Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  For a while things were quiet, but in the early summer of 1502 came disquieting news. On 4 June the city of Arezzo rose unexpectedly against Florentine dominion, and declared for Borgia. A couple of weeks later, in one of his characteristic lightning-strikes, Borgia took Urbino, expelling his former ally Guidobaldo da Montefeltro. A Florentine envoy, Francesco Soderini, Bishop of Volterra, was swiftly sent to Borgia at Urbino, and with him went a high-flying civil servant in his early thirties, Niccolò Machiavelli.

  In a dispatch of 26 June Machiavelli recounted their audience with Borgia.30 Darkness had fallen; the doors of the palace were locked and guarded; the Duke was in peremptory mood, demanding ‘clear sureties’ of Florence’s intentions. ‘I know your city is not well-minded towards me but would abandon me like an assassin,’ he said. ‘If you refuse me for a friend you shall know me for an enemy.’ The envoys murmured assurances and requested the withdrawal of the Duke’s troops from Arezzo. The atmosphere was electric with tension, and Machiavelli’s dispatch concludes in a tone of awestruck fascination:

  This Duke is so enterprising that nothing is too great to be discounted by him. For the sake of glory and the enlarging of his dominions, he deprives himself of rest, yielding to no fatigue, no danger. He arrives in one place before anyone knows he has left the other, he gains the good will of his soldiers, he attracts to him the best men in Italy, and he has constant good luck. For all these reasons he is victorious and formidable.

  Machiavelli was back in Florence by the end of the month. Not long after came the news that the ‘formidable’ Duke had taken Camerino and was setting his sights on Bologna.

  It is in this context that Leonardo enters Cesare Borgia’s service in the summer of 1502. Borgia was not nominally Florence’s enemy, but he was a very dangerous and unpredictable new neighbour. Already stretched at Pisa, the Florentines could not expect to resist him if he chose to invade; the French, now alarmed by this voracious new baron they had in part created, were promising Florence money and soldiers, but could not be relied on. A game of rapprochement was Florence’s only immediate tactic: it was imperative to maintain contact with him, to ‘know him thoroughly’ as the Renaissance saying went. We do not know how or exactly when Leonardo entered Borgia’s employ, but it is plausible that his services were offered to Borgia by Soderini and Machiavelli – an offer of technical assistance which has also an overtone of intelligence-gathering. For Borgia, who attracts ‘the best men in Italy’, Leonardo is a skilled military engineer; for the Florentines he is a pair of eyes and ears – ‘our man’ at the court of Il Valentino.31

  Leonardo’s movements can be tracked with the aid of the pocket-book he carried with him through this summer, Paris MS L, though the chronology is not always clear. On the notebook’s first page is a memorandum list which shows him putting together some of the necessary kit – compasses, a sword-belt, soles for boots, a light hat, a ‘swimming-belt’, and a leather jerkin. Also ‘a book of white paper for drawing’ and some charcoal. Another memo list, on a loose sheet now in the Codex Arundel, is probably contemporary. It begins, ‘Where is Valentino?’ (One recalls Machiavelli’s comment about Borgia’s lightning-fast progress: he is ‘in one place before anyone knows he has left the other’.) This list includes an item, ‘sostenacolo delli ochiali’, which might be either a frame for spectacles or a support for some optical device for mapping and surveying. (If the former, it is the first hint of the failing eyesight which becomes a problem in later years.) The list also mentions certain senior Florentines, including the diplomat Francesco Pandolfini, again suggesting a semi-official overtone to Leonardo’s Borgia adventure.32

  Leonardo was in Urbino by late July 1502, but his route there was circuitous – a rapid swing through various parts of the scattered Borgia dominion: a research trip. The first leg of the journey takes him down to the Mediterranean coast, to Piombino, then a recent Borgia conquest, now a small town through which tourists hurry to board the car-ferry to the island of Elba. His notes concern the town’s fortifications and the capacity of the port. A note on the movement of waves is recorded as ‘fatta al mare di Piombino’. Some sketches show the coastline round Populonia, suggesting he travelled down the coast-road from Livorno.33 From Piombino he cuts inland, eastward to rebel-held Arezzo, where he perhaps meets for the first time Borgia’s confederate Vitellozzo Vitelli. Thence the road leads up into the highlands of the Apennines, where he gathers some of the topographical data that will later appear in his maps of the region. He perhaps saw at this time the graceful five-arched bridge spanning the Arno at Buriano, and the dramatic chimney-stack rocks, the Baize, which characterize the upper Arno valley from Laterina to Pian di Sco. It has been argued that this bridge and this landscape can be seen in the backgrounds of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder and the Mona Lisa.34 The visual parallels are strong, and the dating is right, though the mountains of Leonardo’s landscapes (first seen as early as the Madonna of the Carnation of c. 1474) are a synthesis of many viewpoints, both real and imaginary.

  In Urbino, at the great honey-coloured palazzo of the Montefeltro, he meets again the charismatic Duke: it is nearly three years since they had met in Milan, and the years are marked on their faces. In his pocket-book Leonardo sketches the staircase of the palace and notes an interesting dovecote.35 Maddening yet rather wonderful these tranquil, tangential observations: there is so much we want to know about his months at the court of the Borgia, and so little that he tells us. Apart from his query ‘Where is Valentino?’, Leonardo’s only mention of Borgia (or ‘Borges’, as he writes it) concerns a manuscript: ‘Borges will get me the Archimedes of the Bishop of Padua, and Vitellozzo the one at Borgo di San Sepolcro.’36 These manuscripts are the spoils of war: intellectual plunder. A red-chalk drawing of a bearded, heavy-lidded man, shown from three angles, is probably a portrait of Borgia.

  Red-chalk portrait by Leonardo believed to show Cesare Borgia.

  Niccolò Machiavelli in the portrait by Santi di Tito at the Palazzo Vecchio.

  They were not together long, for at the end of July Borgia travelled north to Milan to reassert his former friendship with Louis XII. Perhaps Leonardo hoped to go with him, but he did not. Instead, no doubt with specific instructions, he embarked on a brisk tour of Borgia’s eastern territories. The itinerary can be reconstructed from a series of brief dated notes:

  30 July – ‘the dove-cote at Urbino’.

  1 August – ‘in the library at Pesaro’.

  8 August – ‘make harmonies out of the different falls of water as you saw in the fountain at Rimini on the 8th day of August’.

  10 August – ‘At the Feast of San Lorenzo at Cesena’.

  15 August – ‘On St Mary’s day in the middle of August at Cesena’.37

  At Cesena, the capital of the Romagna, his notebook is much in use. The place is picturesque, the customs particular. A drawing of a window is captioned, ‘Window at Cesena: a for the frame made of linen, b for the window made of wood, the rounding at the top is a quarter of a circle.’ Elsewhere he draws a hook with two bunches of grapes – ‘This is how they carry grapes in Cesena’ – and remarks, with his artist’s eye, that the workmen digging moats group themselves into a pyramid.38 He notes a rustic communication-system: ‘The shepherds in the Romagna, at the foot of the Apennines, make large cavities in the mountains in the form of a horn, and in part of this they place a real horn, and this little horn combines with the cavity they have made, and produces a huge sound.’39 The land is flat: he considers the possibility of windmills, still unknown in Italy. And he criticizes the local design of carts, which have two small wheels in the front and two high ones behind: this is ‘very unfavourable to their momentum because there is too much weight on the front wheels’. This failing earns a sneer for this backward, broken-down region: the Romagna is ‘capo d’ogni grossezza d’ingegno’ – ‘the chief realm of all idiocy’.40 The tone is untypical; his mood is brittle.

  On 18 August 1502 an impressively florid document
was drawn up – Leonardo’s passport. This was inscribed at Pavia, where Borgia was with the French court.

  Caesar Borgia of France, by the grace of God Duke of Romagna and Valence, Prince of the Adriatic, Lord of Piombino etc., also Gonfalonier and Captain General of the Holy Roman Church: to all our lieutenants, castellans, captains, condottieri, officials, soldiers and subjects to whom this notice is presented. We order and command that the bearer hereof, our most excellent and well-beloved architect and general engineer Leonardo Vinci, who by our commission is to survey the places and fortresses of our states, should be provided with all such assistance as the occasion demands and his judgement deems fit.41

  The document gives Leonardo freedom to travel within Borgia’s dominions, with expenses paid ‘for him and for his’ – we perhaps discern Tommaso and Salai in this formula. He should be ‘received with friendship and permitted to view, measure and carefully survey whatever he wants’. Other engineers ‘are hereby constrained to confer with him and conform with his opinion’. It is a document to be flourished at roadblocks and checkpoints, at suspicious sentries and officious castellans – a reminder of the dangers out here on the frontiers of the new Borgia fiefdom.

  Armed with these powers, Leonardo involves himself in various fortification works at Cesena and at Porto Cesenatico on the Adriatic. A sketch of the latter’s harbour and canal is dated 6 September 1502 at nine o’clock in the morning.42 Then Borgia returns from Milan and the campaigns begin again. A note in the Codex Atlanticus suggests that Leonardo was present at the taking of Fossombrone on 11 October. And a vivid anecdote in Luca Pacioli’s De viribus quantitatis gives us a glimpse of Leonardo on the march with Borgia’s troops:

  One day Cesare Valentino, Duke of Romagna and present Lord of Piombino, found himself and his army at a river which was 24 paces wide, and could find no bridge, nor any material to make one except for a stack of wood all cut to a length of 16 paces. And from this wood, using neither iron nor rope nor any other construction, his noble engineer made a bridge sufficiently strong for the army to pass over.43

  The measurements have been rounded out to make a mathematical point, but the story may well be authentic. Borgia’s ‘noble engineer’ can only be Leonardo, who is presumably the source of the story: he and Pacioli were together in Florence in 1503.

  There emerges from this period a sense of strenuousness. Leonardo tracks between these occupied towns and cities, these fortresses and castles, and all the long miles in between, the commandeered inns, and the dawn departures, and the middays sheltering from the sun. He has thrown himself into a world of physical technical work: pacing out measurements, recording currents, examining fortresses – the disciple of experience on the road, with his quadrant and his spectacles and his notebook. One senses an impatient putting-aside of the comfortable urban life of the last twenty years, in which – as it seemed to him – so much had been begun and so little completed. One senses again the Leonardo who advises the painter to ‘quit your home in town’, to ‘leave your family and friends, and go over the mountains and valleys’ and ‘expose yourself to the fierce heat of the sun’. But we can also suspect that Leonardo’s service of the Borgia was accompanied by a deep ambivalence about the nature of his employer and of the destruction and violence he was helping to spread as the Borgia’s well-beloved military engineer. War is ‘the most brutal kind of madness there is’, Leonardo once wrote,44 and during these months of 1502 he saw something of it at first hand. Hence those momentary notations in his notebook, in one sense fragments yet also complete in themselves – a dovecote, a fountain, a bunch of grapes, or those notes which simply say, ‘I am here, on this day’, and perhaps, given that tinge of danger that seeps into everything that Borgia touches, ‘I am still alive.’

  AUTUMN IN IMOLA

  As the summer drew to a close, Il Valentino established his makeshift court at Imola, a small fortress-town on the old Roman road between Bologna and Rimini. It would be his headquarters for the winter; if the fortress could be made impregnable it might be his permanent headquarters. There are ground-plans of the fortress in Leonardo’s papers, and some written measurements: the moat was 40 feet deep, the walls 15 feet thick – vital statistics in the Borgian world of shoot-outs and showdowns.45

  Here, in the early afternoon of 7 October 1502, arrived Niccolò Machiavelli, sent once more to parley with the renegade Duke. A bony, cadaverous-looking man with a laconic smile, Machiavelli – Il Machia, as his friends called him, punning on macchia, a blot or stain – was not yet famous, hardly yet a writer, but the precision and perspicacity of his mind were already valued. He was thirty-three years old, well educated and well connected, but not rich. He had ridden out the stormy years of the Medici downfall and the Savonarolan theocracy, and from 1498 was Secretary of the Second Chancery, an influential if unglamorous post with a salary of 128 gold florins. Chancery officials were essentially civil servants, appointed by the Signoria to provide a continuum of political and diplomatic activity while the elected officials came and went. Machiavelli was the man behind the scenes, the speech-writer, the spin-doctor, and increasingly the political troubleshooter. He had acquitted himself well in negotiations with Louis XII in 1500, seeking continued French support in the draining Florentine war against Pisa; his reflections on that six-month diplomatic mission are found in The Prince.46

  Machiavelli remained three months at the court of Il Valentino. His clipped dispatches from Imola are punctuated by pleas to be recalled to Florence. He had accepted the mission reluctantly, expecting it to be dangerous, uncomfortable and ultimately pointless. The Duke, as he always pointed out, was a pure man of action: it was one of his sayings that ‘talk is cheap’ – and talk was all Machiavelli had to offer him. He was Florence’s orator or ambassador, but he had been given no commission to sign any treaty. His requests to be recalled were ignored. The Signoria wanted him there, reporting back about ‘the hopes the Duke has’. His feisty young wife, Marietta, whom he had married the previous year, complained bitterly of his absence.

  Even as he arrived in Imola, news was coming in of armed rebellion in Borgia’s dominions by an alliance of malcontent captains – among them Vitellozzo Vitelli, who had fomented the revolt in Arezzo – and ousted local potentates like the Duke of Urbino. Borgia laughed off their council of war at Magione: ‘a congress of losers’. He said, with that raw eloquence which Machiavelli catches so well, ‘The ground is burning under their feet, and it needs more water to put it out than they can throw.’47 On 11 October he struck, sacking the fortress of Fossombrone which the rebels had captured a few days earlier. Leonardo, as the Duke’s military engineer, was almost certainly present. In a note on fortresses in the Codex Atlanticus he writes, ‘See that the escape passage does not lead straight into the inner fortress, otherwise the commander will be overpowered, as happened at Fossombrone.’48

  At Imola is played out one of those piquant little cameos of history: three great names of the Renaissance holed up in a fortress on the windy plains of the Romagna, each seemingly watching the others with a vigilance that is part fascination and part nervy suspicion. It seems, at any rate, that Machiavelli and Leonardo struck up a cordial relationship: we will find them linked in certain Florentine projects over the next year – projects that suggest that Machiavelli valued Leonardo’s skills as an engineer and an artist. Of their particular dealings in Imola we know nothing: Leonardo’s name occurs nowhere in Machiavelli’s dispatches. This silence may be diplomatic: Machiavelli knew his dispatches would be intercepted and read before they left Imola, and may have wished not to compromise Leonardo’s somewhat delicate position as a Florentine in Cesare’s service. But perhaps after all Leonardo is in there, incognito. Thus Machiavelli writes on 1 November that, having talked to a secretary of Borgia’s, one Agobito, he then verified what he had gleaned by talking ‘to another who is also acquainted with the Lord’s secrets’. And on 8 November he speaks of an anonymous ‘friend’ whose analysis of Cesare’s inten
tions is ‘worthy of attention’. It is plausible that in both cases his unidentified source is Leonardo.49

  Of Leonardo’s presence in this heady atmosphere of power-politics we have the beautiful product of his map of Imola. Highly detailed and delicately coloured, it has been called ‘the most accurate and beautiful map of its era’. A page of rough sketches for the map survives, much folded, with measurements written down in situ as he paced out the streets of Imola with this paper in hand.50

  Leonardo’s maps are the true fruits of these relentless travels of 1502. There is a beautiful bird’s-eye map of the Val di Chiana (plate 17).51 The central area, between Arezzo and Chiusi, can be correlated pretty closely with a

  The map of Imola, c. 1502.

  modern map; away from this area the measurements are more hypothetical. (The long lake at the centre of the map, the Lago di Chiana, has since been drained.) The verso of the map has the remains of sealing-wax round the edges: this would have been used to fix the map to a wall or board. The names of the villages and rivers are written in conventional left-to-right script, again suggesting the map was for presentation. It may well have been made for Borgia, though there is an alternative possibility that it was worked up a couple of years later in connection with plans for canalizing the Arno. A rough sheet at Windsor shows a bird’s-eye view of the central area, listing the distances between various towns in the vicinity; these distances have been crossed through, suggesting that Leonardo referred to them when constructing the finished map. Another sheet shows the roads and streams around Castiglione and Montecchio in great detail, with some distances marked in braccia that were presumably paced out by Leonardo himself.52