Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  In the whole universe there is nowhere to be seen a body of greater magnitude and power than the sun. Its light gives light to all the celestial bodies which are distributed throughout the universe. From it descend all the vital forces [anime], for the heat that is in all living creatures comes from these vital forces, and there is no other heat and no other light in the universe.64

  There is an echo here of the old Platonic-planetary magic of Ficino, but if one substitutes ‘solar system’ for ‘universe’ the passage makes perfect scientific sense. It tends towards an idea of heliocentricity, but does not actually express it. The famous note reading, ‘Il sole non si muove’ (‘The sun does not move’), found on a Windsor sheet of c. 1510, has been taken as an inspired astronomical insight pre-dating Copernicus by thirty years, but this cannot be certain. The idea of heliocentricity – though not the proof – is as old as Pythagoras, and anyway the words appear on their own, with no preamble or explanation, and are as likely to be a jotting connected with a pageant or masque, or perhaps the motto of an emblem illustrating some quality of steadfastness.65

  He also pursues in MS F his fascination with geological and aetiological cycles, which is such a feature of the contemporary Codex Leicester. He considers the possibility of the earth’s emergence from the sea, and foresees, in a prophetic tone, the return of the earth to the ‘lap’ (grembo) or womb of the sea.66 In this passage we hear the first germs of his apocalyptic Deluge drawings, where the drama of natural cataclysms conveys also an idea of the collapse of categories and distinctions – an engulfing of the intellect by a Nature uncontrollable and in the end unknowable.

  Among these big themes there is also that quality of momentariness which is such a pungent aspect of the notebooks. Here are some of the phrases scribbled down on the cover:

  inflate the lungs of a pig

  Avicenna on fluids

  map of Elefan of India which Antonello Merciaio has

  enquire at the stationers’ for Vitruvius

  ask Maestro Mafeo why the Adige rises for seven years and falls for

  seven years

  go every Saturday to the hot baths and you will see naked men.67

  Broadly contemporary with this notebook is another, Paris MS D, a booklet of twenty pages, neatly and consistently written, and wholly concerned with a single subject – the science of vision. Some of it elaborates previously written notes, particularly drawing on MS A of the early 1490s. It is a further sign of Leonardo’s thoughts tending towards compilation, finalization, and hence publication.68

  The same desire is undoubtedly to be seen in his anatomical sheets of this period, a gathering of eighteen folios on one of which is the note ‘In the winter of this year 1510 I expect to complete all this anatomy.’ In these the graphic illustrations aligned with short blocks of explanatory text constitute what would now be called the ‘layout’ for a printed page. A note refers explicitly to a future printed edition: ‘As regards this benefit I give to posterity, I show the method of printing it in order, and I beseech you who come after me not to let avarice constrain you to make the prints in [… ]’ The last word is missing owing to paper-loss near the margin, but enough is left to suggest the word legno, wood.69 He wishes, in other words, that his anatomical writings should be illustrated not with woodcuts – cheaper, as he says, but much cruder – but with the more expensive and accurate process of copper engraving. This is confirmed by Paolo Giovio, who had first-hand knowledge of Leonardian anatomy through their shared connection with the anatomist Marcantonio della Torre. Leonardo, he says, ‘tabulated with extreme accuracy all the different parts of the body, down to the smallest veins and the composition of the bones, in order that this work on which he had spent so many years should be published from copper engravings for the benefit of art’. As Carlo Pedretti notes, this expectation may explain the slightly lifeless drawing-style in these anatomical folios: ‘The calligraphic precision of line, and a shading rendered by a minute, uniform hatching, are characteristics that Leonardo was expecting from copper engravings.’70

  Another compilation of this period, no doubt also with a printed edition in mind, is the manuscript ‘book’ on painting which Melzi catalogued (after Leonardo’s death) as Libro A. It formed an important part of Melzi’s compilation of Leonardo’s writings on painting, the Codex Urbinas, which in turn provided the copy-text of the Trattato della pittura. The original manuscript is lost, but some of its contents are recoverable from Melzi’s text. It also contained some notes on hydraulics which were copied by Leonardo himself into the Codex Leicester.71 Thus in his studio in Milan the great project of inquiry proceeds, page by page, pen-nib by pen-nib, towards the distant goal of publication. ‘In this labour of mine’, he promises, men ‘will discern the marvellous works of Nature.’

  FÊTES MILANAISES

  The French seemed genuinely keen to exploit those talents which Leonardo himself enjoyed, and as in the Sforza years there were masques and entertainments – feste, which one might now call fêtes. Among those who witnessed these shows was the young physician Paolo Giovio, who later wrote in his biography of Leonardo, ‘He was the marvellous inventor and arbiter of all elegance and of all theatrical delights.’

  In the Arundel Codex are rapid sketches of a stage-set featuring a range of rugged, Leonardesque mountains, which opens to reveal a large hemispherical chamber or cavern. A diagram shows the mechanism of pulleys and counterweights that would operate this set behind the scenes. Notes explain the theatrical effect: ‘a mountain which opens… and Pluto is discovered in his residence’. This theatrical cavern is the ‘residence’ of the king of Hades: a glimpse of hell, furnished with devils and furies, and Cerberus, and ‘many naked children weeping’.72 These are almost certainly designs for a performance of Agnolo Poliziano’s operetta Orfeo. Leonardo had probably been involved in an earlier production, in Mantua in 1490, starring his protégé Atalante Migliorotti, and now reprises it for the court of Charles d’Amboise. The play retells in sprightly Florentine verse the old story of Orpheus’s journey to the underworld to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the clutches of Pluto, with appropriate musical accompaniment for each – contrabass viols for Orpheus, treble viols for Eurydice, trombones for Pluto, and guitars for Charon, ferryman of the dead. A sheet at Windsor has some costume studies and a profile of a youth with curly hair which may be a portrait of the actor playing Orpheus.73

  Another relic of this production, probably, is a pen-and-ink sketch showing ‘Orpheus being attacked by the Furies’. This surfaced in 1998 among a collection of prints and drawings by Stefano della Bella, but was reported in 2001 as having been damaged during a botched restoration. It is done in a greenish ink, which Leonardo used in other documents and drawings of this time such as the estimate for the Trivulzio monument.74

  These fugitive fragments are all that remain of Leonardo’s Milanese production of Orfeo, itself a text with elements of nostalgia – for the Florence of Poliziano, for the beautiful Atalante – and perhaps with certain echoes and undertones reminiscent of his own early text about the ‘cavern’ and the ‘fear and desire’ he felt as he looked into it.

  Another Leonardo production was the victory pageant of 1 July 1509, staged in honour of Louis XII as he returned to Milan at the head of his troops after the decisive defeat of the Venetians at Agnadello in mid-May. There was an allegoric representation of a battle between a dragon (France) and a lion (Venice) – another of Leonardo’s lion themes, though in this allegory the lion was no doubt expediently defeated – while in the Piazza del Castello was exhibited ‘a horse of immense size, in relief’ with the image of the King on it. We learn of this from a contemporary chronicle, and from G. P. Lomazzo, who gives an account which he seems to have heard at first hand from Francesco Melzi.75

  A tight-lipped note in the Codex Atlanticus has a rather different angle on these Italian wars and their futile wastage: ‘The Venetians have boasted of spending 36 million gold ducats in ten years of war against the Empi
re, the Church and the kings of Spain and France. This works out at 300,000 ducats a month.’76

  These spectacles show Leonardo once more in that role of court artist he had assayed in the Sforza years. In a similar vein are some imprese or emblems he drew at this time. The heyday of the Renaissance emblem has not yet come: one of its chief exponents would be Leonardo’s admirer Paolo Giovio, whose emblem-books were known to Shakespeare via the translation of Samuel Daniel.77 Andrea Alciato, author of the famous Emblematum liber (1531), defined an emblem as an image ‘drawn from history or nature’ which ‘elegantly signifies something’. The true emblem consists of a corpo or body, which is its visual pictorial form, and an anima or spirit, which is the verbal motto that accompanies it. The motto should not declare the ‘sentiment’, or meaning, of the emblem too readily: this is for cultivated men and women to contemplate and ponder for themselves.78 Its effect lay precisely in its poetic suggestiveness, its bodying forth of metaphysical ideas through apparent simplicity and brevity of expression.

  Obstinate rigour. Design for an emblem, c. 1508–9.

  Like a Japanese haiku, the Renaissance emblem is a lapidary art-form which blossoms into complex, personally interpreted ideas.

  A Windsor sheet has three finished emblems.79 The first shows a plough, with the motto hostinato rigore (obstinate rigour). This motto has been held to sum up a side of Leonardo’s character – his rigorously experimental, investigative temper – though in so far as a plough moves in a straight line it is not so characteristic: Leonardo’s furrows are tangential, labyrinthine, like the knot-patterns of the fantasie dei vinci. The second shows a compass turned by a water-wheel, and a star above, with the motto destinato rigore – literally ‘destined rigour’, but more loosely translated as ‘an unwavering course’. A note beside this reads, ‘Non a revoluzione chi a tale stella e fisso’ – ‘He who is fixed to such a star will not revolve’ (hence not be subject to vicissitudes). The presence of tiny fleurs-de-lis within the star shows that it represents the French king.80 The third emblem shows a lamp with a candle inside it, and winds blowing around it from all points of the compass. There is no motto, but a similar device is found in another notebook, with bellows producing the winds and the motto ‘Tal el mal che non mi noce quale il bene che non mi giova’ – ‘As the evil which does not harm me so the good which does not profit me.’81 Inside the lamp the flame is protected both from the strong wind which would put it out and from the gentle wind which would fan it. This protection one would associate once more with the King, the fixed star of the previous emblem, though if so it comes with an idea that royal patronage is double-edged: it shelters the artist from the buffetings of fortune, but also isolates him from the ‘good’ gentle winds (of experience? of Nature?).

  Another series from the same time, though merely rough sketches, shows an emblem featuring a flower (Iris florentina) with a scroll enclosed in a circle. Leonardo tries out various mottos – ‘Prima morte che stanchezza’, ‘Non mi satio di servire’, etc. – on a theme of unswerving service. But a marginal note, like a theatrical ‘aside’ to the audience, suggests an element of scepticism about such devotion: ‘Hands into which the ducats and precious stones fall like snow never grow tired of serving, but such service is only for its usefulness, and is not for one’s own benefit.’82 The verso of the sheet has some vivid sketches, reminiscent of the Pain/Pleasure allegories of the mid-1480s. They show masks held in front of faces, being melted by the sun’s rays. The basic key reads:

  Truth: the sun

  Falsehood: a mask.

  Again he tries out different mottos, such as ‘Nulla occulta sotto il sole’ – ‘Nothing is hidden under the sun.’83

  Are these emblems Leonardo’s own expressions of service to King Louis, or are they done on behalf of someone who wishes to express such sentiments – his old friend Galeazzo Sanseverino, perhaps, the former son-in-law of the Moor, who had adroitly and somewhat cynically switched allegiance to the French and later became superintendent of the King’s stables at Blois?

  Musical shows, victory parades, courtly emblems: these are some of the more minor accomplishments required of the King’s ‘painter and engineer in ordinary’, to be fitted in among such other duties as painting Madonnas, designing summer villas, and rerouting canals. We have some details of the financial rewards that Leonardo reaped from all this. A list of payments from the royal treasurer shows that he received a total of 390 scudi between July 1508 and April 1509 – a good sum, though there is a faintly ominous downward tendency in the payments: 100, 100, 70, 50, 50, 20.84 The larger payments of late summer 1508 are perhaps connected with the Orfeo. A separate account, written on the inside cover of MS F, reads, ‘On the [blank] day of October 1508 I received 30 scudi.’ Of this sum, he notes, he lent 13 to Salai ‘to make up the dowry of his sister’.85

  LA CREMONA

  There is a small and easily overlooked list of six names in the bottom right corner of a large sheet of geometrical designs and anatomical studies at Windsor.86 Written in Leonardo’s smallest and most spidery style, it reads as follows:

  loren

  loren

  salai

  cecho

  chermonese

  fachino

  An item below this reads ‘9 tessci’ – ‘nine skulls’ – but it is separated by a space and does not appear to be part of the list. On the basis of its geometrical contents and references the sheet is datable to around 1509.

  Four of the six names can be easily interpreted. Salai we know. Cecho or Cecco (a common diminutive of Francesco) is Melzi. One of the two Lorens is the Lorenzo who joined Leonardo’s studio in Florence in 1505 and wrote home to his mother in 1507. And the last name on the list is not really a name at all, but simply a porter (facchino), suggesting that a journey is imminent, and that this party of six will accompany Leonardo, and look after him, on it. A plausible context would be Leonardo’s trip to Pavia in late 1509 or early 1510, to attend the anatomy lectures of Marcantonio della Torre: an extended visit, accompanied by his travelling entourage.

  The other two names are mysterious. I have no idea who the second Loren or Lorenzo was, but the one who interests me is ‘Chermonese’. There is no doubt that this is Leonardo’s spelling of Cremonese, i.e. a native of the northern Italian town of Cremona, already famed as a centre of musical-instrument-making. We find the same spelling in a note of 1499, written in Milan, in which he reminds himself to ‘take the works of Leonardo Chermonese’, referring to the Cremonese mathematician Leonardo di Antonio Mainardi.87

  On the evidence of this scribbled list there is a person from Cremona in Leonardo’s retinue in 1509. This person belongs in a list of six names, but may well differ from the other five in one respect – she was a woman. We have here, I believe, a sighting of a mysterious woman called Cremona, with whom Leonardo was involved in some undefined way.

  *

  La Cremona has appeared quite recently in Leonardo’s story. Nothing was known of her until 1982, when there appeared a handsome new edition of the writings of the early-nineteenth-century Lombard artist and critic Giuseppe Bossi, edited by Roberto Paolo Ciardi. Bossi was a prodigious admirer of Leonardo who did a full-size copy of the Last Supper, as well as some detailed drawings which have served as evidence for later restorers. He had his detractors – among them Stendhal, who nailed him as ‘a fat celebrity of the kind that passes here for a great man’ – but he is still highly respected among Leonardo scholars for his monograph on the Last Supper (1810) and for his early edition of the Codex Leicester, based not on the original, which was by then ensconced in Norfolk, but on a complete copy of it which he tracked down in Naples. His own transcription is now in the Grand-Ducal Library at Weimar; it was purchased on the advice of Goethe, after Bossi’s early death in 1815.88 Ciardi’s new edition of Bossi’s writings included previously unknown manuscripts among which was the draft of an essay which had never reached print, about the representation of the passions in art. In this Bossi ref
ers often to Leonardo, citing his masterful depiction of passions in the Last Supper, and then, developing an idea that in order to represent passions adequately you have to experience them yourself, he writes:

  That Leonardo… loved the pleasures of life is proved by a note of his concerning a courtesan called Cremona, a note which was communicated to me by an authoritative source. Nor would it have been possible for him to have understood human nature so deeply, in order to represent it, without becoming, through long practice in it, somewhat tinged with human weaknesses.89

  This is it, tout court. Unfortunately Bossi did not name the ‘authoritative source’ who communicated this ‘note’ to him. We cannot be sure that his information is accurate, though there is no doubt he was very knowledgeable about Leonardo, and that he had access to manuscripts since lost. It is possible his source was Carlo Amoretti, the Ambrosian librarian, who made copies of many fugitive Leonardo papers. Or perhaps Bossi was shown something in Naples, where he found that copy of the Codex Leicester, and where he also copied from a version of the ‘Ambrosian apograph’, a seventeenth-century collection of extracts from material in the Ambrosiana.

  ‘Courtesan’ was a designation with many shades of meaning, but Bossi essentially means a prostitute. In the Roman census of 1511–18, cortesane are classified in descending order of respectability as cortesane honeste, cortesane putane, cortesane da candella e da lume, and cortesane da minor sorte. The top-of-the-range ‘honest’ courtesans were beautiful and accomplished women who were the mistresses of the rich and powerful; the ‘whore’ (putane) courtesans were the city’s street-walkers and brothel-dwellers; courtesans ‘of the candle’ and ‘of the light’ traditionally lodged in the houses of candle-makers and lantern-sellers, adjuncts to shops that were busy after dark; and beneath them all were the ragged working-girls of ‘the lesser sort’. In this census are found two courtesans named Maria Cremonese; as Leonardo was himself in Rome during some of the period of the census, it is not impossible that one of them is La Cremona herself.90 (Leonardo himself would doubtless have figured in the census records too, but they are incomplete: about half the document is missing.)