Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  BACK IN THE STUDIO

  In his letters from Florence to Milan, carried up by Salai in early 1508, Leonardo says he hopes to be back there by Easter – late April – and he probably was. As per the 1506 agreement with the Confraternity, delivery of the reworked Virgin of the Rocks was due by 26 April, and perhaps some final touches were applied by the maestro before the painting was handed over. This is the beautiful, blue-tinged London version of the Virgin of the Rocks, part Ambrogio de Predis and part Leonardo: less shimmery and suggestive than the Louvre version, technically sharper, emotionally cooler. It was certainly in the Confraternity’s possession sometime before mid-August, for on 18 August there is another little flurry of legal documentation in the form of an ‘acquittance’ releasing the Confraternity from its earlier contract with the painters.46 From this it is clear that the painting was now in ‘its place’ – in other words above the altar in the Confraternity’s chapel at San Francesco Grande – and in fact it remained there until the suppression of the Confraternity in 1781. It was brought to Britain four years later by the Scottish collector Gavin Hamilton.47

  That the painting was delivered in 1508 did not mean that the painters got paid the final payment for which they had waited so long. The Confraternity was as loath as ever to part with cash, and in the acquittance of 18 August it was agreed that in lieu of payment the painters would make yet another copy of the painting which they could sell. The Confraternity undertook to ‘deposit the said painting in a room in the convent of San Francesco for a period of up to four months so that Dominus Leonardus and his assistants can make a copy of it, except that on holy days it is to be restored to its place’. On the same date Ambrogio and Leonardo signed an agreement in which Ambrogio undertook to execute this copy, at his own expense and labour, under instruction from Leonardo. All proceeds from the sale of it were to be divided equally between them ‘in good faith and without fraud’. We know nothing of this third version of the Virgin of the Rocks, assuming it was ever painted; of known early copies it is more likely to be the version in a Swiss private collection than the inferior version in the Chiesa di Affori in Milan.48 Leonardo’s input is minimal but magisterial. He ‘instructs’, Ambrogio ‘executes’; each receives half the proceeds – the inequality of their labour precisely reflecting the inequality of their status as master and assistant.

  As he settles back into Milanese life, Leonardo returns with renewed vigour to the studio. We know from these latest documents that he was living in the parish of Santa Babila, at or near the Porta Orientale, and probably his studio was there. (The house in the vineyard outside Porta Vercellina was still occupied by Salai’s father, and anyway could not have accommodated a busy studio, which has a constant requirement of materials and which functions typically in an artisan quarter.) In this studio we can place Salai, by now a thoroughly proficient painter; Francesco Melzi, whose earliest datable drawing is from 1510; young Lorenzo, now once more separated from his little sister Dianira; and also, as we will soon see, one of the best of Leonardo’s young Lombard followers, Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, known as Giampietrino.

  And here too we can place the two great paintings of this period, two long-gestated works which now come to some kind of fruition – the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Leda – and very probably a third, wrapped in an aura of suspendedness from which she would never quite escape, the Mona Lisa. Thus on the easels of Leonardo’s studio we find this extraordinary assortment of four women, each of them a superb study in femininity, each painted from a different model, then teased out into the idealized forms of feminine beauty – four meditations, one might say, on motherhood: St Anne the mother of Mary, Mary the mother of Christ, Leda the mother of those bird-children, and Lisa the actual Florentine housewife and mother.

  As we saw, Leonardo had worked intensively on the St Anne in Florence in 1500–1501, intending it for the altarpiece of Santissima Annunziata, and in 1501 had exhibited a full-sized cartoon, now lost, which caused a sensation in Florentine art-circles. Now, seven years later, he is at work on the theme again, and the result is the superb drawing in the National Gallery in London (Plate 24), known as the Burlington House cartoon because it hung for many years at the Royal Academy’s headquarters at Burlington House. It is a huge drawing (55 x 40 inches), though its sense of size is in part due to the drastic foregrounding of the four figures, so that they occupy practically all the picture space; it looks like a blown-up photograph from which the surrounds have been cropped. The foremost figure, Mary, though seated, takes up virtually all the vertical space; in fact the toes of her right foot are lost beneath the bottom of the frame. The ensemble has a sculptural quality – from this sense of size, from the dense modelling of the figures, and even from the colouring, which gives them a dull coppery gleam (though this is in part the action of time on the picture surface). Yet in this sculpted group Leonardo achieves a subtlety of texture that goes beyond the possibilities of sculpture, and the cartoon seems to embody one of his instances of the superiority of painting over sculpture: ‘Sculpture cannot represent luminous and transparent bodies, such as veiled figures in which the bare flesh below the veils can be seen.’49

  The composition of the Burlington House cartoon, like that of the Virgin of the Rocks, is broadly pyramidic, but within that enclosing shape the dynamic of the drawing is circular, spiralling. The eye is drawn into a vortex, the chief whorl of which is a line which begins with the face of the Christ-child, moves upwards in a flowing movement around the heads of the two adults, descends down the side of Mary’s head and along her arm, but then, instead of completing the circle, shoots off through the signpost finger of St Anne pointing heavenward. Around this central movement, which is also expressed in the lines of the two women’s headgear, are the eddies and flows of the drapery, an undulation of knees and a repeated undulation of feet, and then the scattering of little pebbles – the soothing disorder of the river-bed.

  As in so many Leonardo compositions, there is a hinted narrative. The day is hot; they sit on a rock beside a stream or shallow pool, cooling their feet in the water as they sit. Behind them is a rugged brown landscape, dry-looking. We are in the foothills, rather than the mountains – rocky, hard, not much vegetation to shade us – but we have a sense (as in the landscape behind the Gioconda) of human activity. There is the hint of a road or track winding down behind Mary’s right shoulder, and on the other side of the group are four lines that look like the silhouette of a gate, and a curving shape that could be a simple bridge – a suggestion of the way these people have come to get here. And in the midst of it all is that hand – which amid the swirls and patina and hatching is almost a blank space – which signifies to us that this is not just a family group passing the time together, but a moment of spiritual significance.

  Preparatory drawings exist for the cartoon, done in pen and ink over black chalk on a sheet now in the British Museum.50 The largest of the three is not just a preparatory sketch – it is an actual template for the full-size cartoon. The ensemble has arrived at a point of definition, via the intensive wrestling and probing that remain evident on the page, and the composition is framed and measured, ready to be scaled up to the near-life-size dimensions of the cartoon. The cartoon itself was drawn on to a glued-up assemblage of sheets (the same process recorded in the Anghiari documents of 1504). Leonardo used eight sheets of linen-rag paper – four full sheets, and four narrower ones top and bottom – and drew on them in charcoal heightened with white chalk. The media could not be more basic: coal and chalk, as used by cavemen. The effects he achieves belong to another dimension, the tracery of moti mentali across the paper.

  The fine quality of the linen-based paper has contributed to the drawing’s survival through the many vicissitudes which are etched on its surface and which seem also to be part of its identity. There are scars of water damage, of rollings and foldings. A rip has been sealed up on the back with three large patches of paper; unseen behind the top left-hand corner of the
cartoon is an old print showing the heads of some Roman emperors. In the seventeenth century the drawing was stuck on to canvas: the fingerprints of the craftsman, left as he frantically tried to counteract the grip of the glue, are visible under a magnifying glass. It arrived in England, in circumstances unknown, sometime in the eighteenth century – it is first listed as part of the Royal Academy collection in 1779. Since then it has endured various invasive restorations. The forger Eric Hebborn claimed he redrew all the white-chalk lines in the 1950s, during a secret restoration after the cartoon was left leaning against a hot radiator in the basement of Burlington House, but his story has not been confirmed.51 Its transfer to the National Gallery in 1962 did not mark the end of its tribulations. On the evening of 17 July 1987 a man stood in front of the cartoon and fired at it from point-blank range

  Scaled preparatory drawing for the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John (Burlington House cartoon).

  with a single-barrel 12-bore shotgun. The protective glass prevented any of the pellets reaching the picture surface, but the contusion of the impact was severe – a shallow crater about 6 inches across disfigured the picture. The restoration took over a year, and involved the mapping, storing and replacing of more than 250 fragments of paper, ‘some of them no bigger than spores’.52

  The cartoon was never used for a painting: perhaps Leonardo considered it a final expression of that particular idea. The oil painting of the Virgin

  Giampietrino, Kneeling Leda.

  and Child with St Anne in the Louvre, inferior in power, shows a different grouping. The lamb, reportedly present in the 1501 cartoon, reappears, though this is not quite a return to that earlier design, as there is no infant St John in the picture. The group swivels, the mood changes, the painting is bathed in a sweetness which to some seems sentimental, and the chief charge of the picture is the tantalizing if spurious motif of the bird, discerned a century ago by the Freudian Pfister, and once seen impossible not to see. The date of the painting is unknown and opinions vary. The most plausible view is that it was composed a little later than the cartoon, perhaps c. 1510–11; it was one of the three paintings shown to Cardinal Luigi of Aragon in France in 1517.

  Also in the studio at this time, it would seem, is an evolving version of the Leda. The various paintings of the standing Leda (Plate 29) are mysterious, and there is no documentation (though many opinions) as to who painted them and when. But as we have seen, there was another Leda motif entirely, found in various preparatory drawings of 1504–5, in which she is shown kneeling. Of this there is only one known painted version, and it can be closely tied to Leonardo’s Milanese workshop at this time. The painting, in oils on a panel of alder wood, is by his talented assistant Giampietrino, though when it turned up in Paris in 1756, and was purchased by the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, it was described as ‘a Caritas by Leonardo da Vinci’. A caritas – a personification of Charity – was a specific grouping of a mother and three children, and indeed at this stage the fourth child (the one at bottom right) had been painted over. In 1803 Goethe wrote, ‘Among the treasures of the Gallery at Kassel is the Caritas by Leonardo da Vinci, which more than all others draws the attention of artists and lovers.’53 At some point the painting’s connection with the kneeling-Leda drawings was established, and the fourth child was recovered. The attribution to Leonardo persisted for a while, for the picture is of a very high quality, but Giampietrino’s authorship is now undisputed. The facial type and the curvaceous body of the kneeling Leda are echoed, indeed reiterated, in a number of other works by Giampietrino. Leda’s face is very similar in all the paintings of her: Leonardo’s pen-and-ink studies at Windsor (page 441) are the template for this.54 (It is possible that we know the name and even the address of the model who provided this definitive ‘look’ – but that is a matter for a later chapter.)

  Recent technical examination of the Giampietrino Leda has revealed further close links with the Leonardo workshop.55 Infra-red reflectographs disclose an underdrawing beneath the paint surface, defined by a clear outline of puncture-marks showing that the painting was produced from a full-sized cartoon. This cartoon would be Leonardo’s evolution of the drawings of the kneeling Leda which he had done in c. 1504: the pose is closest to, but not identical with, the drawing at Chatsworth. But the painting has further secrets to reveal, for beneath the underdrawing is another substratum, on which can be seen a drawing of part of the St Anne ensemble; only a fragment of this composition remains, but where it does it follows precisely the line of the painted version in the Louvre. We thus find beneath Giampietrino’s kneeling Leda a reminiscence of the lost cartoon for the Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne. There are many variables here, but the likely date for the Louvre painting, c. 1510–11, is likely enough for the Giampietrino Leda also, though it is possible that the Leda’s landscape background was painted later by another artist, Bernardino Marchiselli or Bernazzano, assistant to Cesare da Sesto and a specialist in just this kind of sweeping, autumnally tinged Lombard landscape.56

  Also on the drawing-board in Leonardo’s studio at this time are his designs for the funeral monument of the condottiere Giangiacomo Trivulzio, the former enemy of the Sforza who was now Marshal of Milan. In a will drawn up in 1504 Trivulzio set aside 4,000 ducats for a monumental tomb in the basilica of San Nazaro Maggiore. He envisaged a suitably grandiose equestrian statue, and the name of Leonardo cannot have been far from his mind. The possibility of this lucrative project was perhaps another reason for Leonardo’s return to Milan in 1506. The ghost of the ruined Sforza Horse stirs in his mind. There are many studies for the monument, which was to feature a bronze horse and rider (the horse being specified by Leonardo as a corsiere or charger) on top of an elaborately carved marble arch. The horses are drawn with wonderful realism and empathy. This is his last series of horses: dynamic, precise, learned, the culmination of decades of connoisseurship.57 The rider is idealized, a youthful warrior – in reality Trivulzio was a burly figure with a face like a prizefighter.

  Study for the Trivulzio monument.

  In a document headed ‘Sepulcro di Messer Giovanni Jacomo da Trevulzo’ Leonardo estimates the costs of the monument:58

  Cost of the metal for the horse and rider

  500 ducats

  Cost of casting it, including the ironwork to go inside the model, and the binding of the mould, and the necessaries for the furnace in which it is to be cast 200 ducats

  Cost of making the model in clay and then taking a mould of it in wax

  432 ducats

  Cost of labour for polishing it after it is cast

  450 ducats

  Thus the statue alone is estimated at 1,582 ducats. For the plinth and the arch some 13 tons of marble were required, adding a further 1,342 ducats for materials and labour. This is his preventivo or estimate. Perhaps it is inaccurate, as Italian preventivi so often are, but it matters little, for the Trivulzio monument is another of Leonardo’s might-have-beens. There is no evidence that the project got beyond the planning stage, and in the event Trivulzio lived on till 1518, when he died at Chartres, a few months before Leonardo.

  THE WORLD AND ITS WATERS

  On 12 September 1508 Leonardo opened up a new notebook with a cover of thin grey card and inscribed it, ‘Cominciato a Milano a dì 12 di settembre 1508’. It is a notebook of 192 pages; at the end of it he writes the date October 1508, so it seems he filled the entire book over a concentrated period of six weeks or so – perhaps less. The compactness and regularity of the handwriting would confirm this. He gave it the title ‘Di mondo ed acque’ – ‘Of the World and Its Waters’ – though it is now known less sonorously as Paris MS F. He instructs himself:

  Write first of water, in each of its motions; then describe all of its beds and the substances therein… and let the order be good, for otherwise the work will be confused. Describe all the forms that water assumes from its largest to its smallest wave, and their causes.59

  The pages on water have smal
l, vivid sketches – superb examples of Leonardo’s mastery in representing complex volatile structures. He treats of ‘retrosi’ (back-currents) and vortices (p. 150). He coins the phrase aqua panniculata – creased or crumpled water – to describe agitated surfaces. The fascination with the intricate forms of running water seems to be echoed in the rolling, flowing tresses of the Leda, on which Leonardo – or at any rate his assistants – were probably working at this time. The interest in water is also practical. There is a machine ‘for excavating earth so as to make the water of the padule deeper’, which can be linked to canalization projects under way at this time.60

  The flying-machine is under consideration once more. A curt note reads, ‘Anatomize the bat, and keep to this, and base the machine on this.’61 He had earlier recognized the bat as the physiological model for the wings of the machine, ‘because the membranes serve as the framework of the wings’, but now – perhaps as a result of the failed trial on Monte Ceceri – he seems to be stressing the bat as a more stable model for flight in general. He later notes that bats ‘can follow their prey upside down, and sometimes in a slanting position, and so in various ways, which they could not do without causing their own destruction if their wings were of feathers with gaps in between’. 62

  His passion for geometry is undimmed: we find him delving into the arcana of square- and cube-roots, and tussling with the Delos problem, so called because it is expressed in the classical story of Apollo, who delivered the islanders of Delos from plague and demanded in return that they double the size of their altar to him; as the altar was a perfect cube of marble, they were obliged to work out a cube-root in order to satisfy him.63

  There are discussions of optics and light which shade into cosmological theory. A powerfully written discourse ‘In Praise of the Sun’ covers a two-page spread, citing and disputing the opinions of Epicurus and Socrates about the size of the sun, and concluding: