Leonardo’s David, c. 1504. A drawing after, but not of, Michelangelo’s David.
Around this time Leonardo writes a brief passage criticizing pictures showing exaggeratedly muscular torsos: ‘You should not make all the muscles of the body too conspicuous, unless the limbs to which they belong are engaged in the exertion of great force or labour… If you do otherwise you will produce a sack of walnuts rather than a human figure.’ This may well be a dig at the muscled figures of Michelangelo’s Cascina cartoon. He repeats the idea in another notebook: the body should not be made to look like a ‘bundle of radishes’ or a ‘sack of walnuts’.119 He enjoys this phrase. ‘Un saco di noce…’ One imagines him saying it, deadpanning it, making people laugh: his weapon. It is rather better as a put-down than those blunt-edged insults that Michelangelo threw at him that day at the Ponte Santa Trinità.
For all this, it is certain that Leonardo’s later anatomical drawings show the influence of Michelangelo. There is also a small sketch at Windsor which looks rather like the David – in art parlance it is ‘after David’.120 This is the only surviving drawing by him which is demonstrably based on a contemporary art-work. Despite all the needle and resentment, primacy is given to the old artistic imperative: what can I learn from him?
A DEATH AND A JOURNEY
Amid these momentous artistic events – the creation of the Anghiari cartoon, the hauling of the marble giant through the streets of Florence, the emerging face of the Mona Lisa – life proceeds according to the rhythms and necessities to which even Renaissance geniuses are subject, and by chance there survives a list of Leonardo’s household expenses over four days in May 1504, written in the well-formed hand of ‘Tommaso mio famiglio’ – ‘my servant Tommaso’ – otherwise known as Zoroastro. The heading reads, ‘On the morning of St Zanobio’s Day, 25 May 1504, I had from Lionardo Vinci 15 gold ducats and began to spend them.’121
On that first day, a Saturday, Tommaso disbursed nearly 200 soldi (10 lire or 2½ ducats), of which 62 soldi went to a certain ‘Mona Margarita’, who appears elsewhere in the accounts as associated with horses (‘di cavali mona malgarita’), and 20 soldi went on ‘repairing the ring’. An account was settled at the barber’s, a debt was paid at the bank, some velvet was purchased, and the rest was spent on food: eggs, wine, bread, meat, mulberries, mushrooms, salad, fruit, partridge, flour. Saturday was the big-spending day – perhaps for a party of some sort, for on the following three days Tommaso buys only the basics: bread, wine, meat, soup and fruit. The daily expenditure on bread is constant (6 soldi) and that on wine fairly constant (usually 9 soldi). On the basis of this small sample Leonardo was spending about 12 lire a week on food for his household. The fact that meat is bought every day does not show that Leonardo was at this point a meat-eater, only that he did not insist on others in his household abstaining. According to Scipione Ammirato, Tommaso was also vegetarian: ‘He would not kill a flea for any reason whatever. He preferred to dress in linen so as not to wear something dead.’
These accounts cover three sides of paper; on the fourth side are notes in Leonardo’s hand – ‘To make the great canal first make the smaller one and bring the water in by it’, and ‘This is how piles should be driven in’ – and sketches in red chalk preliminary to one of his maps of the Arno. The household business thus inserts itself among his water-moving projects of 1503–4.
Another list of expenses, in Leonardo’s hand, belongs to around the same time – a spicy fare of ‘peppered bread’, eels and apricots, as well as two dozen laces, a sword and a knife, and a little cross from a man called Paolo have been bought. There is another visit to the barber, and also a curious item which has attracted some note: ‘per dire la ventura: 6 soldi’.122 That a man so axiomatically unimpressed by superstition spent good money for having his ‘fortune told’ is surprising. What is it that he wishes to know about his destiny?
Further accountings are found on a Codex Atlanticus sheet:123
On the morning of St Peter’s Day, 29 June 1504, I took out 10 ducats, of which I gave one to my servant Tommaso to spend…
On Monday morning [1 July] 1 florin to Salai to spend on the house…
On the morning of Friday 19 July I have 7 florins left and 22 in the cashbox…
Friday 9 August 1504 I took 10 ducats out of the cashbox…
And on the same page, amid these small disbursements, Leonardo records the death of his father:
On Wednesday at the 7th hour Ser Piero da Vinci died, on the 9th day of July 1504.
A more extended note is on another sheet: ‘On the 9th day of July 1504, Wednesday, at the 7th hour, died Ser Piero da Vinci, notary to the Palazzo del Podesta, my father, at the 7th hour. He was eighty years old, and left ten sons and two daughters.’124 This has a more formal, obituarizing tone, but one discerns again that jumpy mix of punctiliousness and repetition which is found in the note about Caterina a decade earlier: emotion sublimated into tics of detail. Not just repetition, but error: 9 July 1504 was not a Wednesday but a Tuesday – the days blur. And Ser Piero was not eighty at his death, but seventy-eight, as shown by his birth-date inscribed by Antonio da Vinci in the family record-book, which is unlikely to be wrong.
There are so many unanswered questions about Leonardo’s relationship with his father – our questions, because we lack the evidence; his questions, because as often between father and son there was a core of distance which they could not cross. ‘He left ten sons and two daughters,’ Leonardo writes, including himself in this quota, but he will soon learn that he alone has been left nothing in his father’s will: the last rejection.
A solitary fragment of discourse between them survives: the opening sentence of a letter from Leonardo – undated, but from the handwriting apparently written not long before this. ‘Dearest father,’ it reads: ‘On the last day of last month I received the letter you wrote to me, which caused me in a brief space of time both pleasure and sadness: pleasure in that I learned from it you are well, for which I thank God, and displeasure to hear of your troubles…’125 This is not just formal: it reads like a composition, with its neatly balanced clauses, its modicums of pleasure and sadness. This respectful but wooden salutation is written from left to right, the ‘normal’ way. Leonardo is for a moment the kind of son his father wanted him to be – but the letter is discontinued, and remains among his papers. On the back of the page he draws the wing of a flying-machine.
A coda to this is another letter – again just a fragment – which he wrote to one of his half-brothers, probably Domenico da Vinci, congratulating him on the birth of a son. ‘My beloved brother,’ he begins, warmly enough, ‘I hear you have an heir and are extremely pleased about it.’ But he then goes on to wonder why ‘you are so pleased about having created a deadly enemy, who with all his heart desires liberty, which he will only get with your death.’126 It is intended as an avuncular joke, perhaps – Leonardo was more than thirty years older than Domenico – but if so it is a dark one: the son as malcontent subject chafes under the parental yoke; the father’s death brings ‘liberty’ to him.
Accounts and memoranda continue through August. A new apprentice arrives: ‘On Saturday morning, 3rd August 1504, Jacopo the German came to live with me in the house, and agreed with me that I should charge him one carlino per day.’127 Also in August came the news that the proposed diversion of the Arno near Pisa was finally to be put into action. It does not seem that Leonardo was actively involved in this, but it is likely that he was in touch with Machiavelli about the progress of the project. The Signoria finally voted to proceed on 20 August 1504; work began immediately, as mentioned in Landucci’s diary on 22 August. As we have seen, the whole enterprise was a disaster which cost the Signoria 7,000 ducats and resulted in eighty deaths, and the project was abandoned in mid-October.
And where was Leonardo as this fiasco was played out on the Pisan flatlands – a fiasco for which he might take a share of the blame? Probably out of town. We know from dated notes that he was
in Piombino by mid-October 1504, and it is pretty certain that en route there from Florence he spent some time in Vinci with his uncle Francesco. As noted earlier, his departure coincides with the Signoria’s decision to commission Michelangelo to paint alongside him in the Palazzo Vecchio – a decision which becomes visible with the requisitioning of studio space for him at Sant’Onofrio on 22 September.
Shortly before his departure from Florence in September or October 1504 Leonardo drew up the last and most extensive catalogue of his books. There are two lists, written across a double-page spread of Madrid Codex II.128 The longer one is headed ‘Richordo de libri ch’io lasscio serati nel cassone’: ‘A record of the books I am leaving locked in the large chest’. The shorter is headed ‘In cassa al munistero’: ‘In the chest at the monastery’ – presumably Santa Maria Novella. The total number of books is 116. Another list splits fifty books into different sizes and types:
25 small books
2 large books
16 very large books
6 books on vellum
I book bound in green chamois
It seems that this last list refers to bound manuscripts rather than printed books (the word libro was used for both) – the ‘6 books on vellum’ must certainly be manuscripts, as vellum (stretched calf- or lamb-skin) was not used for printing. It is just possible that this is an inventory of Leonardo’s own manuscripts and notebooks in 1504. Alternatively it is a subdivision of the actual book-list, suggesting that getting on for half of Leonardo’s 116 books were handwritten codices. For instance the ‘vita civile di matteo palmieri’ is certainly a manuscript: the first printed edition of Palmieri’s Della vita civile was not published till 1529. Also the ‘libro di regole latino’ by Francesco da Urbino, who taught Latin grammar at the Florentine Studio, is not known in a published edition at this date. Some of the items in the list do seem to be Leonardo’s own works – for example the ‘libro di chavalli scizati per cartone’ is clearly a sketchbook of studies for the horses of the Anghiari cartoon, and the ‘libro di mia vocaboli’ (‘my vocabulary book’) is probably the Trivulzio Codex. The ‘libro di notomia’ (‘book of anatomy’) may also be his (compare his memorandum of c. 1508: ‘Have your books of anatomy bound’).
The Madrid book-lists are a trove of insights into Leonardo’s interests and influences. Some entries which are not found in the earlier Atlanticus book-list of c. 1492 are these:
batista alberti in architettura – Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, first published in Florence in 1485.
isopo illingia francosa – Aesop’s Fables in French, perhaps Les Fables de Esope (Lyons, 1484), interestingly implying that Leonardo had learned French, presumably further to his French contacts in Milan in 1499.
galea de matti – Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools. No Italian edition is known so this too may be manuscript, or it may be one of the French editions published in Paris in 1497–9.
sonetti di meser guaspari bisconti – sonnets by Gasparé Visconti, courtier-poet at the Sforza court, friend of Bramante, and probably also of Leonardo; the Rithmi of 1493 may be the collection referred to.
arismetricha di maestro luca – Pacioli’s Summa arithmetica, as purchased by Leonardo for 119 soldi in c.1494.
franco da siena – certainly a reference to the Sienese architect Francesco di Giorgio Martini, whom Leonardo knew in Milan, and probably to the manuscript copy of his Trattato di architettura now in the Laurentian Library in Florence, with marginal annotations by Leonardo.
libro danticaglie – ‘book of antiquities’, perhaps the mysterious Antiquarie prospetiche Romane dedicated to Leonardo in the late 1490s, though it could be his friend Bernardo Rucellai’s De urbe Roma (1471).
One also notes Leonardo’s growing collection of popular literature – books to be read for pleasure and relaxation, such as Luca Pulci’s romantic poem Ciriffo calvaneo (Venice, 1479); the chivalric romances Attila flagellum dei, attributed to Nicola da Casola (Venice, 1491), and Guerino meschino, by Andrea da Barberino (Padua, 1473); Masuccio Salernitano’s Il novellino (Naples, 1476); and the curious and frequently erotic poem Geta e Birria, by Ghigo Brunelleschi and Ser Domenico da Prato (Florence, c. 1476).
With his books inventoried and boxed up Leonardo heads out of town for Vinci, a natural place for him to be in the aftermath of Ser Piero’s death, and particularly so because on 12 August Uncle Francesco had drawn up his own will, in which he left Leonardo certain properties in the Vinci area. This bequest was no doubt a reaction to the exclusion of Leonardo from his father’s estate; it was in fact a contravention of an earlier agreement between Ser Piero and Francesco, made in 1492, in which it was promised that ‘after the life of Francesco all his goods will go to Ser Piero and his children’ (meaning, of course, his legitimate children). Francesco’s will has not survived, but we know from later litigation – he died in 1507 – that Leonardo’s legacy included a property called Il Botro, a name meaning a ravine. The place may be depicted in a sketch-map at Windsor showing a property situated between two rivers (see page 24). It has two buildings, and some land which ‘yields 16 staia of grain’; to the north of it is a lecceto – a grove of holm-oaks. The owners of adjoining plots of land are noted; that one of the names is ‘ser piero’ suggests that the map cannot have been drawn much later than 1504. The local historian Renzo Cianchi has identified the area shown in the map as Forra di Serravalle, about 4 miles east of Vinci.129
A small sketch of the Mont’Albano hills probably belongs to this visit,130 as does that drawing of a Vinci oil-press – ‘molino della doccia di Vinci’ – which we looked at earlier. Its adaptation of the olive-press into a ‘machine to grind colours’ would be related in his mind to the Battle of Anghiari fresco which he was soon to begin painting on the wall of the Council Hall, and which would certainly need industrial quantities of paint.
From Vinci he travelled on down towards the coast of Piombino, where he had been two years earlier on Borgia business. The town was now once more under the Florence-friendly lordship of Jacopo d’Appiano. A dated note finds Leonardo ‘at the castle’ of Piombino on 20 October. Another reads, ‘On All Saints’ Day [1 November] 1504 I made to the Lord of Piombino this demonstration.’ He neglects to say what the ‘demonstration’ demonstrated: perhaps the ‘method for drying the marshland of Piombino’ sketched on a sheet of the Codex Atlanticus.131 On the same day he writes this beautiful note: ‘1504 at Piombino on All Saints Day, as the sun was setting, I saw the green shadows produced by the ropes, masts and yardarms against the white surface of the wall. This was because the surface of the wall was not tinged by the sunlight but by the colour of the sea opposite it.’132
November brought its customary storms and many years later he recalled scenes witnessed on the waterfront at Piombino:
De venti di Piombino a Piombino
ritrosi di venti e di pioggia con
rami e alberi misti coll’aria.
Votamenti dell’acqua che piove nelle barche
[Of the winds of Piombino at Piombino: gusts of wind and rain, with branches and trees blown into the air. The emptying of rainwater from the boats.]133
These intensely compacted notes are the verbal equivalent of the swift in situ sketch. We see him, a solitary rain-soaked figure out on the strand, watching the waves, watching the fishermen baling out their boats, storing the moment.
By the end of November he was back in Florence, where we find him burning the midnight oil, tussling over the old mathematical conundrum of squaring the circle (that is, constructing a circle and a square with identical area – a mathematical impossibility because of the indeterminate nature of π). In a dramatic nocturnal note, the words squeezed in vertically among geometric figures, he writes, ‘On St Andrew’s night [30 November] I concluded the squaring of the circle, and the light was at an end, and the night, and the paper on which I was writing; it was concluded at the end of the hour.’134 The lamplight gutters, the dawn comes in, but these conclusions will prove as always to be
temporary.
THE ANGHIARI FRESCO (II)
In December 1504, after a hiatus of about four months, Leonardo begins work on the critical phase of the Anghiari fresco – the actual painting of it, from the cartoon, on to the wall of the Council Hall. On 31 December the works department of the Palazzo Vecchio pays suppliers for nails and cloth delivered that month to ‘cover the window where Leonardo da Vinci is working’, and for wax, sponges and turpentine ‘to wax the windows’. On 28 February 1505 there are further payments for iron, trivets and wheels ‘to make Leonardo’s carriage [carro], that is the platform’ – another custom-made mobile scaffolding, like the one he used in Santa Maria Novella, which has now been constructed in the Council Hall. The cost of this contraption is nearly 100 lire, as is noted by the parsimonious accountants, who on 14 March order that ‘the platform for Leonardo da Vinci’s picture, which is now being done in the Hall of the Great Council, and all the planks and panels which have been used to make it, should be returned and restored to the Department of Works when the said picture is completed.’ These entries suggest that Leonardo was equipped to begin painting the fresco around the end of February 1505 – precisely the date by which he had previously promised to have the whole thing completed.135
On 14 April, a new pupil: ‘1505 – Tuesday evening, 14 April, Lorenzo came to live with me; he says he is 17 years old.’ He is immediately set to work, for on 30 April the accounts include payment to ‘Lorenzo di Marco, journeyman, for 3½ sessions in the Council Hall on the picture which Leonardo da Vinci is doing’.136 He is paid at a basic rate of 9 soldi a day. Also disbursed during this month of intense activity are ‘5 gold florins to Ferrando Spagnolo, painter, and to Tommaso di Giovanni, who is grinding the colours.’ This ‘Ferrando the Spaniard’ is a shadowy painter to whom various Leonardesco works are attributed, among them the sultry Madonna and Child with a Lamb (Brera Gallery, Milan); a free version of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder (private collection); and even – according to some – the Uffizi Leda. He is probably Fernando (or Hernando) Yañez de la Almedina, who is documented in Spain after 1506; some of his works, such as the Epiphany and Pietà in Cuenca cathedral, show strong influence of Leonardo and Raphael.137 The other man mentioned, Tommaso di Giovanni the colour-grinder, is of course Zoroastro. In a later account-entry he is described as Leonardo’s ‘garzone’, a lowly status which reflects the incomprehension of the accountants.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 47