Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  Leonardo… has not behaved as he should have done towards the republic, because he has taken a large sum of money and only made a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out, and in his devotion to Your Lordship he has made himself a debtor to us. We do not wish any further requests to be made on this matter, for this great work is for the benefit of all our citizens, and for us to release him from his obligations would be a dereliction of our duty.

  The tone of this letter, as much as its statements, shows the gulf of antipathy between Leonardo and Soderini. Leonardo knows that the complaint against him is justified, but everything about the letter is calculated to annoy him – its suggestion of dishonourableness, its description of him as a ‘debtor’, the invocations of ‘duty’, the republican cant about the fresco being ‘for the benefit of all our citizens’.

  From Milan a lofty silence, and then on 16 December Charles d’Amboise wrote to Soderini, promising that he would not stand in the way of Leonardo’s return, but taking the opportunity to rebuke the Gonfalonier for his base accusations and his inability to accommodate Leonardo’s peculiar genius:

  If it is fitting to recommend a man of such rich talent to his fellow citizens we heartily recommend him to you, assuring you that everything you can do to increase either his fortune and well-being, or the honours to which he is entitled, would give us, as well as him, the greatest pleasure, and we should be much obliged to you.

  An ironic letter of ‘recommendation’: that a Frenchman in Milan should have to explain Leonardo’s greatness to his own ‘fellow citizens’ – with the further irony implied that the best way to improve Leonardo’s ‘fortune and well-being’ would be to let him stay away from Florence. In this letter d’Amboise writes that eulogy of Leonardo I quoted earlier (‘We loved him before meeting him…’ etc). None of Leonardo’s other patrons has left any comparable show of warmth and admiration.

  Scarcely had Soderini digested this barbed lecture when there arrived news from his ambassador in France, Francesco Pandolfini, that King Louis was enchanted by a ‘little picture’ of Leonardo’s he had recently been shown – probably the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, painted for his secretary Florimond Robertet – and that he wanted Leonardo to remain in Milan and paint something for him. He might paint, said the King, ‘certain little pictures of Our Lady, and other things as they occur to my fantasy, and perhaps I will also get him to paint my own portrait’. This regal whim was formalized in a peremptory letter to the Florentine Signoria on 14 January 1507: ‘We have necessary need of Master Leonardo da Vinci, painter of your city of Florence… Please write to him that he should not leave the said city [Milan] before our arrival, as I told your ambassador.’

  The King’s writ proved decisive in this strange tug-of-war, and on 22 January 1507 the Signoria acceded to his ‘gracious request’ that Leonardo should remain in Milan. It was a victory for Leonardo, though one that left a bitter taste. In the event he would be back in Florence before the summer was out, though it was not Soderini or civic duty that called him back there.

  *

  Over the next few months Leonardo was busy. In February he was probably with Charles d’Amboise at the taking of Baiedo, north of Milan, where a troublesome baron, Simone Arrigoni, was captured. Leonardo noted the trickery by which Arrigoni was ‘betrayed’.11 Also from this time are some designs for a new church, Santa Maria della Fontana, to be built in the suburbs outside Milan, on the site of a spring to which miraculous powers were attributed. The church still exists – unfinished. And on 20 April, just a few days after his fifty-fifth birthday, he got a present in the form of a letter from Charles d’Amboise to the ducal treasurers, formally restoring to him the ownership of his vineyard, which had been confiscated sometime after the French takeover of 1500.12

  At the end of this month King Louis arrived in Milan, having snuffed out a rebellion at Genoa en route. The French chronicler Jean d’Auton describes the route from the Duomo to the castle, now Via Dante, festooned with ‘triumphal arches of greenery in which the arms of France and Brittany were displayed, and images of Christ and the saints, and a triumphal chariot bearing the cardinal virtues, and the god Mars holding in one hand an arrow in the other a palm’ – all of this, and the masques and dances which followed, bearing the imprimatur of the man the King was pleased to call ‘our dear and well-beloved Léonard da Vincy’.13

  Leonardo the entertainer, the pageant-maker, the choreographer of spectacles: a role he had missed in the more strait-laced ethos of republican Florence. The stage-managing of victory parades in an occupied city is not the most laudable of Leonardo’s activities, but it is hard to resist his enjoyment, and indeed a certain thoughtlessness is probably what he enjoyed about it.

  It was probably at this stage that King Louis granted Leonardo an income in the form of dues paid by users of the Naviglio di San Cristofano, a stretch of the city’s canal system. It took a while, and some prompting letters, for the gift to be ratified, but these rights – referred to as ‘the twelve ounces of water’ – were still owned by Leonardo at his death, and were bequeathed to one of his servants in his will.14

  Meanwhile there was the Virgin of the Rocks to attend to, adjudged ‘unfinished’ in the arbitrato of April 1506. In the same judgement the Confraternity was ordered to pay the painters a conguaglio, or adjusted fee, of 200 lire – considerably less than they had asked for, but more than the 100 lire the Confraternity had originally offered. The painting needed work if there was to be any money, but what state it was in, and what was done to it, we don’t know. By the summer of 1507 there appears to be some tension between Leonardo and Ambrogio de Predis. In early August they went as far as to nominate an arbitrator – one Giovanni de Pagnanis, a Dominican friar – to resolve their differences. By this point the painting had probably been completed; the quarrel was about the apportioning of the payments. The matter seems to have been resolved, and on 26 August 1507 the Confraternity paid up the first half of the fee due. This was collected by Ambrogio, his ‘partner’ Leonardo being by this stage back in Florence.15

  ‘GOOD DAY, MASTER FRANCESCO…’

  Sometime before his temporary return to Florence in the summer of 1507 Leonardo met a young Milanese aristocrat named Francesco Melzi. Melzi was perhaps taken on as a pupil – and he was later an excellent draughtsman and painter – but his chief purpose in the entourage soon became scribal rather than artistic. He became Leonardo’s secretary or amanuensis – one might even say his intellectual confidant – and, after Leonardo’s death, his literary executor: the guardian of the flame. His elegant italic script is found scattered throughout Leonardo’s papers – in texts copied for or dictated by Leonardo; in annotations, captions and collation marks – and more than anyone else it is Melzi we must thank for the survival of so many of Leonardo’s manuscripts.

  Giovanni Francesco Melzi16 was well bred and well educated, but his family was not rich. His father, Girolamo Melzi, served as a captain in the Milanese militia under Louis XII; much later he was involved as an engineer in the reconstruction and expansion of the city walls (this in the early 1530s, after the restoration of the Sforza) – a country gent with skills: a type Leonardo knew in his bones. The family seat was at Vaprio, a picturesque old villa perched above the Adda river. On a drawing in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, dated 14 August 1510, Melzi signs himself ‘Francescho de Melzo di anni 17’, in which case he was born in 1492 or ’93 and was about fourteen when he entered Leonardo’s ambit.17 This drawing, a fine profile in red chalk of an elderly bald man, is the earliest known work by Melzi. He was evidently by then a practising member of Leonardo’s studio. (Some discern an influence of Bramantino in his drawing style, and he may have studied under that fine painter before joining Leonardo.) His punctilious skills are shown in some closely worked copies of Leonardo drawings at Windsor. The beautiful red-chalk portrait of Leonardo in profile is almost certainly by Melzi: there are two versions, at Windsor and the Ambrosiana, the former retouched
by the master.

  Vasari met the aged Melzi during a visit to Milan in 1566, and added the following passage to the 1568 edition of the Lives:

  Many of Leonardo’s manuscripts on human anatomy are in the possession of Messer Francesco Melzi, gentleman of Milan, who in the time of Leonardo was a very beautiful boy, and much loved by him, just as today he is a handsome and courteous old man. He cherishes and preserves these writings as if they were relics, as well as the portrait which is a happy memory of Leonardo.

  Vasari’s phrasing – that Melzi had been a ‘bellissimo fanciullo’, and ‘molto amato da’ Leonardo – echoes the language he uses of Salai and carries the same assumption of ‘Socratic’ love. This did not necessarily mean actively homosexual love, though one suspects that in Leonardo’s case Vasari thought that it did mean that. However, Melzi had a notably heterosexual life after Leonardo’s death, marrying the nobly descended Angiola Landriani, who was said to be one of the most beautiful women in Milan, and fathering eight children. We don’t know – but we can guess – what Salai thought of this young interloper, this ‘very beautiful boy’ whose charming manners and educated hand whispered privilege. Melzi had the class that Salai could never have (though to say that Salai was ‘common’ is to identify one of the things that Leonardo loved about him). Salai is snazzy, brittle, a bit of a wide boy; he is good with money – usually someone else’s.

  What the ‘bellissimo’ Melzi actually looked like is uncertain – there is no good reason for saying (as Bramly and others do) that a painting in the Ambrosiana showing a round-faced young man in a hat is a portrait of him by Boltraffio. It is likely that Leonardo drew him, but though there are various young men in the later sketchbooks, there is no clue as to which might be Melzi – none of them becomes a regular, indeed habitual, subject as Salai did. It is argued by Pietro Marani that Melzi’s own Portrait of a Young Man with a Parrot, though probably a late work of the 1550s, is a portrait of himself when young; it has a melancholic, nostalgic air.18

  The earliest reference to Francesco Melzi in Leonardo’s papers is a draft of a letter to him, in Leonardo’s hand, written in Florence in early 1508.19 There are two drafts on the sheet. The first is briefer, and strikes a personal note which Leonardo then thinks better of:

  Good day, Master Francesco,

  Why in God’s name have you not answered a single one of all the letters I’ve sent you. You just wait till I get there and by God I’ll make you write so much you’ll be sorry.

  The tone is fond, joshing, but not perhaps without a genuine hint of hurt that the young man has not, as it appears, bothered to reply to him. There is also a strong suggestion that Melzi’s role as secretary or scribe is already established (‘I’ll make you write so much you’ll be sorry’) if not yet formalized.

  Francesco Melzi’s Young man with a Parrot, possibly a self-portrait.

  From this point on Melzi is an indispensable part of the Leonardo retinue. He is doubtless the ‘Cecho’ and ‘Cechino’ (diminutives of Francesco) in name-lists of c. 1509–10, in which he appears alongside Salai, Lorenzo and others.20 He travels with Leonardo to Rome in 1513, and then to France, where he is more and more essential to the ageing maestro, and where he is distinguished in the French accounts as ‘Francisque de Melce, the Italian gentleman who is with the said Maistre Lyenard’, and receives a handsome salary of 400 écus a year – as opposed to Salai, who is merely ‘servant to Maistre Lyenard’ on 100 écus a year.21 He is a happy presence in Leonardo’s household: discreet, efficient, talented, devoted – the perfect amanuensis (or, as we would now say, personal assistant). He is an intellectual companion for the solitary Leonardo: more learned and less complex than the troublesome Salai.

  BROTHERS AT WAR

  What brought Leonardo back down to Florence was the death of his uncle Francesco in early 1507; or more precisely it was the matter of Uncle Francesco’s will. As we saw, the will had been drawn up in 1504, shortly after the death of Ser Piero. It named Leonardo as sole heir, almost certainly in response to his exclusion from his father’s will. There had always been a closeness between Leonardo and Francesco, the easy-going, country-dwelling young uncle of his childhood. But the bequest contravened an earlier agreement that Francesco’s estate should be inherited by Ser Piero’s legitimate children, and they, led by the inevitable notary of the new generation, Ser Giuliano da Vinci, swiftly moved to challenge the will.22 Leonardo probably learned of this in June 1507, for on 5 July one of his garzoni, probably Lorenzo, wrote a letter home to his mother, in which he says he will be returning soon to Florence, with the maestro, but that he won’t be there long because they have to get back to Milan ‘subito’. Meanwhile, he asks, ‘Remember me to Dianira, and give her a hug so she won’t say I’ve forgotten her’ – for a moment we look in on the life of Leonardo’s apprentice: a young man a long way from home.23

  In the event Leonardo did not leave Milan until at least the middle of August. In the interim, on 26 July, he secured the first of his trump cards in the case against the brothers – a letter to the Signoria, signed by the French king, asking them to intervene in Leonardo’s favour. In this letter Leonardo is called ‘nostre peintre et ingeneur ordinaire’ – ‘painter and engineer in ordinary’ to the King (‘ordinary’ in the courtly sense meaning a permanent official position, as opposed to ‘extraordinary’ or temporary). This is the first documentation of his status at the French court. A further letter to the Signoria, this time from Charles d’Amboise, is dated 15 August. It announces Leonardo’s imminent return to Florence ‘to conclude certain differences that have arisen between him and some of his brothers’, and asks the Signoria to expedite the matter as swiftly as possible.24 Leonardo’s permission to leave has been granted ‘with the greatest reluctance’, because he is working on a ‘painting very dear to the King’. This is presumably one of ‘the two Madonnas of different sizes, done for our most Christian king’ which Leonardo mentions in a letter of early 1508 – works apparently lost – though it is just possible it refers to the equally chimerical Leda, which was later catalogued in the French collection.

  From Florence, on 18 September, Leonardo wrote a letter to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, brother of Isabella, from which we learn some details of the case.25 Leonardo’s ‘cause is being argued’ before a member of the Signoria, Ser Rafaello Hieronimo, who has been specifically assigned by Gonfalonier Soderini to adjudicate the case, and ‘to decide and conclude it before the festival of All Saints’, i.e. 1 November 1507. Ser Rafaello, it appears, is known to Ippolito d’Este – he is perhaps one of the numerous d’Este ‘agents’ in Florence. Hence the letter, which asks Ippolito ‘to write to the said Ser Rafaello, in that dextrous and persuasive manner which Your Lordship has, recommending to him Leonardo Vincio, your most devoted servant, as I am and always will be, and requesting and pressing him not only to do me justice, but to do it with as little delay as possible’.

  This document is in one sense unique: it is the only letter we know that Leonardo sent; all his other letters survive only in draft, among his papers, but this one sits visibly and tangibly in the Estense archives in Modena. Unfortunately neither the text nor the signature – ‘Leonardus Vincius pictor’ – is in Leonardo’s hand. As in other formal documents (e.g. the letter of introduction to Ludovico Sforza), he has availed himself of someone with better handwriting – in this case Machiavelli’s assistant Agostino di Vespucci, who had earlier written up that summary of the Battle of Anghiari. The only physical touch of Leonardo on the paper is on the verso: the wax seal, showing a head in profile, is probably an impression of a signet ring on Leonardo’s hand.

  Another draft letter reveals the acid relations between Leonardo and his fratellastri or half-brothers, who are said to have ‘wished the utmost evil’ to Francesco during his lifetime, and to have treated Leonardo ‘not as a brother but as a complete stranger’. Part of the dispute concerned the property called Il Botro which Francesco had bequeathed him. Leonardo writes, ‘You do
not wish to repay his heir the money he lent for Il Botro’, which implies that he had lent Uncle Francesco money to purchase or improve the property. There is a reference to ‘la valuta del botro’ (‘the value of Il Botro’) in a memo list in the Codex Arundel. In neither case is botro capitalized, so it could also be translated as ‘ditch’ or ‘ravine’ – perhaps a quarry or lime-pit. Leonardo refers to experiments done at his ‘pit’ (bucha) in the Codex Leicester, which he began around this time.26

  In his letter to Ippolito d’Este Leonardo spoke of the case being resolved by November 1507, but it was not, and in early 1508 he wrote to Charles d’Amboise, ‘I am almost at an end of the litigation with my brothers, and believe I will be with you this Easter.’27 In 1508 Easter Sunday was 23 April. It is probable that he was back in Milan around then, though whether the lawsuit was wrapped up is another matter, as a further letter on the subject is in Melzi’s hand, and was therefore written after Leonardo’s return to Milan.

  While in Florence, Leonardo and Salai (and probably Lorenzo) stayed in the house of a wealthy intellectual and art patron, Piero di Braccio Martelli. He was a noted mathematician and linguist, and a friend of Bernardo Rucellai, and the uncongenial business of the lawsuit was at least partly counterbalanced by the free-and-easy atmosphere of the Palazzo Martelli.28 The house stood on Via Larga; it was later swallowed up by the church and convent of San Giovannino, built in the 1550s. Among Leonardo’s fellow guests or lodgers there was the sculptor Giovanni Francesco Rustici, of whom he seems to have been fond. Rustici was about thirty, little more than half Leonardo’s age. Vasari gives a colourful account of him. As well as