Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Leonardo did not stay long in Mantua. He continued on to Venice, probably in February 1500. He was certainly there by mid-March, when he was visited by Lorenzo Guznago. A Ferrarese musician and instrument-maker now resident in Venice, Guznago had previously been at the Sforza court in Milan, and so probably knew Leonardo personally. On 13 March he wrote a letter to Isabella which included the following: ‘Also here in Venice is Leonardo da Vinci, who has shown me the portrait of Your Ladyship, which is very true to nature and beautifully done. It couldn’t possibly be better.’ Behind the curtain of bland superlatives one discerns Leonardo in his lodgings in Venice; and beside him on the easel a portrait of Isabella d’Este. Guznago describes it as a ritratto, which almost certainly means a painting rather than a drawing. (Ritratto can also mean a copy, and in that sense can be a drawing, but this cannot be the meaning of the word here.) This painting may not be finished, but it is substantive enough to be praised as very lifelike and ‘beautifully done’.3

  This lost portrait of Isabella d’Este is of particular interest because it probably contained the first painted version of the hands of the Mona Lisa. The crossed hands of the cartoon – only partially present in the Louvre drawing, but reconstructable from the Christ Church copy (Plate 20) – are almost identical to those more famous hands: the fingers of the right hand and their light placing on the left forearm, which in turn rests flat on a solid surface (the parapet in the drawing, the arm of a chair in the Mona Lisa). Other anticipations of the Mona Lisa are discernible in the drawing. Isabella’s hair is not quite distinct, but its shape – its lack of free fall – suggests that it is covered, as is Mona Lisa’s, with a thin gauzy veil. And the bust is strongly suggestive of the Mona Lisa – the cut of the dress, the first faint indentation of cleavage, the position of the left shoulder – though of course in the Mona Lisa the sitter is turned slightly to her right (or to the left of the picture) while the bust of Isabella is turned to her left. This discrepancy can be removed by looking at the back of the Louvre drawing, where the figure of Isabella shows through in reverse (Plate 21). The image is extraordinary: a ghostly Mona Lisa hovers on the paper (though this is partly the result of staining, which obscures the profile of the face, so that the figure seems to have turned towards us).

  There are many mysteries about the Mona Lisa, but here it seems we have something approaching a fact, which is that certain particulars of her pose and her appearance first appear in a portrait that Leonardo drew, and apparently began painting, in the first months of the year 1500.

  Of Leonardo’s brief sojourn in Venice – his first as far as we know – there are some small but interesting remains. On a much folded, much corrected sheet in the Codex Atlanticus is the draft of a report to the ‘illustrissimi signori’ of the Venetian Senate concerning the possibilities of fortifying the Isonzo river (in the Friuli region north-east of Venice) against the threat of Turkish invasion. This appears to be an official commission. His visit to the area probably took place in early March, before a meeting of the Senate on 13 March at which they nominated certain ‘engineers’ to be sent to the Friuli.4 The folds of the paper suggest that the sheet was carried in Leonardo’s pocket, out in the field. A sketch in red chalk captioned ‘Ponte de Goritia’ and ‘alta vilpagho’ records his presence on the Wippach river near Gorizia. Another location is identified by a later note about the transport of artillery, which should be done ‘in the way I suggested at Gradisca in the Friuli.5

  He affects a clipped, reportorial style: ‘I have carefully examined the conditions of the Isonzo river…’ He records the height of the floodwaters. He talks to the locals – ‘from the country people I have learned that…’ He comments dourly about the force of water being too powerful for man-made structures to resist. Some of his recommendations seem to have been put into practice, for in a late note in the Codex Arundel, referring to the French palace at Romorantin, he writes, ‘Let the sluice be movable, like the one I set up in Friuli.’6

  Another rather different technology interested him in Venice – printing. The city was at the forefront of the new technology of copper-plate engraving, in which the image was etched with corrosive acid (aqua fortis, or strong water) on a sheet of copper. The technique was still at an experimental stage, but Leonardo no doubt understood its potential for the reproduction of his technical drawings. The copper etching had a finesse of line not approachable by the traditional woodcut. It was probably during his stay in 1500 that the ‘academy’ designs were engraved and printed; six early exemplars survive in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Despite this interest, Leonardo remained snobbish about the superiority of the unique painting over the multiple reproductions of print: ‘Painting does not produce endless children as printed books do; she alone is unique, and never gave birth to children who are exactly like her, and this singularity makes her more excellent than those that are published everywhere.’7

  Of other artistic activities we know little. It is probable he met the new young maestro of Venetian painting, Giorgio da Castelfranco, known to the Venetians as Zorzi and to us today as Giorgione – ‘Big George’. Leonardo deeply influenced his work. A painting like The Tempest (c. 1508) is a tribute to Leonardo’s sense of colour and light, his sfumato technique, his dramatic momentary quality. Leonardo’s brief stay in the city in 1500 is a particular moment of interchange within this more general influence.

  In mid-April 1500 news reached Venice from Milan. There had been a brief resurgence of Sforza fortunes in early February, when loyalist troops under Ascanio Sforza and Galeazzo Sanseverino re-entered the city. But the Moor’s bruited return was halted at Novara, and on 10 April his army of Swiss mercenaries was put to flight, and he himself was captured, ignominiously disguised as a servant. By 15 April Milan was back under French control.

  On the inside cover of his pocket-book, Paris MS L, Leonardo jots down a brusque digest of this latest turn of events – the staccato sentences seeming to record this news almost as he hears it:

  The governor of the castle made prisoner.

  Bissconte [i.e. Visconti] dragged away and then his son killed.

  Gian della Rosa robbed of his money.

  Borgonzo began then changed his mind and so ran away from fortune.

  The Duke lost his state, and his goods, and his freedom, and none of his works was completed.

  Some commentators have dated this to September 1499 – the first incursion of the French – but that the Duke has ‘lost… his freedom’ clearly refers to the capture of Ludovico at Novara. The imprisoned castellano is the French governor, who had surrendered the castle to the Milanese in February and was imprisoned when the French recaptured the city on 15 April. Gian della Rosa is probably the Moor’s physician and astrologer Giovanni da Rosate, and Borgonzo is the courtier Bergonzio Botta. Leonardo does not mention the more dramatic fate of his friend the architect Giacomo Andrea. He was imprisoned by the French as a pro-Sforza conspirator, and despite influential pleas, was beheaded and quartered at the castle on 12 May. One infers that this had not yet happened when Leonardo wrote this note.

  It was indeed true that the Moor had lost his freedom. He was taken to France and imprisoned at Loches, in the Touraine, and there he remained until his death, half-mad from captivity, eight years later. That ‘none of his works was completed’ is at once a reflection on the mutability of political fortunes and a more personal underlining of the abandonment of the Sforza Horse. Later he would learn of the vandalizing of the clay model of the Horse by French archers, as recorded by the chronicler Sabba Castiglione. ‘I remember,’ wrote Castiglione nearly fifty years later, ‘and with sadness and anger I say it now, this noble and ingenious work being used as a target by Gascon crossbowmen.’8

  If Leonardo had been intending to return to Milan, these latest upheavals probably convinced him otherwise. Imprisonments, confiscations, murders. Sometime soon after 15 April he scribbles down these dire bits of news on a notebook cover. By 24 April he is in Florence.

>   BACK IN FLORENCE

  On 24 April 1500 Leonardo withdrew 50 florins from his account at Santa Maria Nuova. He was back in Florence after an absence of eighteen years.9 He found much that was familiar. His father, now in his mid-seventies, was still a practising notary, and still living in Via Ghibellina not far from the site of Verrocchio’s old bottega. Perhaps the difficulties between the two were by now resolved: the boy had proved himself, and anyway the father had his legitimate children – eleven of them now, the youngest born just a couple of years earlier. The resentments between them had no particular focus any more, though they had perhaps become ingrained. Did Leonardo tell him of the last days of Caterina? Did Ser Piero wish to know?

  In the artistic world some of the old faces had gone – the Pollaiuolo brothers were both dead, as was Domenico Ghirlandaio – but Leonardo’s former colleague Lorenzo di Credi still ran the workshop he had inherited from Verrocchio, and down on Via della Porcellana Botticelli was still painting in his rarefied and now old-fashioned style. And in the offing – a name but not yet a face, for in 1500 he was down in Rome – was the arrogant new star, the magistrate’s son from Caprese, Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti, now twenty-five years old, and putting the finishing touches to his first sculptural masterpiece, the Pietà.

  But something had gone from Florentine life with the eclipse – temporary though it would prove – of the Medici. These were the gloomy years after the Savonarolan theocracy, that ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ which had eventually engulfed Savonarola himself, hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria on 23 May 1498. It was a time of financial crisis. Several of the guilds were on the verge of bankruptcy; taxes rose as a costly and ill-conducted war with Pisa – ceded to the French in 1494 – strained the resources of the treasury.

  Gingerly Leonardo takes his place amid the familiar but altered landmarks of his youth. It is a time of uncertainty, a new beginning amid old haunts. To the Florentine eye he is strange and capricious. ‘Leonardo’s life’, an observer reports in early 1501, ‘is extremely irregular and haphazard [varia et inderminata], and he seems to live from day to day.’10

  Though strange, Leonardo returned an acknowledged master, a famous man – the Last Supper his crowning achievement, the Sforza Horse his magnificent failure – and he did not lack offers of work. According to Vasari he was swiftly accommodated as a guest of the Servite friars of the church of Santissima Annunziata:

  When Leonardo returned to Florence he found that the Servite friars had commissioned Filippino [Lippi] to paint an altarpiece for the high altar of the Annunziata. Leonardo remarked that he would gladly have undertaken this work himself, and when Filippino heard this, like the good-hearted person he was, he decided to withdraw. Then the friars, to secure Leonardo’s services, took him into their house, and met all his expenses and those of his household.

  The Santissima Annunziata, abutting on to the Medici sculpture-garden at San Marco, was one of the richest churches in Florence. The mother church of the Servite order, founded in Florence in the early thirteenth century, it had been remodelled by Michelozzo in the 1460s to accommodate the pilgrims who came to view a certain miraculous image of the Virgin. Lorenzo’s father, Piero de’ Medici, had financed these improvements: the tabernacle which contains the holy image bears the inappropriate-seeming inscription ‘Costò fior. 4 mila el marmo solo’ (‘The marble alone cost 4000 florins’). The monastery’s notary was Ser Piero da Vinci, and this may have been a factor behind the hospitality offered to Leonardo and his ‘household’.11

  On 15 September 1500 the Servites commissioned a large gilded frame for the altarpiece from the architect and woodworker Baccio d’Agnolo. The specified measurements of the frame show that the painting was to be 5 braccia high by 3 wide (about 10 feet by 6 feet) – larger than any previous panel painting by Leonardo.12

  Vasari continues:

  He kept them waiting a long time without even starting anything, then he finally did the cartoon showing Our Lady with St Anne and the Infant Christ. This work not only won the astonished admiration of all the artists, but when it was finished for two days it attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.

  This gives us a remarkable glimpse of Leonardo’s prestige at this time. The completion of a Leonardo cartoon is something with the buzz of a theatrical ‘first night’; crowds form in the normally quiet cloisters of the Santissima Annunziata.

  The cartoon itself is lost. It is patently not the famous Burlington House cartoon in the National Gallery in London (p. 427), which was drawn some years later and which differs in composition. There is an eyewitness account of the Annunziata cartoon, written in April 1501 by Fra Pietro Novellara, vicar-general of the Carmelites. He describes the drawing as ‘not yet finished’, so his sight of it seems to pre-date the public viewing described by Vasari. Writing to Isabella d’Este about Leonardo’s activities, Novellara says:

  Since he has been in Florence he has only done one drawing, in a cartoon. It shows an infant Christ, of about one year old, almost escaping from the arms of his mother. He has got hold of a lamb and seems to be squeezing it. The mother, almost raising herself from the lap of St Anne, holds on to the child in order to draw him away from the lamb, which signifies the Passion. Saint Anne is rising somewhat from her seat; it seems that she wants to restrain her daughter from trying to separate the child from the lamb, which perhaps symbolizes the Church’s desire that the Passion should not be impeded from running its course. These figures are life-size, but the cartoon is not so large because they are all seated or leaning over, and each figure is partly in front of another, towards the left-hand side. This drawing is not yet finished.13

  This cartoon, unfinished in April 1501, is doubtless the one referred to by Vasari as drawing astonished crowds when it was completed. Annoyingly, however, Vasari’s description of it is different: ‘The virgin… is holding the infant Christ tenderly on her lap, and she lets her pure gaze fall on St John, who is depicted as a little boy playing with a lamb.’ This tallies neither with Novellara’s description (which features the lamb but no St John) nor with the extant London cartoon (which features St John but no lamb). The explanation is not hard to find, for Vasari adds that the Annunziata cartoon ‘was subsequently taken to France’, which is almost Vasarian shorthand for saying that he had not actually seen it. I suspect his description of the cartoon (like his description of the Mona Lisa which follows immediately after this passage) is cooked up from other accounts. Thus Novellara’s is the only dependable record of the 1501 cartoon.

  Though it differs in detail from the Burlington House cartoon, the cartoon described by Novellara is remarkably similar to the composition of the finished painting of the Virgin and Child with St Anne now in the Louvre. The painting itself dates from the end of the decade, c. 1510, so it appears that the Annunziata cartoon is a lost prototype of the later painting, and the London cartoon an intermediate variation. There are various smaller pen-and-ink studies of this group. Two of these (in the Accademia, Venice, and in a private collection in Geneva) may be related to the Annunziata cartoon: indeed, the Geneva drawing has a very faded annotation on the verso, in a sixteenth-century hand, which has been read as ‘Leonardo alla Nuntiata [i.e. Annunziata]’.14

  This is complicated, as Leonardo tends to be, but the upshot is that this subject of the Madonna and her mother, St Anne – this family group from which, the psychologist notes, the father is rigorously excluded – was one that Leonardo returned to repeatedly over a period of about ten years. The lost cartoon of 1501, the London cartoon of c. 1508, the Louvre painting of c. 1510, the smaller sketches of various periods – these are variations on a compositional theme, recurrent wheelings around a central image. This becomes a norm with Leonardo now – these long, slow evolutions, these masterpieces dense with recurrence: the Mona Lisa, the Leda, the Baptist.


  Leonardo ‘kept them waiting a long time’ before producing the cartoon of the Virgin and St Anne, says Vasari, and we can fill in some of his other activities at this time.

  In the summer of 1500 we glimpse him in the hills south of Florence, sketching the villa or country-house of the Florentine merchant Angelo del Tovaglia. This was probably in early August – a good time to be out of the city – for on 11 August a drawing he had done of the house was sent to the Marquis of Mantua, Leonardo’s host a few months previously. Tovaglia was one of the Marquis’s agents in Florence; the villa stood in the hills south of the city, with superb views over the Val d’Ema. As we gather from the letter that accompanied the drawing, the Marquis had been a guest there a couple of years previously, and had a whim to build a replica of it near Mantua.15 A large folio at Windsor is probably a pupil’s copy of this drawing. It shows an imposing house in ‘rusticated’ stone, a colonnaded loggia, a terrace and a garden. A drawing in the Codex Arundel, also not by Leonardo, seems to be a detail of the loggia, with some variation in the design of the columns.16

  Looking at the loggia in the Windsor drawing, one notices that it is open at the back, enclosed only by a low wall on a level with the sills of the ground-floor windows. It looks rather like the sort of loggia on which Mona Lisa sits, which is discernible as a low balustrade behind her, with – just visible at either side of the painting – two rounded pediments suggestive of two columns outside the picture space (or possibly lost owing to a cutting-down of the picture). Raphael’s sketch for his portrait of Maddalena Doni, which is generally believed to have been based on a drawing of the Mona Lisa, shows the loggia setting more clearly, though the line of the balustrade is higher in relation to the sitter than it is in the Mona Lisa. Part of the latter’s complex and eerie charm is its slightly surreal double point-of-view, in which the landscape is seen from an implicitly aerial viewpoint but the woman herself is viewed as if you are standing in front of her. Like the cartoon of Isabella d’Este, those views over the Val d’Ema, framed by the columns of the loggia of Tovaglia’s villa, may be another of the ghostly sources of the Mona Lisa.