whether there was much personal rapport between them is another matter.

  Isabella d’Este was strong-willed, ferociously cultivated, and very rich. Though only in her mid-twenties, she ruled her court like an imperious maîtresse of a Parisian salon. The d’Este of Ferrara were one of the oldest and most illustrious families in Italy; their fiefdom included Modena, Ancona and Reggio. (There was also a German branch, founded in the late eleventh century, from which are descended the Este-Guelph houses of Brunswick and Hanover, and thence the British royal family.) Isabella was sixteen when, in January 1491, she married Francesco Gonzaga II, Marquis of Mantua, in a diplomatic triple-move of which the other parts were the marriages of her sister to Ludovico and of her brother to Ludovico’s niece Anna. The Gonzaga had been sworn enemies of the Visconti of Milan, but through the marriages of these eligible sisters the Sforza and the Gonzaga were now allies to one another and to Ferrara.

  Isabella arrived in Mantua in style, sailing in an aquatic fantasia down the Po and entering the small, elegant fortress-city in a triumphal carriage, her possessions spilling out of thirteen painted marriage-chests. She swiftly became an icon of this era of conspicuous consumption, an avid and sometimes unscrupulous collector of precious and pretty things. She spoke petulantly of her sister’s fortune – the Sforza were even richer than the Gonzaga, but Beatrice was not a collector. ‘Would to God that we who spend willingly should have so much,’ Isabella said. She built on the Gonzaga collection of gems, cameos and intaglios – small, portable assets which were popular collectables – but in the later 1490s her letters show a broadening of interest. ‘You know how hungry we are for antiquities,’ she writes to her agent in Rome in 1499. And ‘We are now interested in owning some figurines and heads, in bronze and marble.’1 These antiques and figurines were for the display-rooms she was creating in the Gonzaga castle – her famous studiolo and its companion room, the grotta. She began to commission paintings – her interest in Bellini and Leonardo, as evinced in her letter to Cecilia Gallerani, was part of this. Eventually the studiolo was decorated with nine large pictures: elaborate allegories specified by Isabella herself. Two were by the veteran Mantuan court artist Andrea Mantegna, two by Lorenzo Costa of Ferrara, and one by Leonardo’s old stablemate Perugino; but none, despite her efforts, was by Leonardo.

  Isabella was a woman of high intelligence and discernment. She was a patron of poets and musicians, and was an accomplished lutenist herself; the light amorous love-song known as the frottola was a speciality of her soirées. But she was above all a collector, her enthusiasm tending to obsessiveness. Among her possessions when she died in 1539 were 1,241 coins and medals; 72 vases, flasks and cups, of which 55 were of pietre dure (agate, jasper, etc.); some 70 statues and statuettes in bronze, marble and pietre dure, and 13 portrait busts; watches, inlaid boxes, pieces of coral, an astrolabe, a ‘unicorn horn’, and a fish’s tooth ‘three palms long’.2

  Leonardo’s half-length portrait drawing of Isabella, now in the Louvre, was almost certainly done in the winter of 1499�
��1500, while he was her guest at Mantua. One may call it his meal-ticket. It is a finished drawing done in black chalk, red chalk and yellow pastel. It has apparently been cropped at the bottom: an anonymous sixteenth-century copy (Christ Church, Oxford), which is close to the original in every other respect, shows that her hands are resting on a parapet, and that the extended index-finger of her right hand is pointing at a book which is also on the parapet. The drawing’s large format suggests a preparatory cartoon for a painting, so do the perforations around the outline of the image, for transferring it on to the panel. Leonardo never delivered a painted portrait to her, though there is evidence that he started on one – of this lost work, more later.

  Isabella d’Este by Leonardo, 1500

  The drawing presents a subtle contrast between the sweetness of the modelling and the intimated wilfulness in the profile. We see an aristocratic young woman complacent in the knowledge that her wishes will be satisfied by those – the portraitist, for instance – who are paid to satisfy them. The face is a little plump and a little ‘spoilt’: she might be given to pettishness; she might stamp her foot when vexed, or giggle when pleased. That Isabella was a princess of caprices we know from other sources. When her lapdog Aura died in 1512 she called for tributes – and got them, in both Latin and Italian. Machiavelli, a Florentine envoy in Mantua, noted testily that she got up late and received no official visitors before midday. The full profile – the ‘numismatic’ style of coins and medals – presents her in a noble, authoritative mode. The portrait shows both how she wanted to be seen and how Leonardo actually saw her, and so contains an ironic subtext about the expedient flatteries of the artist in need of protection in these difficult days.