It is axiomatic that artists sometimes use prostitutes for models. The Roman courtesan Fillide Melandrone appears frequently in Caravaggio’s paintings. Was La Cremona a model? One looks again at those wonderful later studies for the head of Leda at Windsor. They are very different from the first Leda drawings of c. 1504 – different in style, but also different because they have a particular face, which now becomes fixed as the face of Leda and is echoed closely in all the surviving paintings. The woman’s elaborately braided hair, also found in the paintings, was a style associated with courtesans – see for instance the erotic engravings accompanying Aretino’s I xvi modi (The Sixteen Positions).91 The conventional date of these later Leda drawings is around 1508–9, which is just about the time that the mysterious Chermonese appears in Leonardo’s entourage. The voluptuous full-frontal nudity of the Leda may be precisely in Bossi’s mind when he speaks of Leonardo enjoying the ‘pleasures’ of a woman in order to learn about the passions he was depicting.
And it may even be that we have the address where Leonardo found her, for tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of a large anatomical sheet at Windsor is the following cryptic memorandum: ‘femine di messer iacomo alfeo elleda ne fabri.’ The only reasonable interpretation of the non-existent elleda is that it is two words run together – è Leda – and so, expanding the terseness of the note into a proper sentence, we get, ‘Among the women of Messer Giacomo Alfeo at the Fabbri is Leda.’ Alfeo is perhaps the same as the ‘Messer Iacopo Alfei’ who traded invective sonnets with Leonardo’s friend Bellincioni – the honorific is that of a knight or a doctor of law: a prosperous society figure. The Fabbri was an area of Milan around the small city gate known as the Pustarla dei Fabbri (the Blacksmiths’ Gate).92 Pedretti suggests that the femine referred to were Alfeo’s daughters, but the word is equally if not more likely to refer to serving-women or mistresses. This sheet is also dated to c. 1508–9. It contains a large anatomical
Reflections of Cremona? Study for the head of Leda (left), and the ‘Nude Gioconda’ at the Hermitage.
study of a standing female; the outline is pricked for transfer, and is indeed found transferred on another Windsor sheet – the very one that includes the name Chermonese.
These hints seem to offer a tantalizing fragment of biography for Bossi’s ‘courtesan called Cremona’. She was a kept woman in the house of Giacomo or Jacopo Alfei in Milan; she was used by Leonardo as the model for Leda; she became part of his entourage, and was listed as such as he prepared to leave for Pavia in 1509. A lesser-known sketch at Windsor, probably by a pupil, shows a young, partially nude woman with one hand cupping her right breast and the other touching or covering her genitals. (At least that is one reading of it: the drawing merges into a separate study of her left leg, so it is hard to be sure what the intention is.) The sheet also has anatomical studies of c. 1508–9 and this may possibly be another glimpse of Cremona.93 We slide here towards that mysterious group of paintings which goes under the generic title of the ‘Nude Gioconda’, showing a bare-breasted woman in a pose more or less reminiscent of the Mona Lisa. None of the surviving examples is by Leonardo, though the best of them, known as the Mona Vanna (Hermitage), is plausibly attributed to Salai. It explicitly quotes the Mona Lisa – the chair, the loggia, the vistas of mountains beyond – but the woman’s face and braided hair are closer to the Leda. A version now in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo was catalogued in Milan in 1664 as a portrait by Leonardo of ‘a woman believed to be a prostitute’ (‘mulier creditur meretrix’).94
Bossi’s allusion to La Cremona suggests that Leonardo had a sexual relationship with her – suggests, in fact, that Leonardo said as much in that note which ‘proved’ that he ‘loved the pleasures of life’. It is around this time that Leonardo writes an odd and somewhat opaque sentence about sex: ‘The man wants to know if the woman is pliable to the demands of his lust, and perceiving that she is and that she has a desire for him, he makes his request and puts his desire into action; and he cannot find out if he does not confess, and confessing he fucks.’95
‘Confessando fotte’ – there is really no other way to translate this phrase. It is the only time in all his manuscripts that he uses fottere. It should not be taken as an obscenity, but nor can it quite be explained away as simple vernacular frankness. He chooses the harshly emphatic and physical verb over various blander alternatives that he uses elsewhere (usare con, fare il coito, etc.); its sudden physicality is expressive of the overall point of the sentence, which seems to be that sexual desire begins with a vague interrogative curiosity – would she or wouldn’t she? – and that merely posing the question, verbally ‘confessing’ the desire, tends to lead precipitously to the act itself. Is this little meditation in part autobiographical?
On an anatomical sheet of c. 1510 is another interesting comment: ‘The act of coition and the parts of the body involved in it are of such ugliness that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the lovers, and the reined-in desire, nature would lose the human species.’96 Again the language is revealing: between them beauty and desire – especially a desire that has been repressed and reined in (frenata) – override the inherent ‘bruttura’ of heterosexual love. These comments add some credibility to that fugitive note referred to by Bossi.
It is a biographer’s job to be sceptical more often than romantic, but I find no inherent difficulty in the idea that Leonardo, at the age of about fifty-seven, had some kind of relationship or entanglement with a beautiful young prostitute whose serene features and curvaceous body served as the model for the Leda and perhaps for the lost original of the ‘Nude Gioconda’. This could be an entirely new chapter in his sex-life, or it could be that his homosexuality should not be regarded as a dogma. Leonardo had many relationships with women. The majority of his paintings are of women, and they retain a frisson of physical proximity, an atmosphere of the shared moments that went into their making. His relationships with Ginevra de’ Benci, or Cecilia Gallerani, or Lisa del Giocondo – and with all the other nameless girls and women who modelled for his Madonnas – are in them. Whatever his customs and preferences, it seems unlikely that this ‘disciple of experience’ who made all knowledge his province would have denied himself, at least once in his life, the sexual knowledge of a woman. This is indeed the logic of Bossi’s mention of La Cremona, which is as near as we get to Leonardo’s mention of her: that she taught him those heterosexual ‘pleasures’ without which his understanding of life would be incomplete; that he was beneficially ‘tinged with human weaknesses’ by this unexpected autumnal coup de foudre.
THE ‘MEDICAL SCHOOLS’
On a page of anatomical drawings Leonardo writes, ‘In questa vernata del mille 510 credo spedire tutta la notomia’ – ‘In this spring of 1510 I expect to complete all the work on anatomy.’97 This was perhaps written in Pavia, where Leonardo spent some months attending the anatomy lectures of Marcantonio della Torre, a new master in the field. Theirs was described by Vasari as a mutually beneficial partnership: ‘each helped and was helped by the other.’ Leonardo refers to della Torre as ‘messer Marcantonio’ in a note concerning a certain ‘libro dell’aque’.98 This ‘book of waters’ may be about urine-diagnosis, much used by physicians at this time.
Marcantonio della Torre was in his late twenties, a Veronese. His father, Girolamo, was a celebrated professor at Padua, where Marcantonio began his career. In 1509 he migrated to Pavia, and there – probably towards the end of that year – arrived Leonardo to study with him or under him at the famous old university. Pavia was a city with pleasant memories – he had spent some days there in 1490 with Francesco di Giorgio Martini (dead since 1502), measuring up the cathedral, admiring the prancing horse of the famous Regisole, and watching the workmen replacing the embankment along the Ticino river which runs through the city.
We may imagine that Marcantonio gave Leonardo the place of honour in the anatomy theatre. While his assistants carved up the cadaver and he lect
ured on the various body parts to his students, Leonardo rapidly recorded with drawings. Among della Torre’s pupils was the young Paolo Giovio, whose comments on Leonardo’s anatomical work are probably based on first-hand knowledge:
He dedicated himself to the inhuman and disgusting work of dissecting the corpses of criminals in the medical schools, so that he might be able to paint the various joints and muscles as they bend and stretch according to the laws of nature. And he made wonderfully skilled scientific drawings of every part of the body, even showing the tiniest veins and the inside of bones.
These dissections done ‘in the medical schools’ may specifically refer to Leonardo in Pavia. In 1508 Leonardo said he had performed ‘more than ten’ human dissections; nine years later, in conversation with Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, he put the number at thirty. By this reckoning – his own – he performed about twenty dissections between 1508 and 1517: some of these would have been done in the ‘schools’ in Pavia, and some in Rome, where he speaks of his work ‘at the hospital’.
Much of della Torre’s written work has perished, but one piece that survives is a spirited attack on ‘abbreviatori’ – in other words those who simply rehashed previous knowledge in digestible form. His particular bête noire was the author Mundinus (or Mondino de Liuzzi), whose Anatomia had been published in Pavia in 1478 and whom Leonardo himself quotes on a couple of occasions.99 Della Torre urged a return to the original texts of Galen which Mundinus had merely paraphrased. This may be connected with Leonardo’s own diatribes against these same ‘abbreviators’. On a sheet of closely written notes about the action of the heart is a marginal comment: ‘Make a discourse censuring scholars who are the hinderers of anatomical studies, and the abbreviators thereof.’ And on the verso is another: ‘Those who abbreviate such works should be called not abbreviators but expungers [obliatori, literally those who bring oblio or oblivion].’ The threatened ‘discourse’ is probably the long tirade on another anatomical sheet:
The abbreviators of works insult both knowledge and love, seeing that the love of something is the offspring of knowledge of it… It is true that impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if we did not have a whole lifetime in which to acquire complete knowledge of a single subject, such as the human body.100
The page contains two drawings showing a dissected heart opened up like a sliced fruit.
The shallow-brained abbreviators are an affront to Leonardo as he amasses his own painstaking portfolio of notes and drawings, whose purpose by now is clear: to create a masterwork on anatomy, suitable for publication, and offering for the first time a detailed visual description of the workings of the human body. This was Leonardo’s great innovation – not only to describe anatomy with the inadequate instrument of language, as in the medieval texts on the subject, but also to display it in sharp visual detail, free of the abstractions, metaphors and general mental clutter to which language, he felt, always tended:
O writer! What words can you find to describe the whole arrangement [of the heart] as perfectly as is done in this drawing? For lack of true knowledge you describe it confusedly and convey little knowledge of the true shapes of things… My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind.101
He developed the technique of multiple representation, ranging from the all-round view to transparency, from cross-section to the precise sfumatura of the enclosing shape:
True knowledge of the shape of any body is arrived at by seeing it from different aspects. Thus to express the true shape of any limb of a man… I will observe the aforesaid rule, making 4 demonstrations for the 4 sides of each limb. And for the bones I will make 5, cutting them in half and showing the hollow of each of them, of which one is full of marrow, and the other spongy or empty or solid.102
This plurality of points of view – sometimes up to eight different angles – creates a sequence which has been described as almost cinematographic.
In the ‘inhuman and disgusting’ business of dissection, with its sawing of bones and its rummaging among guts, and the spurting up of pressurized human fat when the skin is incised, we find Leonardo a long way from the image of the dandified, rosewater-scented artist of his younger days. The anatomical drawings are the product of Leonardo at his most grimly empirical. In them, writes Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘he puts his skill at the service of truth rather than of some ideal of beauty… The anatomical drawings in this sense are not beautiful at all, but represent the way in which physical beauty must, literally, be sacrificed to the kind of truth which can only be reached through butchery.’103
For all this, Leonardo never quite renounced his fascination with analogies – between anatomical structures and geometric forms (as can be seen in his drawings which seek to relate the tricuspid valve of the heart to semicircular ‘lunes’) and between human and plant organisms (as in the drawing which places a germinating bean seedling next to a study of the human trachea).104
Leonardo’s intense collaboration with Marcantonio della Torre was abruptly ended by Marcantonio’s death in 1511, at the age of twenty-nine. He died on the shores of Lake Garda, a victim of the plague which devastated the Verona region – his homeland – in that year. He was probably infected while ministering to the sick.
CHEZ MELZI
The death of Marcantonio della Torre in 1511 was an intellectual and perhaps a personal loss, and it was not the only one. On 10 March 1511 Charles d’Amboise died – not yet forty years old – and with him went something of Leonardo’s precious security. Charles had been a personal patron, and though his successor as governor, the elegant young chevalier Gaston de Foix, continued to favour Leonardo, he was not a Maecenas. Leonardo was still on a stipend, paid from the King’s coffers: in 1511 he received 400 lire, the same as in the previous year, but no longer bolstered by other largesses from d’Amboise.105 He also had his income of canal dues, the ‘twelve ounces of water’ granted by the King in 1507. What paintings were issuing from his studio we don’t know: perhaps some copies and variations of the Leda and the St Anne; perhaps some decorous Madonnas for French courtiers. The Trivulzio monument continues to occupy his sketchbook, but there is no evidence of any contract or payment. There is a new tenant at his house in the vineyard, but the arrangements are handled by Salai, whose purse opens only one way. These are dribs and drabs: a period of liberality has passed.
For some of the year, Leonardo was out of the city, once more among the rivers and mountains which fed his soul. His precise brief is not clear, but it probably had a military overtone. This was a time of renewed military tension. The bellicose Pope Julius II, having allied with the French in the subjection of Venice, had now turned against them: the foreigner must be chased out of Italy. In Rome he plotted his Lega Santa or Holy League: a strengthened bloc of Italian states, allied to Spain and the Habsburg empire. In Innsbruck, at the court of Maximilian, a new generation of Sforza waited in the wings.
During this period Leonardo dedicated himself to a series of fluvial studies found in Paris MS G and the Codex Atlanticus. If initially motivated by military requirements (relief-mapping, fortifications, etc.), they were soon transformed into a wide-ranging study of Lombard water-courses, particularly in the river-basins of the Adda and the Martesana. He produced nothing to match the great bird’s-eye maps of Tuscany done for Cesare Borgia, but once again the collection of strategic military data is a spur to other achievements. This is a pattern with Leonardo: the alarming expansion of view from the specific to the panoramic, the mental movement equivalent to soaring.
Judging from his notes and drawings, Leonardo was in the area known as La Brianza, north-east of Milan, in 1511. He remarks on the prodigious timber of the region (I preserve his toponyms, which have the quality of a timbre or tone of voice): ‘At Santa Maria a O [Hoe] in the valley of Ranvagnan [Rovagnate] in the mountains of Brigantia [Brianza] there are chestnut poles of 9 braccia and of 14 braccia; you can buy a hundred of 9 braccia for 5 lir.’106 Rovagnate is
in the southern part of the Brianza region, on the old ore-trail known as the Carraia del Ferro. Moody studies of snow-capped mountains done in red chalk on red prepared paper, with highlights in white, are from this time. Some are based on views from the Carraia del Ferro. Above one of them are some vivid notes:
Here the gravel-stones are whiter than the water except when the water foams, and the lustre of water where it is lit tends to the blue of the air, and in the shadows it tends to green, and sometimes to dark blue. The low grass which spreads across the gravel-plains has different colours according to the richness or thinness of the terrain, and so is sometimes brownish, sometimes yellow, and sometimes tending to green or greenish-yellow.107
These austere upland colours are found in his late landscapes – in the Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne and in the Bacchic St John. In the foothills of Monviso he sees marble ‘flawless, as hard as porphyry’.
Leonardo Da Vinci Page 54