Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Leonardo was also called on at this time as a consultant engineer. The church of San Salvatore dell’Osservanza overlooking Florence had suffered structural damage – ‘breakings of the walls’, in Leonardo’s phrase – owing to slippage in the hillside beneath it. A summary of his recommendations is found in the Florentine state archives: ‘Concerning S. Salvatore and the remedies required, Lionardo da Vinci said he has furnished a plan which shows the problem of the buildings in relation to the water-courses, which flow between the strata of rock to the point where the brick-factory is, and… where the strata have been cut is where the defect is.’17 The decision to renovate the drainage-system and the water-channels – as recommended by Leonardo – was taken by the planners on 22 March 1501.

  In the early months of 1501 Leonardo took a brief trip to Rome: as far as is known, his first visit – the disappointment of twenty years earlier, when he was passed over by the commissioners of the Sistine Chapel, not quite forgotten. All that is known of the visit is to be found on a folio of the Codex Atlanticus, which has a note: ‘a roma attivoli vecchio casa dadriano’, and then lower down a note dated 10 March 1501 about changing money, written in a shaky hand suggestive of being in a cart or on horseback.18 This suggests he was in Rome in early 1501, and that while there he visited the ruins of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. The folio also contains a sketch of a circular fortress by a river with a four-pier bridge, which is probably the Castel Sant’Angelo. Several pieces of antique sculpture were excavated at Tivoli in March 1501 – the Muses, now in the Prado in Madrid – and Leonardo may have seen them. He no doubt met up with Bramante, who was beginning his great unfinished project of redesigning St Peter’s. He also put together a series of designs of antique buildings and sculptures, in a ‘book’ which is now lost but which was seen by an anonymous Milanese artist who copied some of its drawings and annotated a view of the Teatro Maritimo at Hadrian’s villa, ‘This is a temple which was in a book of Maestro Leonardo’s, which was done at Rome.’19

  Mantua, Venice, Florence, Rome – this is the restless, peripatetic tone of Leonardo’s life in these first uncertain years of the new century.

  THE INSISTENT MARCHIONESS

  Back in Florence after that brief interlude in Rome, Leonardo returns to the Santissima Annunziata, and in early April 1501 he has a meeting with the well-connected churchman Fra Pietro Novellara, vicar-general of the Carmelites, who comes bearing somewhat peremptory requests from Isabella d’Este. Novellara’s brief role as the Marchioness’s message-bearer opens up a window on to Leonardo’s circumstances and activities, and indeed his mentality, in Florence in 1501. The story, with its curious theme of pursuit and evasion, is told in three letters here translated in full for the first time.20

  Isabella d’Este to Fra Pietro Novellara; Mantua, 29 March 1501

  Most reverend,

  If Leonardo Fiorentino the painter is to be found there in Florence, we beg you to discover what his situation is, and whether he has got under way with any work, as I hear that he has, and what work it is, and if you think he is likely to be staying there for some time. Thus Your Reverence could sound him out, as you know how, as to whether he intends to take up the commission to paint a picture for our study: if he is willing to do it, we will leave to his judgement both the theme of the picture and the date of delivery. And if you find him reluctant, you could at least try to persuade him to do me a little picture of the Madonna, in that devout and sweet style which is his natural gift. Would you also ask him to be so good as to send me another sketch of his portrait of us, since His Lordship our consort has given away the one he left here. If all this is done I will be very grateful to you, and to Leonardo himself for what he offers me…

  Fra Pietro Novellara to Isabella d’Este; Florence, 3 April 1501

  Most illustrious and excellent Lady,

  I have just received Your Ladyship’s letter, and will attend to your requests with all speed and diligence, but from what I understand Leonardo’s life is extremely irregular and haphazard, and he seems to live from day to day. Since he has been in Florence he has only done one drawing, in a cartoon… [There follows the description of the Virgin and Child with St Anne cartoon quoted in the previous chapter.] He has not done anything else, though two of his assistants make copies, and he from time to time adds some touches to them. He devotes much of his time to geometry, and has no fondness at all for the paintbrush. I am writing this only so Your Ladyship should know that I have received your letter. I will do what you ask and advise Your Ladyship as soon as possible.

  Fra Pietro Novellara to Isabella d’Este; Florence, 14 April 1501

  Most illustrious and excellent Lady,

  During this Holy Week I have learned of the intentions of Leonardo the painter, by means of his pupil Salai and some others who are close to him, and to make his intentions clear they brought him to me on Holy Wednesday [7 April]. In short, his mathematical experiments have distracted him so much from painting that he cannot abide the paintbrush. I apprised him of Your Ladyship’s wishes and found him very willing to satisfy them, for the kindness you showed him at Mantua. We spoke freely, and arrived at this conclusion – that if he could free himself from his obligations to His Majesty the King of France without incurring disfavour, as he hoped to do within a month at the most, he would sooner serve Your Ladyship than anyone else in the world. In any event, once he has completed a little picture he is doing for a certain Robertet, a favourite of the King of France, he will immediately undertake the portrait, and send it to Your Excellency. I gave him two tokens to encourage him [dui boni sollicitadori]. The little picture he is working on is a Madonna who is seated as if she intended to spin yarn, and the Child has placed his foot in the basket of yarns, and has grasped the yarnwinder, and stares attentively at the four spokes, which are in the form of a cross, and as if he were longing for this cross he smiles and grips it tightly, not wishing to yield it to his mother, who appears to want to take it away from him. This is as much as I could get from him. Yesterday I delivered my sermon. May God grant that it bears fruits as plentiful as were its auditors.

  These letters give us a glimpse of Leonardo the elusive celebrity. The meeting is fixed up through Salai, as if his personal secretary. The churchman is treated with politeness and evasion. Leonardo is ‘brought’ to him, they reach a ‘conclusion’, but when he comes to write to Her Ladyship he finds that the fruits of the meeting were not, after all, very plentiful: ‘This is as much as I could get from him.’

  We learn also about Leonardo’s circumstances: that he is sick of painting, and ‘cannot abide the paintbrush’; that he spends his time on mathematical and geometrical studies, continuing the influence of Luca Pacioli (who would himself be billeted in Florence shortly after this). And we find a confirmation of Leonardo’s dealings with the French, presumably before

  The Madonna of the Yarnwinder (Reford version), by Leonardo and assistants, c. 1501–4.

  his departure from Milan, for he describes himself as under an ‘obligation’ to King Louis. It is hard to know what this obligation is: perhaps it is no more than the painting Novellara goes on to describe, which is for the King’s ‘favourite’ Florimond Robertet.21 Novellara may be exaggerating Leonardo’s commitment a little: he is anxious not to give the impression that Leonardo is flatly rejecting the Marchioness’s overtures.

  This ‘little picture’ on which Leonardo was working in early 1501 was the Madonna of the Yarnwinder. The painting is known in various versions, of which two – both in private collections – have a claim to be partly in the hand of the maestro. These are conveniently known as the Reford and Buccleuch versions, though in fact the former is no longer in the Reford collection in Montreal, but in a private collection in New York, and the latter is – at the time of writing – no longer hanging on the staircase of the Duke of Buccleuch’s country seat, Drumlanrig Castle, having been stolen in August 2003 by two men posing as tourists.22 CCTV footage shows the painting being carried off un
der one of the men’s coats as they walk towards a white car, an echo of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 in which she left the gallery under the workman’s ‘smock’ of Vincenzo Perugia. These thefts have an overtone of abduction – indeed, Perugia kept the Mona Lisa in his room for two years, hidden in a box under the stove, which is almost more a kidnapping than a theft.

  Novellara’s description of the painting is concise and accurate, but curious for its detail of the ‘basket of yarns’ at the child’s foot, which is not found in any of the known versions. X-rays and infra-red reflectograms have revealed no trace of it, though the examination of the Reford painting did turn up an interesting pentimento – a curious flat-roofed building with a door or long window in the façade, placed in the middle distance to the left of the Madonna’s head.23 This was painted over, to become part of the gorgeous hazy landscape of river and rock that stretches off to the ice-blue mountains in the distance. In this landscape one discerns another anticipatory frisson of the Mona Lisa. There is in fact a precise echo: in both landscapes there is a long arched bridge spanning the lower reaches of the river (Plate 22). This is often identified with Ponte Buriano, near Arezzo, an area Leonardo travelled and indeed mapped in the summer of 1502.24

  The iconography of the yarnwinder seems to be original to Leonardo, though it is part of a convention of the Christ-child contemplating symbols of his future Passion, as in Leonardo’s early Florentine panels where the symbols are flowers – the blood-red carnation of the Munich Madonna and Child, the cruciform bitter cress of the Benois Madonna. Leonardo imbues the note of prophecy with his characteristic drama, the momentum of the moment – the flowing motion of the child towards the miniature cross, towards the picture-edge, towards the future; the protective motion of the mother’s hand, seemingly arrested in a trance-like instant of tragic premonition. The modelling of the figures is faultless: this is the first figurative painting that we know of since the completion of the Last Supper four years previously, and it continues that painting’s precise and learned depiction of significant gesture: the moti mentali. None of this alters one’s feeling that the painting teeters on the edge of lushness: of all Leonardo’s autograph works, this comes closest to the plumped-up sentimentality of

  Fra Pietro Novellara to Isabella d’Este, 14 April 1501.

  the ‘Leonardesco’. The Madonna’s extended hand echoes that of the Virgin of the Rocks, but is no longer a gesture of benediction. And the face has changed: the willowy girl in that enchanted grotto has become fleshier, broad-faced, more worldly. An innocence has gone.

  In July the Marchioness was back on the offensive. She sent a personal letter to Leonardo, no longer extant. It was delivered to him by another of her go-betweens, one Manfredo de’ Manfredi, as appears from the latter’s report to Isabella, dated 31 July 1501:

  I have delivered into his own hand the letter to Leonardo Fiorentino which Your Ladyship recently sent me. I gave him to understand that if he wished to reply I could forward his letters on to Your Ladyship and thus save his costs; he read your letter and said he would do so, but hearing nothing more from him I finally sent one of my men to him to learn what he wished to do. He sent back answer that for now he was not in a position to send another reply to Your Ladyship, but that I should advise you that he has already begun work on that which Your Ladyship wanted from him. In short, this is as much as I have been able to get from the said Leonardo.25

  One sympathizes with Manfredo, caught between Isabella’s irresistible acquisitiveness and Leonardo’s immovable reluctance. The picture which Her Ladyship ‘wanted from him’ could be either her portrait or the painting for her studiolo which she speaks of in her letter to Novellara. Manfredo assures her that Leonardo has ‘begun work’ on it; if he is referring to the portrait, this will not much satisfy the Marchioness, who knows that Leonardo began work on it over a year ago. There is something heartening about Leonardo’s aloofness, his refusal to dance to the tune of patronage. He was not in immediate need: he was comfortably billeted at the Annunziata, with his ‘expenses met’ out of the Servites’ capacious coffers; he had a commission, and perhaps other promises, from the French court. He wanted head-space for all the other pursuits of his life: for the mathematics and geometry which promise him ‘supreme certainty’; for the mechanical and technological interests which slowly fill the pages of the Madrid codices; and for the great dream of flight which is never far from his mind – the journey ‘from one element to another’, the journey away from all this chatter.

  On 19 November 1501 he draws out another 50 florins from his savings at Santa Maria Nuova.26 In May 1502, further to another request from Isabella, he views and values some antique vases formerly owned by the Medici. ‘I showed them to Leonardo Vinci the painter,’ writes yet another of her agents, Francesco Malatesta, on 12 May. ‘He praised all of them, but especially the crystal one, because it is all of one piece and very clear… and Leonardo said that he had never seen a better piece.’27 And between these casually documented markers of the artist’s day-to-day life, between the visit to the bank and the viewing at the antique-dealer’s showroom, there fell a day of more personal and more ambiguous import: on 15 April 1502 Leonardo turned fifty.

  BORGIA

  Leonardo’s opinion on the Medici vases, delivered to Francesco Malatesta in May 1502, is the last we hear of him in Florence this year. In early summer he is on the move again. He has a new employer: Cesare Borgia, illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, a byword for ruthlessness and cunning, the model for Machiavelli’s ‘prince’. Tales of murder, debauchery and incest cluster round his family: his younger sister Lucrezia Borgia has a particularly lethal reputation. Some of it is mythology; some of it is not. Like the Moor, but even more so, Borgia was not a patron for the squeamish. Freud believed that these strong men to whom Leonardo gravitated were substitutes for the absent father of his childhood.

  The Borgia family, originally Borja, was of Spanish origin (and bullfighting was one of Cesare’s macho accomplishments). In 1492 Cardinal Rodrigo Borja ascended the papal throne as Alexander VI. Sixty years old, he was a notorious libertine and was fanatically devoted to the advancement of his illegitimate children. A portrait of him by Pinturicchio shows a bald, jowly man in a sumptuous robe kneeling unconvincingly before a holy image. Guicciardini said of him, ‘He was perhaps more evil, and more lucky, than any other pope before him… He had in the fullest measure all the vices of the flesh and of the spirit.’28 The Florentine Guicciardini was hardly neutral, but his judgement is echoed by others.

  Cesare was Rodrigo’s son by his Roman mistress, Giovanna or Vanozza Cattanei. He was born in 1476; Lucrezia was born to the same mother four years later. He was made a cardinal at the age of seventeen, though a visitor to his palazzo at Trastevere found his style anything but churchy: ‘He was ready to go hunting, dressed in very secular silk and heavily armed… He is intelligent and charming, and bears himself like a great prince. He is lively and merry and loves society. This cardinal has never had any inclination for priesthood, but his benefices bring him in more than 16,000 ducats a year.’29 In 1497 his younger brother Giovanni was found floating in the Tiber with his throat cut: the first of many murders attributed to Cesare. It was said that Cesare envied his brother’s secular powers (he was Duke of Gandia), whereas he had been given only church benefices. In 1498 he ‘doffed the purple’ in order to become captain-general of the Church, essentially commander of the papal troops. In France he negotiated an alliance between the Pope and the new king, Louis XII. In 1499 he married Louis’s cousin, Charlotte d’Albret, and was created Duke of Valentinois; from this comes his Italian sobriquet Il Valentino, by which he was generally known to his contemporaries. In this year he was part of the French invasion force into Italy, and entered Milan alongside Louis XII. It was probably then that Leonardo first met him: twenty-three years old, tall and powerful, with blazing blue eyes; a brilliant soldier, a ruthless aspirer. His motto, recalling his imperial names
ake, was ‘Aut Caesar aut nullus’ – ‘Caesar or nothing’.

  Borgia’s plan, for which Louis promised military support, was the conquest of the Romagna, a sprawling and lawless region north of Rome which was nominally under the suzerainty of the Pope but was in effect controlled by independent princelings and prelates. Over the next few months, with a large detachment of French troops, Borgia established a power-base in central Italy, brilliantly creating, as Machiavelli later saw it, a de facto ‘principality’ out of a hitherto formless region. By the end of 1500 he was master of Imola, Forli, Pesaro, Rimini and Cesena. Faenza fell to him in spring 1501, giving him control of Florence’s chief trade-route to the Adriatic. Swaggering under the new title of Duke of Romagna, Borgia now advanced threateningly on Florence itself. The republic parleyed nervously, with the upshot that Borgia was ‘engaged’ as a condottiere at the enormous salary of 30,000 ducats per annum – a Florentine spin on what was essentially the payment of protection-money. Borgia moved off, down to the Tyrrhenian coast, where he added the port-town of Piombino to his possessions.