Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  In all these Leda is shown kneeling (the Leda inginocchiata) in a pose reminiscent of classical sculptures of Venus. This is perhaps the earlier conception, though the standing Leda (the Leda stante) who appears so uniformly in the painted versions also dates back to this time. There is no extant drawing of this pose comparable to the Chatsworth and Rotterdam drawings, but there is a small sketch on a sheet in Turin which once again has sketches relating to the Anghiari fresco. A lost cartoon of the standing Leda was copied by Raphael, probably during his Florentine sojourn of 1505–6, when he seems to have had contact with Leonardo and produced

  The Chatsworth drawing of Leda and the Swan, c. 1504–6.

  his portrait of Maddalena Doni, which shows familiarity with the Mona Lisa. This Leda cartoon was later owned by Pompeo Leoni, as appears from an inventory of his estate, dated 1614, which includes a ‘cartoon 2 braccia high’ – thus a full-scale cartoon – ‘of a Leda standing, and a swan who sports with her, emerging from a marsh with certain cupids in the grass’.150 Apart from the misinterpreting of the children as cupids, this is a clear sighting of the lost cartoon.

  It is not known who, if anyone, commissioned the painting. It is possible the idea flickers into being as a composition for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo: it inhabits the same sort of classical-mythological world as paintings commissioned by the Marchioness from Mantegna and Perugino. Or it may have had a Florentine patron – the rich banker Antonio Segni, perhaps: a ‘friend’ (according to Vasari) and a classical enthusiast, for whom Leonardo did a superb drawing of Neptune in his chariot.151 Also part of Leonardo’s classical tendency at this time is a fugitive painting of Bacchus, about which there is an exchange of letters in April 1505 between Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara – the brother of Isabella – and one of his business agents. The Duke is anxious to purchase the painting, but learns that it has already been promised to Georges d’Amboise, Cardinal of Rouen. The painting is also mentioned in a Latin poem by an anonymous Ferrarese author, possibly Flavio Antonio Giraldi. The references suggest it was an existent work rather than just an idea; I will look later at some possible traces of it.152

  The classical myth of Jupiter copulating in the guise of a swan with the beautiful princess Leda – one of Jupiter’s many divine ‘interventions’ of this sort – was certainly well known. Among classical sculptures there are some highly erotic renditions, with the swan between her legs in species-defying coitus. Leonardo’s painting was perhaps seen as risqué, but its dominant motif is not so much erotic as generative. The myth becomes one of fecundity and fertility. The woman is rounded, full-hipped – both consort and mother. Around her spring phallic reeds and rampant flowers; beside her stands the superphallic swan-god. Everything burgeons.

  The Platonists would interpret the legend of Jupiter and Leda as an allegory of the influx of divine spirit into the terrestrial world. This seems to link the painting with Leonardo’s comment about human flight, quoted at the top of this chapter, in which he expresses his desire to instil into a man the one thing his aviational technology cannot supply – ‘the spirit of the bird’. This text is from around 1505, contemporary with the first drawings on the Leda theme. It was at this time too that he recorded that childhood memory of the kite which ‘came’ to him in his cradle: that strange transaction of the bird putting its tail in his mouth seems to enact once more, in a more personal arena of recovered or invented memory, this idea of receiving ‘the spirit of the bird’, the shamanistic secret of flight.

  A page of the Turin Codex seems to sum up this intensely personal involvement in the idea of flight. As he writes his notes on the page, accompanied by the typical bird-sketches, the subject of his sentences changes from ‘the bird’ (‘If the bird wishes to turn quickly…’ etc.) to ‘you’, and the indeterminate ‘you’ of Leonardo’s notebooks, the imagined auditor of his thoughts and observations, is always essentially Leonardo himself. He is, in his imagination, already up there:

  If the north wind is blowing and you are gliding above the wind, and if in your straight ascent upward that wind is threatening to overturn you, then you are free to bend your right or left wing, and with the inside wing lowered you will continue a curving motion…

  In a text in the margin the two subjects merge almost seamlessly:

  The bird that mounts upward always has its wings above the wind, and does not beat them, and moves in a circular motion. And if you want to go westward without beating your wings, and the wind is in the north, make the incident movement straight and below the wind, and the reflex movement above the wind.153

  These are almost literally ‘flights of the mind’: in his mind, in his words, he is flying. And on this page of notes, actually staring out from behind the text – that is, already on the page when Leonardo wrote it – is a faint red-chalk drawing of a man’s head. It is hard to make out, hard to detach from the lines of handwriting superimposed on it, but it is a strong face, long-nosed, with a familiar hint of long hair falling, and it seems to me very likely that it is a portrait of Leonardo by one of his pupils. It would be our only image of him during these years of greatness – the years of the Mona Lisa and Anghiari and Leda, of Borgia and Machiavelli and Michelangelo. The drawing must be from about 1505 – the two dated notes in the codex are March and April 1505. It would show him at the age of fifty-three, and for the first time he is bearded. It is an elusive image, as ever: a shadowy face half-obscured by a sentence about wings ‘suprando la resistentia dellaria’ – ‘conquering the resistance of the air’.

  This conquest of the air is always seen as the ultimate expression of Leonardo as aspirant Renaissance man, but these flights of which he dreams are not entirely distinct from those more prosaic flights with which the rest of us are familiar: flights of escape, of evasion, of irresolution – flights semantically referrable to fleeing rather than flying. Twenty years earlier, beneath a drawing of a bat, he wrote, ‘animal which flees from one element to another’. In his obsession with flight there is a kind of existential restlessness, a desire to float free from his life of tensions and rivalries, from the dictates of warmongers and art-lovers and contract-wavers. He yearns for this great escape, and in failing he feels himself more captive.

  PART SEVEN

  Return to Milan

  1506–1513

  The eye as soon as it opens sees all the stars of the hemisphere. The mind in an instant leaps from east to west.

  Codex Atlanticus, fol. 204v-a

  THE GOVERNOR

  In late May 1506 Leonardo received the grudging permission of the Signoria to leave Florence for Milan. In a document notarized on 30 May he undertook to return within three months, on pain of a fine of 150 florins. His guarantor was Leonardo Bonafé, superintendent of the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova where his savings were held: Leonardo’s bank manager.1 This is the tone of the times in the Soderini government. In the event Leonardo would not return for fifteen months, and then only because of a family dispute.

  The French governor of Milan, Charles d’Amboise, was no doubt keen to attract him north again, but the ostensible reason for Leonardo’s departure was the continuing contractual disputes over the Virgin of the Rocks. This painting had been troublesome ever since its delivery to the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in about 1485, and according to the supplica lodged by Leonardo and Ambrogio de Predis in about 1492 it had still not been properly paid for. The original painting (the Louvre version) seems to have left Italy in 1493, having probably been bought by Ludovico Sforza and given by him to Emperor Maximilian, and at some point after this Leonardo and Ambrogio (but mostly Ambrogio) began work on a substitute copy for the Confraternity. This second Virgin of the Rocks (the London version) was delivered to the Confraternity perhaps before Leonardo’s departure from Milan in 1499, or perhaps by Ambrogio sometime after that. The latest date for the delivery would be 1502, for in March 1503 Ambrogio lodged another supplica, addressed to Louis XII of France, now the de facto ruler of Milan, complaining
once again that he and Leonardo were owed money. The king ordered a judge, one Bernardino de’ Busti, to look into it. The case wallowed in the bog of Italian litigation for three years, but in the arbitrato handed down in April 1506 the judgement went against the painters. The central panel of the altarpiece was adjudged to be ‘unfinished’ – that, at least, is the usual meaning of imperfetto, though it is possible that it means here ‘not good enough’, which in turn would probably mean ‘too much Ambrogio and not enough Leonardo’. At any rate Leonardo is considered the key to resolving the matter, and the court orders him, in absentia, to complete the painting within two years.2

  It was this situation, presumably communicated to him by Ambrogio de Predis, which precipitated Leonardo’s request the following month to be given leave from his duties in the Palazzo Vecchio to travel up to Milan. Contractual language was something that the Florentine authorities could understand. But beneath this runs a deeper theme of restlessness, which is in part the old theme of Leonardo’s difficult relationship with Florence. Much had changed in his life since he first left for Milan nearly a quarter of a century previously, but one catches an echo of that earlier departure. In 1482 he left behind him an unfinished masterpiece – the Adoration – and a somewhat lurid homosexual reputation. In 1506 he leaves on a note of dispute and distrust over the Anghiari fresco, and perhaps with a first inkling of its technical problems; also, probably, the failure of the flight from Monte Ceceri. These echoes are recurrences: soured relations, abandoned projects, irresolution, escape.

  Leonardo arrives once more in Lombardy with a sense of relief and release, but different this time in his status: his arrival is eagerly anticipated by the French masters of Milan. He seems to have had an affinity with the French. He had dealt with them amicably enough when they swept into Milan in 1499, and had apparently offered his services to Count Ligny. By 1501 he was painting the Madonna of the Yarnwinder for the French courtier Florimond Robertet. Perhaps the affinity was simply that the French appreciated him, far more – he might have felt – than did his Italian patrons, with whom he had a kind of hot–cold relationship which always seemed ready to founder into tensions and impatience. A particular instance of their appreciation was King Louis’s desire to remove the Last Supper so that he could take it to France; however, as Vasari drily comments, ‘its being done on the wall made the king give up his desire, and it remained among the Milanese.’

  Leonardo was warmly received by the governor, Charles d’Amboise, Comte de Chaumont – the ‘high-spirited’ count, as Serge Bramly calls him, for the chroniclers tell us he was ‘as fond of Venus as of Bacchus’.3 D’Amboise was thirty-three years old. The portrait of him by Andrea Solario was painted around this time, and is very Leonardesque with its slight contrapposto. It shows an intelligent, concentrated face, with a large nose noticeable even in full face: un homme sérieux. He was a tremendous admirer of Leonardo, and a few months later wrote in exalted terms: ‘We loved him before meeting him in person, and now that we have been in his company, and can speak from experience of his varied talents, we see in truth that his name, though already famous for painting, has not received sufficient praise for the many other gifts he possesses, which are of an extraordinary power.’4

  Andrea Solario, portrait of Charles d’Amboise, c. 1508.

  Leonardo was his honoured guest at the castle, in the rooms of which were many memories of days and nights in the Sforza court. In a later letter he asks about lodgings in the city, ‘not wishing to trouble the Governor further’,5 which perhaps also means not wishing to be quite so closely billeted on him – Leonardo always needed space. But for now there is the energy of novelty, and talk of grand new projects – in particular of d’Amboise’s plans for a summer villa outside the Porta Venezia. It was planned for a site between two small rivers, the Nirone and the Fontelunga, there to blend pleasingly and pastorally into the natural forms of the landscape. Leonardo’s notes and sketches show everything carefully geared to the pleasure and delight of the master of the house – porticos and loggias, and big airy rooms opening on to the sumptuous pleasure-gardens. Even the stairs should not be too ‘melancholic’ – in other words too steep and dark. Leonardo envisages a wonderful, Arabian Nights garden of sweet-smelling orange- and lemon-trees, and a bower covered over with a fine copper net to keep it full of songbirds, and a babbling brook with its grassy banks ‘cut frequently so that the clearness of the water may be seen upon its shingly bed’ – one thinks of the river-bed in the Verrocchio Baptism of Christ – ‘and only those plants should be left which serve the fishes for food, like watercress and suchlike’. The fish should not be eels or tench which muddy the water, nor pike which will eat any other fish. A small canal would flow among the tables, with flasks of wine cooling in the water. The pièce de résistance was a little mill powered by water but with sails like a windmill:

  With this mill I will generate a breeze at any time during the summer, and I will make water spring up fresh and bubbling… The mill will serve to create conduits of water through the house, and fountains in various places, and there will be a certain pathway where the water will leap up from below whenever someone walks there, and so this will be a good spot for anyone who wants to spray water over women… With the mill I will create continuous music from various instruments, which will sound for as long as the mill continues to turn.6

  This last device recalls the musical fountain he saw and heard at Rimini in 1502: ‘Let us create a harmony from the waterfall of a fountain by means of a bagpipe which produces many consonances and voices’, he wrote then, citing a passage in Vitruvius ‘about the sound made by water’.7 He brings a certain learnedness, a certain gravity, to these pastoral diversions.

  Probably connected with the d’Amboise villa are some ideas for a ‘temple of Venus’ – what in later country-house contexts would be called a ‘folly’:

  You will make steps on four sides, leading up to a naturally formed meadow on the summit of a rock. The rock will be hollowed out and supported at the front with pillars, and beneath it a huge portico where water flows into various basins of granite and porphyry and serpentine, within semicircular recesses; and let the water in these be continually running over. And facing this portico, towards the north, let there be a lake, and in the middle of it a little island with a thick shady wood.8

  Here is Leonardo visualizing a landscape: the words sketching it in (‘let there be a lake’), the mind’s eye moving across the water to find the point of focus, the ‘little island’. On the verso of the sheet he pens a rather elegant piece about the dangerous allures of the goddess Venus:

  To the south of the southern seaboard of Cilicia may be seen the beautiful island of Cyprus, which was the realm of the goddess Venus; and there have been many who, impelled by her loveliness, have had their ships and rigging broken upon the rocks which lie amid the seething waves. Here the beauty of some pleasant hill invites the wandering mariners to take their ease, where all is green and full of flowers, and soft winds continually come and go, filling the island and the surrounding sea with delicious scents. But, alas, how many ships have foundered there!

  This very literary piece echoes a passage in Poliziano’s Stanze of 1476, thus recalling the Venusian imagery of the Medici giostra.9

  Leonardo’s envisaging of Charles d’Amboise’s villa and gardens survives only in sketches and notes, but is full of exquisite detail and elegance. A sense of sheer pleasure – the wine cooling in the brook, the splashing of girls in their summer dresses, the sound of water ‘continually running over’ in the Venusian grotto – is only faintly shadowed by the idea that these pleasures, like all others, will inevitably lead to pain. It is hardly an idea original to Leonardo, but it seems to have been often on his mind: it is expressed rather intensely in his ‘Oxford allegories’ of the mid-1480s, and here again sensual pleasure brings doom and shipwreck, men ‘broken upon the rocks’ of carnal temptation.

  Leonardo had promised to return to Florence,
and the unfinished Battle of Anghiari, within three months – that is, by the end of August 1506 – but he did not want to go, and his new patron did not want him to go either. On 18 August Charles d’Amboise wrote courteously to the Signoria, asking them to allow Leonardo to stay a bit longer ‘so he can supply certain works which he has at our request begun’. This presumably refers to the summer villa. There may be other ‘works’ – canal engineering, for instance: a constant preoccupation in Milan – or there may be none, the phrasing a mere formula to imply worthwhile industry. The letter was backed up by a more formal missive, signed by the vice-chancellor of the duchy, Geoffroi Carles, requesting a one-month extension of Leonardo’s leave of absence, and promising his return to Florence on the due date ‘without fail, to satisfy Your Excellencies in all things’. On 28 August the Signoria wrote back granting permission – probably not because they wanted to, but because the French were too powerful an ally to fall out with over such matters.10 Florence was already mending fences with Pope Julius II, further to disputes between him and Michelangelo. Thus the great Clash of the Titans envisaged three years previously was dribbling off into small acrimonies.

  The end of September came and went, and Leonardo did not return. On 9 October Gonfalonier Soderini wrote personally to Charles d’Amboise: a grim letter. He was angry with d’Amboise for ‘making excuses’, and even angrier with the absconded artist: