Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  To Lorenzo, Fernando and Tommaso may be added a certain Rafaello di Biagio, painter, whose work seems to have been less skilled since his rate of pay is only 2 soldi per diem, and another mysterious character who is not mentioned in the accounts but who is named by the Anonimo Gaddiano as one of Leonardo’s assistants on the fresco – ‘Il Riccio Fiorentino who lives at the Porta della +’ (i.e. the Porta alla Croce). He is presumably the same as the ‘Riccio, goldsmith’ who was on the David committee convened in January 1504. Another name missing from the accounts is Salai, whom one would expect to be involved. This is Leonardo’s team.

  In a dramatic note headed ‘On Friday in June, at the 13th hour’, Leonardo writes:

  On 6 June 1505, on Friday, at the stroke of the 13th hour [about 9.30 a.m.] I began to paint at the Palazzo. At the moment of putting down the paintbrush the weather changed for the worse, and the bell in the law-courts began to toll. The cartoon came loose. The water spilled as the jug which contained it broke. And suddenly the weather worsened, and the rain poured down till nightfall. And it was as dark as night.138

  This extraordinary, almost apocalyptic memorandum has the usual ambiguities. When he says he ‘began to paint’ – or more precisely to apply colours (colorire) – does he simply mean he began the day’s painting at that time, or that this was the day when he first started to colour in the figures? And what quite does he mean by ‘il cartone straccò’? The verb straccare means to become tired or stale or worn-out; hence in this context to sag or come loose. How is this connected to the abrupt change of the weather? Is it a case of ominous synchronicity – the storm, the bells, the studio mishap – or has a sudden gust of storm-wind blown in through the veiled and waxed windows of the Council Hall, tearing the cartoon off its frame and knocking over the jug of water?

  Time rolls on; the work moves slowly; there are mutterings in the Signoria as the money continues to be doled out. Vasari has a story which sums up the declining momentum of the project:

  It is said that when he went to the bank for the salary which he was accustomed to receive from Piero Soderini every month, the cashier wanted to give it to him in piles of quattrini [small coins]. He did not want to take them, saying, ‘I am no penny painter!’ There were complaints about this behaviour, and Piero Soderini was turning against him. So Leonardo got many friends of his to gather up a whole pile of quattrini, and he took them to him to return the money: but Piero did not want to accept them.

  This explosion of temperament is like the scandalo in Milan, when he had stormed out of the Duchess’s chambers – another unexpected storm from one who usually kept his emotions well-hidden.

  This anecdote remains as the documents dwindle. The last recorded payments are dated 31 October 1505, though the work must have continued, perhaps fitfully, through till the following May, when Leonardo was very grudgingly given permission by the Signoria to leave Florence.

  The Anghiari fresco is perhaps the most intensely documented of all Leonardo’s paintings – more so even than the Virgin of the Rocks, since the documentation concerns the actual execution of the painting, rather than just the contractual ramifications of it. We know the amount of paper he used for the cartoon, the price he paid for the paints, the quantity of wood used for the scaffolding, the names of his principal assistants and the rates they were paid, and possibly even the precise day and hour he began to ‘colour’ the painting on to the wall of the Council Hall.

  The only thing we are missing is the work itself. The fresco was never completed, but a large central portion of it was. This has long since vanished from view: in fact it is not even certain which wall of the hall it was painted on – the consensus used to be that it was on the east wall, but now the west wall is favoured. Either way, if anything of it remains, it lies somewhere beneath the enormous fresco-cycle painted in the early 1560s by none other than Giorgio Vasari. It is hard to imagine that Vasari would have painted over an original Leonardo in good condition, so there are two inferences available – the pessimistic and the optimistic: that in Vasari’s view nothing remained which was worth saving, or that he took steps to protect what remained before covering it.

  Our knowledge of what the fresco – or the fragment of it which was completed – actually looked like rests on various early copies.139 There is an anonymous copy in oils, painted on a wooden panel; it is called the Tavola Doria, as it was for a long time in the collection of Prince Doria d’Angri in Naples. It shows the dramatic collision of men and horses prefigured in the preparatory drawings; it also has some lacunae – blank gaps – which enhance the idea that it is a direct copy from the fresco. It is not in itself a very good painting, but it may accurately represent the original in an unfinished or deteriorated state. Another important copy is an engraving by Lorenzo Zacchia, dated 1558. This has more detail than the Tavola Doria, but it is not certain where this detail comes from. It could conceivably be based on the original cartoon, but Zacchia himself describes the work as ‘taken from a panel painted by Leonardo’ (ex tabella propria Leonardo Vincii manu picta). It may in fact be a version of the Tavola Doria, which Zacchia believed (or claimed to believe) was the work of Leonardo himself. If so, the additional details and filled-in lacunae would be his own interpolations rather than an alternative reporting of the original fresco.

  Most of the details of the Zacchia engraving are also found in the superb watercolour version in the Louvre, attributed to Rubens (page 374). This is actually done on top of an earlier drawing. Beneath the Rubens additions of c. 1603 – the watercolour over-painting, the lead-white heightening, the glued-on extension on the right-hand side of the sheet – there is an Italian drawing datable to the mid sixteenth century, roughly contemporary with the Zacchia engraving. Though Rubens (born in 1577) could not have seen the original fresco, he has brilliantly caught the angry turmoil of the skirmish: seven figures – four on horseback, three on the ground – locked in combat, a pyramidal composition reaching to an apex of two clashing swords. The extraordinary, writhing horseman on the left (who represents Francesco Piccinino, son of the Milanese condottiere) has the attributes of Mars on his armour, and becomes in Rubens’s imaginative rendering a kind of archetype: a universal soldier.

  There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that, as with the Last Supper, there were technical problems in painting the Anghiari fresco, which revealed themselves fairly quickly. Antonio Billi, writing sometime around 1520, speaks of it as abandoned:

  He did… a cartoon of the war of the Florentines, when they defeated Niccolò Piccinino, the captain of the Duke of Milan. He began to work from this in the Sala del Consiglio, using a medium which did not stick [materia che non serrava], and so it remained unfinished. It was said that the cause of this was that he was deceived about the linseed oil he used, which was adulterated.

  If Billi is right, we might lay the blame for this great artistic loss on a grocer named Francesco Nuti, who was paid on 31 August 1505 for ‘8 pounds of linseed oil supplied to Leonardo da Vinci for the picture’.140

  The fresco was still visible on the wall in the 1540s. The Anonimo Gaddiano says of it, ‘anchora hoggi si vede, et con vernice’, which seems to mean that the work could still be seen, preserved under an application of varnish; and in 1549 Antonio Francesco Doni advised a friend, ‘Go up the stairs of the Sala Grande, and take a close look at a group of horses and men, a battle-study by Leonardo da Vinci, and you will see something miraculous.’141

  A fresco visible and ‘miraculous’ in 1549, the optimists say, must surely have still been visible when Vasari began his redecoration of the hall some twelve years later – and may be there still. But to find a lost wall-painting you must first find the wall. Early accounts describe the fresco as being on one side of the tribune – the dais where the Signori and Gonfalonier sat when the council was in session – but the evidence is maddeningly ambiguous as to where the tribune was.142

  In 1974 an American conservation scientist, H. Travers Newton, used Thermavis
ion (‘an infra-red Vidicon system supercooled with liquid nitrogen’) to probe the walls.143 This machine produces a ‘thermal map’ of materials present beneath the surface (different materials absorb and emit heat at different rates). The first findings were exciting. The east wall revealed only normal architectural elements, but the west wall displayed what Newton described as an ‘anomalous layer’ beneath Vasari’s frescos. This was confirmed by ultrasound, which uses ultrasonic soundings to register variations of density; in 1974 this could ‘read’ the stratifications of a wall up to a depth of about 4 inches. From these twin probes, the ‘anomalous layer’ was defined as an area about 75 feet wide by 15 feet high. Next, core samples were removed from both walls. The east wall exhibited the normal sequence of layers one would expect from the Vasari fresco: a top layer of plaster, an underlayer of rendering, and then the supporting wall; some traces of colour were found, suggesting an underdrawing in some areas. The same was found on the west wall above and below the ‘anomalous layer’, but in that area itself things were different. All the core samples showed a layer of red pigment beneath Vasari’s intonaco, and some showed other pigments laid over this red ground. These included two suggestive of Leonardo’s practice – a green copper carbonate similar to that used in the Last Supper, for which Leonardo gives a recipe in the Trattato; and blue smalt, as found in the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks. Azurite was also found, which is not suitable for use in true fresco, so it suggests the anomalous area is not a conventional fresco.

  This raised exciting possibilities, though Newton’s interpretation of the data is not universally accepted. There is currently a stasis. Any further investigation would be invasive, and the idea of damaging Vasari’s fresco and finding nothing but a giant blur beneath it is not attractive to the decision-makers: as the Florentine councillor Rosa di Giorgi put it in 2000, ‘Vasari may not be Leonardo, but he is still Vasari.’144 There is talk of adapting the ‘geo-radar’ system developed by NASA to map sub-surface features on the earth’s surface; a version of this is already used by archaeologists to map ruins before uncovering them, but it remains to be proved whether it can detect pigments on a flat surface.

  Meanwhile Maurizio Seracini, whose investigations of the Adoration of the Magi caused such controversy, points back to the east wall,145 and to a tiny green flag which forms an apparently insignificant detail in the vast panorama of the Vasari fresco. On it, visible from the ground through binoculars, is a small inscription – two words, perhaps an inch high, written in white paint which Seracini’s chemical analysis shows to be contemporary with the rest of the fresco: words put there by Vasari. They read, ‘Cerca Trova’ – ‘Seek and you shall find.’

  THE SPIRIT OF THE BIRD

  A bird is a machine working according to mathematical laws. It lies within the power of man to reproduce this machine with all its motions, but not with as much power… Such a machine constructed by man lacks only the spirit of the bird, and this spirit must be counterfeited by the spirit of man.

  Codex Atlanticus, fol. 161r-a

  In 1505 Leonardo was dreaming once more of the possibilities of human flight, and was filling a small notebook with notes and diagrams and light airy scribbles which comprise his most focused and purposive text on the subject. After a chequered history, in which the kleptomanic Count Libri plays a part, this notebook has come to rest in the Royal Library in Turin, and is known as the Turin Codex. It contains that famous fairground-barker proclamation, found on two separate pages in slightly different phrasing, which announces, ‘The big bird will take its first flight above the back of the Great Cecero, filling the universe with amazement, filling all the chronicles with its fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.’146 The ‘big bird’ is certainly Leonardo’s flying-machine. Neat, highly specific drawings show parts of it (rotating wing-joints on folios 16–17, for example) but no full view – perhaps for reasons of secrecy.

  The announcement seems to mean that he was planning a trial flight of the machine from the summit of Monte Ceceri, near Fiesole, just north of Florence. He spells it ‘Cecero’, which is an old Florentine word for a swan – a conjunction of meanings that would be congenial to Leonardo: a good omen, an emblematic connection. A jotting dated 14 March 1505 finds him sky-gazing on the road to Fiesole: ‘the cortone, a bird of prey which I saw going to Fiesole, above the place of the Barbiga’.147 This adds a touch of specificity to the possible flight of the ‘big bird’, but it is curious that there is no independent record of this momentous event, no letter-writer or diarist who mentions it: either it was a well-kept secret or it never happened.

  Girolamo Cardano states in his De subtilitate (1550) that Leonardo was an ‘extraordinary man’ who tried to fly ‘but in vain’ – ‘tentavit et frustra’. If he – or someone: Zoroastro? – tried to fly from Monte Ceceri in early 1505 we must assume the trial was a failure, in which context one reads with some trepidation the page of the Turin Codex entitled ‘Per fugire il pericolo della ruina’ – ‘To escape the perils of destruction’:

  The destruction of such a machine may occur in two ways. The first is that the machine might break up. The second would be if the machine turned on its side, or nearly on its side, because it should always descend at a very oblique angle, and almost exactly balanced on its centre. To prevent breaking up, the machine should be made as strong as possible in whichever part it may tend to turn over… Its parts must have great resistance so they can safely withstand the fury and impetus of the descent by the means I have mentioned: joints of strong leather treated with alum, the rigging made of cords of the strongest silk. And let no man encumber himself with iron bands, which are very soon broken when twisted.148

  In these details one has a physical sense of this creature, this mathematical bird-machine: the creaking of the leather, the wind in the rigging, the ‘fury’ of the descent. One recalls that one of his earliest texts on the possibility of flight – ‘A man with wings large enough, and duly attached, might learn to overcome the resistance of the air…’ – is accompanied by his specifications for a parachute.

  More than a study of the flying-machine, the Turin Codex is a study of its primary model: the bird. The pages are full of observations on the aerodynamics and physiology of birds, and of beautiful little sketches, squiggled yet acute, which swoop and soar and turn and flutter across its pages: ornithological pictograms. This notebook is a Leonardo poem on the subject of birds and their flight, and it is indeed around this time that he writes the famous marginal note about the kite, beginning: ‘Writing like this so particularly about the kite seems to be my destiny.’

  The birds of the Turin Codex, the marginalium about the kite, the trial flight from Swan Mountain – all these seem to merge into the strange elusive talisman of Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan. It is elusive to the point of non-existence: there is no painting that can be thus described. It is one of those mysteriously notional Leonardo works which exist only before and after – in various preparatory sketches which are certainly in his hand, and in various finished paintings which are certainly not. Some of the paintings are of very high quality and may have been painted under his supervision; close similarities between them suggest they are based on a lost original, though whether this original was an actual painting or a full-size cartoon is uncertain. The Anonimo Gaddiano included ‘una Leda’ in a list of Leonardo’s paintings, but he (or someone else) later crossed the words through. Vasari did not mention the painting at all. G. P. Lomazzo certainly believed there was an authentic Leonardo Leda around – in fact he says that ‘la Leda ignuda’ (‘the nude Leda’) was one of the few paintings which Leonardo actually finished – but one can never be quite sure with Lomazzo, and he may in fact be talking about one of the extant studio versions or copies. There was once a Leda attributed to Leonardo in the French royal collection, but it disappears from the inventories in the late seventeenth century. According to tradition it was removed, on the grounds of immorality, by Madame de Maintenon. />
  The paintings – Leonardo’s, if it ever existed, and the copies and studio versions – belong to a later period, but the idea certainly originated at this time. The earliest studies are on a sheet which also contains a drawing of a horse for the Battle of Anghiari and is therefore datable to c. 1504.149 There is no swan, but the presence of the hatching babies can be discerned among the squiggles. These sketches evolve into two more finished drawings – one in the Duke of Devonshire’s collection at Chatsworth, the other in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam – in which all the mythological elements are in place: the attentive swan, the fleshy innamorata, the hatchling children, the fecund vegetation. The style of the drawings reflects the influence of Michelangelo at this time – especially the Chatsworth drawing, with its strange whorled hatching and the statuesque heftiness of the female figure.