Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  By the end of 1511 Swiss soldiers in the service of the Holy League were menacing the northern approaches to Milan. On 16 December they fired Desio, less than 10 miles from the city walls. The conflagration was seen and recorded by Leonardo in a dramatic drawing again on brick-red prepared paper. His note is very faded, and was already so in the sixteenth century, when Melzi felt it necessary to copy it out: ‘On the 16th day of December, at the fifteenth hour [10.30 a.m.] fires were set. On the 18th day of December 1511 at the fifteenth hour this second fire was set by the Swiss near Milan at the place called Dexe [Desio].’108

  In the early spring of 1512 came the showdown between the French and the Holy League at Ravenna. In the battle on Easter Day, 11 April, Gaston de Foix, governor of Milan, was killed. The French claimed the victory, but their dominion of Lombardy hung in the balance, and by the end of the year Milan was once more the city of the Sforza. The triumphal re-entry of 29 December 1512 was headed by Massimiliano Sforza, Ludovico’s legitimate son, and his half-brother Cesare, son of Cecilia Gallerani. The Moor himself had died four years earlier in his prison at Loches, but his broad powerful features are discernible in these younger scions.

  *

  Amid these revolutions Leonardo is nowhere to be seen: he has slipped away, as so often. Not a single dated note or record survives from the year 1512. Between the second firing of Desio on 18 December 1511 and a sectional study of an ox’s heart dated 9 January 1513 the Leonardo calendar is blank. For much of this time he was holed up at the Villa Melzi, the country-house of Girolamo Melzi, father of Francesco: a handsome foursquare villa (though probably pretty basic in its amenities) perched on a bluff above a wide curve of the Adda river near the village of Vaprio d’Adda, or as Leonardo – a great one for vernacular forms – writes it, ‘Vavrio’. Here the illustrious house-guest finds peaceful refuge from the upheavals and rivalries and importunate commissions of the city. The villa is only about 20 miles from Milan, so we need not assume he was in complete seclusion, but there is no record of him in the city before March 1513, and it seems that this was indeed a period of rural retreat.

  Here with Francesco or Cecco Melzi, now nearly twenty, he embarks on a programme of writing and sketching. There is a series of late anatomical sheets, some of them probably a working-up of notes and drawings done at speed during lectures and dissections at Pavia, and some the product of animal dissections done there at the villa. The structure and activity of the heart is a constant theme. There are water studies on the Adda. A note reads, ‘Flux and reflux of water as demonstrated at the mill of Vaprio.’109 A beautiful drawing of a small ferry-boat can still be identified with a particular stretch of the river between Vaprio and Canonica, though the ferry itself has been replaced by a bridge. The turbulent currents of the water are carefully observed, but the power of the drawing is in its snapshot of particulars: the landing-stage, the little stone bridges, the oxen standing on the deck of the raft-like traghetto, and one of them left lowing on the shore.110

  While at the Villa Melzi Leonardo projected various home-improvements. A rough ground-plan shows parts of the interior and exterior of the villa; notes refer to the ‘garden passage’, and there are sketches of a terraced garden overlooking the river. Another folio toys with a design proposing cupolas over the corner towers and an arcaded retaining wall on the river frontage.111 The dated anatomical drawing of 9 January 1513 has also a sketch-plan of the villa, and a note reading ‘chamera della Torre da Vaveri’ (‘the room in the tower at Vaprio’). Perhaps the room was his studio. On the left-hand side of the page is a sketch of a fortress on the bend of a river, with several artillery positions firing around it. This little drawing turns out to be another piece of reportage, like the fires of Desio. It shows the castle of Trezzo a few miles from Vaprio, which was bombarded by the Venetians

  Ferry-boat on the Adda, c. 1512.

  on 5 January 1513, just four days before the date at the top of the page.112 Thus the war laps around Leonardo’s country retreat, and thus coolly he notes it down in visual shorthand in a corner of the page.

  PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AT SIXTY

  During this period of seclusion on the banks of the Adda, on 15 April 1512, Leonardo reached the age of sixty. A well-known drawing at Windsor dates from around this time, since it has architectural drawings relating to Villa Melzi on the verso.113 It shows an old bearded man in profile, weary and

  Old man and water studies, probably drawn at Vaprio.

  contemplative, sitting on a rock with his legs crossed and his hand resting on a tall walking-stick. Beside him are swirling eddies of water, and for a moment you might think the old man was staring at them. This is an illusion, as there is a well-defined fold in the paper, and it is clear that the portrait of the old man and the study of the water are two distinct works, possibly done on different occasions. None the less, by intention or serendipity, they become a unified composition when the page is unfolded – a teasing, melancholy composition; a riddle or rebus whose answer is old age. What story makes sense of this alignment of old man and trilling water? Is he staring down at the water, or is he seeing it in his mind’s eye? The text beneath the water studies makes explicit their visual comparison of water-currents and braided hair – ‘Observe the curling motion [moto del vello] of the water, how like it is to that of hair’ – so the story, if there is one, might be taken to include the old man’s wistful reminiscence of some bygone amour. The hair looks like the fantastical tresses of the Leda drawings, and so the bewitching Cremonese slips into the frame, but one thinks also of the ringletted hair of the teenage Salai in which Leonardo had ‘delighted’.

  These are games of interpretation – but not wholly pointless ones, because the chance apposition of images points up certain characteristics which are already there in the old man: an air of nostalgia, of resigned reminiscence. Leonardo enjoyed the imagination’s power to construct meanings out of randomness – he wrote of seeing the stains on a wall as beautiful landscapes – so the ‘found’ picture on the unfolded sheet would surely have been noticed if not intended by him.

  It is sometimes said that the old man is a self-portrait, but this is misleading. He is too old to be an accurate depiction of Leonardo at sixty or sixty-one: he is nearer to the iconic image of the Turin self-portrait, which probably dates from the last years of the artist’s life, though he has none of the poignant majesty of that image. He is, as Kenneth Clark says, a ‘self-caricature’ rather than a self-portrait: a rueful depiction of himself as decrepit, disenchanted, marginalized.114 Leonardo has always had this half-humorous image of himself as an old man – that comic figure with the ‘nutcracker’ profile, gamely confronting the provocative youth opposite him – and now, suddenly, he is sixty, and feeling it.

  There are three portraits which can claim to show us the true image of Leonardo at around the age of sixty, all of them the work of pupils. Two are drawings in the Windsor collection; the third is from a painting, and is here proposed for the first time as an authentic likeness of Leonardo.

  The famous and beautiful profile portrait in red chalk (Plate 15), inscribed underneath in elegant contemporary capitals ‘Leonardo Vinci’, is considered the ‘most objective and accurate portrait of the master to survive’, and is the prototype of the profile portrait which became the standard image of Leonardo in the mid sixteenth century (in the woodcuts used by Vasari and Giovio, for example).115 It is plausibly attributed to Francesco Melzi. It is a very accomplished drawing, and almost certainly later than Melzi’s earliest dated drawing of mid-1510. The long wavy hair falls with a suggestion of lankness, and is apparently now grey or silvery – one cannot tell, because the chalk is red, but that is the impression given. But it is still profuse and vigorous, as is the bushy beard. The superbly modelled profile shows both refinement and a certain strength; the nose is long, the eye steady, the lips faintly feminine, the moustache neatly combed. It is the profile of a man who was beautiful in youth (as early accounts of Leonardo insist)
and who is still strikingly handsome. He is not yet the old man of the Turin self-portrait; indeed, he is noticeably free of wrinkles. I would say this is a portrait of Leonardo at around sixty, done by Melzi at Vaprio d’Adda in 1512 or 1513. Unusually for a drawing in the Windsor collection the sheet has been clipped at the corners for mounting, and the reverse shows signs of having been attached to a support. It may well have been the portrait seen by Vasari when he visited Melzi at Vaprio in 1566, noting that ‘Francesco cherishes and preserves these papers as relics of Leonardo, together with the portrait of that artist of such happy memory.’

  Portrait sketch of Leonardo, c. 1510.

  Less well known and more elusive is a small pen-and-ink sketch on a sheet containing studies of horses’ legs.116 This is almost certainly a portrait of Leonardo by one of his pupils (the shading is right-handed, so it is not a self-portrait). The face is in three-quarter profile to the left, but the features compare closely to those of the red-chalk profile. The studies of horses’ legs may be connected to Leonardo’s project for the Trivulzio monument, c. 1508–11; the portrait sketch is the other way up from the horse studies, though which was on the paper first is impossible to say. Leonardo looks a couple of years younger than in the Melzi profile, so a date of about 1510 would be plausible. Interestingly, the sketch shows him wearing some kind of hat, minimally suggested by the wavery line across his forehead and the cross-hatched shadow beyond his right cheek. Most of the sixteenth-century portraits of Leonardo, though undoubtedly derived from the Melzi profile, show him in a hat. In the woodcut portrait in Vasari’s Lives he wears a berretta with ear-flaps, which is perhaps the kind of headgear suggested in the Windsor sketch. This detail of the Leonardo ‘image’ may derive from lost portrait-drawings of which this Windsor sketch is a vestigial relic.

  I certainly suspect the existence of a drawing showing the features of the Windsor sketch in reverse – i.e. in three-quarter profile to the right. It can be reconstructed simply enough by tracing a reproduction of the Windsor sketch through to the other side of the paper (Plate 25). Pupils frequently used reverse tracings and mirror images, thus producing two models from a single drawing; this technique is often found in Leonardo’s own drawings.117 And this reverse version of the Windsor sketch is not quite lost – its features are precisely preserved in the bearded figure of St Jerome in a painting by Leonardo’s Milanese pupil Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli or Giampietrino (Plate 26). Apart from the opposite direction of the three-quarter profile, the Jerome resembles the Windsor sketch in every respect – the line of the nose, the moody eyes, the beard, even the line of the hat (the cardinal’s hat traditionally worn by St Jerome) and the hood.

  The painting is an altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with St Jerome and St John the Baptist. Giampietrino painted it in 1515; it was commissioned by the Jeromite order for the church at Ospedaletto Lodigiano, near the Lombard city of Lodi, and it hangs in the church still.118 It is visibly influenced by Leonardo, as was all Giampietrino’s work. The Christ-child playing with a lamb quotes from the Louvre Virgin and Child with St Anne, and the face of the Madonna is closely modelled on the London Virgin of the Rocks. These are both works from Leonardo’s second Milanese period, when Giampietrino was attached to his studio. As we have seen, Giampietrino’s own version of the kneeling Leda was painted over an underdrawing of part of the St Anne group, now visible only by X-ray. The Windsor sketch can be dated to around 1510, which is broadly the time of the Louvre St Anne and the versions of Leda – the time of Giampietrino’s involvement in the workshop. The sketch is not in itself a significant drawing, just a briefly elaborated doodle. It is significant because it is an eyewitness portrait of Leonardo, and because it is mirrored in the St Jerome at the Ospedaletto Lodigiano, which is therefore also a refracted portrait of him. The probable link between them is a lost drawing of Leonardo by Giampietrino. It was the source of the Windsor sketch, which is a brief copy of it in reverse, and it was used by Giampietrino as the model or cartoon for the features of St Jerome in the Lodigiano altarpiece – a tribute to his old master, by then down in Rome, but seen in the painting as he would have been seen in Milan, nearing sixty: the beard flecked with silver, the chiselled face, the intensity of the eyes, the fondness for hats.

  PART EIGHT

  Last Years

  1513–1519

  Observe the flame of a candle and consider its beauty. Blink your eye and look at it again. What you see now was not there before, and what was there before is not there now. Who is it who rekindles this flame which is always dying?

  Paris MS F, fol. 49v.

  HEADING SOUTH

  Leonardo was briefly in Milan in early 1513: a tentative appearance, perhaps, uncertain how the new duke, Massimiliano, would view one who had collaborated so thoroughly with his father’s enemies. On 25 March he is mentioned, in a register at the Duomo, as living or lodging with one Prevostino Viola.1 Around this time he notes down the name of Barbara Stampa, the daughter of Filippo Stampa and the wife of Carlo Atellani (or della Tela), both of whom were loyal Sforza servants and now much in favour. She ran a lively salon at the luxurious Atellani house near the Grazie, later frescoed by Bernardino Luini. Their back garden shared a boundary with Leonardo’s vineyard: prosperous, cultivated neighbours. Another family of Sforza loyalists were the Crivelli: ‘Ask the wife of Biagino Crivelli why the capon nurtures and hatches the eggs of the hen if he is made drunk.’2 For the disciple of experience no question is too small. But of any activities in Milan we know nothing, and it is probable he was mostly at Vaprio.

  News, meanwhile, filtered up from Florence, where the pendulum of political fortunes had swung back to the Medici, represented by the new generation – Giovanni and Giuliano, the two surviving sons of Lorenzo, and their cousin Giulio. In the summer of 1512, after eighteen years in exile, they returned to govern Florence: a bloodless coup, though backed by the presence of troops in Prato. On 1 September, Gonfalonier Soderini left by one of the city’s gates, on his way to exile on the Dalmatian coast, and Giuliano de’ Medici entered by another. He came in on foot, with no military escort, dressed in the traditional Florentine lucco or gown. He went neither to the Palazzo Vecchio, nor to the Palazzo Medici, but to the house of one the Medici supporters within the government, Antonfrancesco degli Albizzi. It was a masterpiece of political understatement: the modest return of a Florentine citizen by the consensus of his fellow citizens. The arrival of the head of the family, Giuliano’s elder brother, the obese, scholarly, politically acute Giovanni, now a powerful cardinal in Rome and already tipped as the next pope, was less modest – he entered the city with a troop of 1,500 soldiers, looking every inch a magnifico. But there were no executions, no expropriations; power was transferred with quiet efficiency, like a bill of exchange at the Medici bank.

  Giuliano de’ Medici in a portrait by or after Raphael.

  The demise of Pope Julius II completed the Medici game-plan, and Giovanni hastened back down to Rome, where on 11 March 1513 the conclave of cardinals duly elected him Pope Leo X. Giuliano was left in charge of Florence, but the new Pope, doubting his capricious brother’s capacity to deal with the Florentine factions, decided to replace him with their malleable young nephew Lorenzo di Piero. Recalled to Rome, Giuliano was loaded with new titles to assuage any resentment he might feel. He became Prince of Parma, Piacenza and Modena, but declined the dukedom of Urbino, recognizing the legitimacy of Francesco della Rovere, nephew of the late Pope, who had been a friend to him in his exile. He was also named gonfalonier to the papal army (as Cesare Borgia had been during the papacy of Alexander VI), a position which obliged him to be based permanently in Rome.

  And now from Giuliano de’ Medici in Rome, sometime in the summer of 1513, comes an invitation to Leonardo to join him there, in this new Medicean court in the Eternal City.

  On the opening page of a new notebook, Paris MS E, Leonardo writes, ‘I left Milan for Rome on 24 September 1513, in the company of Giovan, Francesco de Melzi, Salai, L
orenzo and Il Fanfoia.’ The first and last names have caused puzzlement. ‘Giovan’ could be either Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio or Giampietrino, though there is no evidence that either went to Rome; or he could be an unknown garzone; or it could be (since there are no commas in the original) that he is not a separate person at all, and that Leonardo has, unusually, used both of Melzi’s forenames, Giovanni Francesco. ‘Il Fanfoia’, found nowhere else in Leonardo’s papers, remains mysterious. There is a known forename, Fanfulla, of which it may be a dialect variation; or perhaps it is a descriptive nickname. ‘Fanfoia’ is not a word in its own right, but is suggestive of fanfano, a babbling; fanfaro, a musical march (whence ‘fanfare’); and indeed fanfarone, a braggart – a group of words connoting noise and showiness. Could it possibly be another nickname of the many-monikered Tommaso Masini, a.k.a. Gallozzolo, Zoroastro, Alabastro, Indovino, et al?

  The date, at least, is precise. Leonardo and his entourage left Milan on 24 September 1513, more than seven years after he had arrived from Florence with the intention of staying three months – a statistic which speaks volumes about his deep attachment to the city (and to its seriously wealthy dukes and governors): he spent, in all, more than a third of his life there. The landscapes of his paintings, imprinted with reminiscence of the Tuscan hill-country of his youth, are bathed in the more northerly and subtle light of Lombardy, which at his departure in September is already beginning to soften, as the grapes ripen in his vineyard and the evening comes in a little earlier than expected.

  They journeyed south-east down the Via Emilia – through Lodi, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena and Bologna, and thence south through the Apennine mountains. He probably did not stay long in Florence. A note of expenses reads, ‘13 ducats for 500 pounds from here [Milan] to Rome’ – this is the carriage fee for his luggage all the way to Rome.3 This quarter-ton of personal effects would include the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Leda, the portfolios of drawings and sketches, the majority of the great anatomical folios, all of the notebooks we know and a great many we do not, the 116 books of the Madrid list (minus a few dispersed, plus some acquired since), as well as such pieces of studio equipment, scientific instrumentation, furniture, clothing and personal mementoes that escaped, for reasons of value or sentiment, the injunction to ‘sell what you cannot take with you’.