Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  He may have stopped long enough to see a few friends, and to attend to matters listed in a memorandum in the Codex Atlanticus.4 Among unidentified names – a shoemaker called Francesco, a stationer called Giorgio – is a query: ‘whether the priest Alessandro Amadori is still living’. This is an old acquaintance: the brother of Leonardo’s first stepmother, Albiera. He is mentioned twice in the list: Leonardo is keen to see him. He must have known him from childhood; they had met again in 1506, when the priest brought him a letter from Isabella d’Este. Albiera was herself only sixteen years older than Leonardo, so Alessandro may have been quite close to him in age. As noted earlier, he may well be the ‘uncle’ who owned Leonardo’s lost cartoon of Adam and Eve, an early Florentine work. Vasari, writing in the 1540s, says this uncle had ‘not long ago’ presented the cartoon to Ottaviano de’ Medici. If this is Alessandro, we can be glad to note that the answer to Leonardo’s query of 1513 is – yes.

  Among those he did not meet in Florence was Niccolò Machiavelli. Too closely associated with the Soderini government, Machiavelli was dismissed from his secretarial posts in November 1512. The following February he was implicated in an anti-Medici plot fomented by Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, whom he very nearly followed to the execution block. Imprisoned and tortured in the Bargello, he was exiled to his small estates at Sant’Andrea in Percussina, where he took somewhat reluctantly to the life of an impoverished country squire, and between coppicing woodlands, snaring thrushes and playing backgammon in the local inn, sat down to write his famous study of power-politics, The Prince (or, to give it its correct title, Dei principati – Of Principalities), first conceived ten years earlier during those fraught missions to the Borgia and now distilled and concentrated by the bitterness of more recent experiences. He intended to dedicate it to Giuliano de’ Medici, hoping that the gesture would revive his shipwrecked fortunes – a hope perhaps encouraged by news that his former friend Leonardo da Vinci was now entering Giuliano’s service.5

  Leonardo was probably in Rome by the end of October 1513. If he accomplished all the tasks on the memo-list mentioned above, he arrived with a pair of ‘blue spectacles’. I am tempted to say he arrived wearing a pair of blue spectacles – a marvellous image: Leonardo in shades – though they were probably more in the nature of goggles, intended for use in the strange metallurgical experiments which are one of the features of the Roman sojourn.

  Handsome, feckless, somewhat mystically inclined, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici had inherited his father’s personal charms but none of his political dynamism. Born in 1479, he was named after his assassinated uncle. We see him at the age of about five in the beautiful fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio in Santa Maria Novella: a small brown-haired boy turning to look at the painter, he is standing next to the gaunt and slightly dishevelled figure of Agnolo Poliziano, the poet of Orfeo, who was tutor to Lorenzo’s children. Behind him is his brother Giovanni, seen in the fresco as a round-faced boy with lank blondish hair, the features already heralding those of the jowly pontiff painted by Raphael some thirty-five years later.

  Giuliano was fifteen when the tide turned against the Medici in 1494. In exile he was a guest of the Duke of Urbino and the Marquess of Mantua. As we have seen, it is possible he met Leonardo in Venice in 1500, and possible he admired the unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este which Leonardo was working on, and possible he asked him to paint a similar portrait of Lisa Gherardini, whom he had known and fancied in Florence. A lot of possibles, but they would explain why Leonardo, standing in front of the Mona Lisa in France in 1517, described it as a portrait of a ‘certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici’. The alternative explanation is that it was ‘instigated’ by Giuliano when Leonardo was with him in Rome, and that it portrays one of his mistresses of the period, but none of these later pretenders to the seat on the loggia is at all convincing. Nevertheless the painting was physically there in Rome, and has no doubt its Roman phase of retouchings and recoatings as it slowly metamorphoses into the Louvre icon. And it is perhaps at this time, within the ambit of Giuliano’s patronage, that the painting’s flighty cousin – the so-called ‘Nude Gioconda’ – makes her appearance in Leonardo’s studio.

  Giuliano is among the interlocutors in Castiglione’s The Courtier, nominally based on conversations at a gathering of ‘noble and talented persons’ at the castle of Urbino in March 1507. The book was written after the death of the Duke, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the following year, and was fastidiously polished and redrafted until its publication in 1528, becoming in the process a nostalgic vision of the perfect Renaissance house-party. Also included in the conversations are Pietro Bembo, son of Ginevra de’ Benci’s courtly lover Bernardo, and Dom Miguel da Silva, the Portuguese prelate who was later one of Zoroastro’s patrons in Rome. Castiglione dedicated the book to da Silva, recalling some members of the Urbino circle who had since died, among them Giuliano de’ Medici, ‘whose goodness, nobility and courtesy the world deserved to enjoy longer’. It is likely that da Silva and Giuliano were friends in the Rome of Leo X, where da Silva was for many years Portuguese ambassador, and it may be through this connection that Zoroastro gained his patronage.

  No one has anything worse to say of Giuliano than that he was a bit of a dreamer. As commander of the papal troops he was ineffectual. He was a courtier more than a soldier, and a dilettante scholar more than a courtier. Vasari describes him as ‘a great student of natural philosophy, and especially of alchemy’ – the latter brings Zoroastro to mind again, and has a bearing on some of Leonardo’s experiments undertaken in Rome. Raphael’s portrait of him, mentioned by Vasari, was painted around this time; the version in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is either the original or a contemporary copy of it. A similar image of him is from the workshop – or indeed Medici image-factory – of Agnolo Bronzino, done in the late 1550s. Both works show Giuliano much as he was when Leonardo entered his service in late 1513: a dark, bearded man in his mid-thirties, handsome in a slightly decadent way, a man of scholarly refinement and precarious health, not entirely fitted for the new mantles of power now thrust upon him.

  This new or renewed link with Giuliano brings Leonardo back into the Medici fold, healing whatever resentments he might have harboured from his dealings with Lorenzo de’ Medici thirty years previously. According to the contemporary testimony of Benedetto Varchi, Giuliano treated Leonardo ‘piu tosto da fratello che da compagno’ – ‘more like a brother than a friend’.6

  An emblem of Giuliano’s recorded by Paolo Giovio may be a Leonardo invention. It is a version of the broncone mediceo or Medici stump, which shows a cut trunk of laurel growing new shoots, but the enigmatic motto – ‘GLOVIS’ – is not found in other versions. Read backwards it suggests ‘si volge’, meaning one makes a turn, a change of direction, which recalls another Leonardo emblem-motto, ‘Thoughts turn towards hope.’7 An apt motto for the reascendant Medici of 1513, and perhaps for Leonardo in Rome, in a mood of optimism: another fresh start.

  AT THE BELVEDERE

  On 1 December 1513 one of the Pope’s architects, Giuliano Leno, listed various building-works to be carried out in the Vatican precincts, among them ‘things to be done at Belvedere in the rooms of Messer Lionardo da Vinci’.8 The Villa Belvedere, built some thirty years previously by Pope Innocent VIII, was essentially the Pope’s summer palace, cool and elevated and surrounded by beautiful gardens. Judging from the list of ‘things to be done’ Leonardo had not yet taken up residence there by 1 December. The work required was not major, and we may perhaps imagine him installed by the end of the year in what is to be, essentially, his last Italian home. The list gives us a glimpse of the layout of Leonardo’s Roman apartments. Among the requirements are:

  pinewood partitions, one of which is specified as for the kitchen

  framework for a ceiling to create a loft

  the widening of one window

  paving-tiles


  four dining-tables of poplar, on trestles

  eight stools and three benches

  a chest

  a counter for grinding colours on

  The dining arrangements suggest a quite numerous household, and indeed we will find those seats filled by some rather dubious new assistants.

  Leonardo had made a couple of brief visits to Rome, but had never lived there before. The city had a population around 50,000, much fewer than Milan’s. It was famed both for its antiquities and for its grandiose novelties: chief among the city’s architects was Leonardo’s old friend Bramante, whose projects demolished whole neighbourhoods – earning him the soprannome ‘Maestro Ruinante’. It was also notorious for the corruption and venality of the papal court – ‘that sewer of iniquity’, as Lorenzo de’ Medici called it in a famous letter to his son the future pope. The court of Leo X had none of the Caligulan excesses attributed to the Borgia papacy, but the tone of Vatican life remained lascivious. There were some 7,000 prostitutes in the city, many in brothels licensed by the papal authorities; syphilis was epidemic, and Benvenuto Cellini was not being flippant when he described it as ‘a kind of illness very common among priests’.9 Something of this air of corruption seeps into a strange drawing known as the Angelo incarnato, of which more later.

  But amid all this the Belvedere was a little world apart, and there is a reclusive air to Leonardo in Rome. The palace was quite new, but the gardens in which it stood were huge, ancient and half-wild. Alberti had drawn up plans for a new, classicized garden, with porticoes and curved flights of steps, and grottoes containing fountains and ‘laughable statues’ (‘laughable’ because odd or strange, as was suitable for grottoes: hence ‘grotesque’).10 But Alberti’s plans were not realized, and the gardens remained a dense swathe of woods, orchards, fish-ponds, fountains, statues and hidden pergolas, stretching down the slopes to the valley at the foot of the Belvedere. It is perhaps here, more than in the city or at the court, that we glimpse the gaunt, bearded figure communicating with ‘Nature, the mistress of all masters’ – or if not with her then at least with one of the gardeners, as appears from an anecdote from Vasari:

  When the gardener of the Belvedere found a very odd-looking lizard, Leonardo attached wings to its back with a mixture of quicksilver; they were made from scales stripped from other lizards and they quivered as it walked along. He gave the creature eyes, horns and beard, and then he tamed it, and kept it in a box to show his friends and frighten the life out of them.11

  Whether or not authentic the story conveys an imagery of strangeness and sorcery which attaches to Leonardo in Rome. In 1520 a similar creature was reported by Miguel da Silva as being in the possession of Zoroastro – ‘a serpent with four legs, which we take for a miracle; Zoroastro believes that some gryphon has carried it through the air from Libya.’

  A note from the Belvedere on a summer evening in 1514: ‘Finished on 7 July at the 23rd hour at Belvedere, in the studio provided for me by the Magnifico.’12 What was finished was some geometrical equations, an abiding interest. On another sheet Leonardo writes, ‘I now begin my book De ludo geometrico [On Geometric Games], in which I show further ways to infinity.’ Long, obsessive-looking sequences of geometrical ‘lunes’ – variable figures formed by two arcs of circle enclosing space – seem to belong with these infinity-games.13

  Of his social life, if any, we know nothing. In Rome at this time were many men he had known – Bramante and Michelangelo; Raphael, whose spell in Florence in 1505 had brought him into contact with Leonardo; the courtly author Castiglione; and even his old pupil Atalante Migliorotti, now employed as a superintendent of works at St Peter’s.14 But their names do not trouble the pages of his notebooks, in which one finds the mesmeric dance of the lunes, and experiments in acoustics, and notes of a trip to Monte Mario in search of fossils, and fragmentary accounts expressed in Roman giuli: ‘Salai: 20 giuli; for the house: 12 giuli’, and ‘Lorenzo owes 4 giuli for the hay that was bought for Christmas.’15

  In the late summer of 1514 Leonardo accompanied Giuliano on a brief trip north. He records his presence in Parma ‘alla Campana’ (i.e. at an inn called The Bell) on 25 September, and ‘on the banks of the Po near Sant’Angelo’ two days later.16

  Towards the end of the year comes a pleasant note of family reconciliation. There was another da Vinci in Rome in 1514 – Leonardo’s half-brother Giuliano, second son of Ser Piero and the one singled out by Leonardo as the leader of the fratellastri during the legal battles of 1507–8. Giuliano, now in his mid-thirties – a husband, a father, and of course a notary – was apparently in Rome to pursue some kind of benefice which he felt was owed to him, and doubtless his rapprochement with Leonardo was not without ulterior motive: contacts were everything in this world, and Leonardo had them. A letter from Leonardo to the papal adviser Niccolò Michelozzi recounts his futile efforts on Giuliano’s behalf:

  My dear Messer Niccolò, whom I honour as an elder brother. Shortly after I took leave of Your Lordship I went to look in the register to see if my brother’s name had been entered. The book was not there, and I was sent hither and thither before I found it. Finally I went to His Lordship the Datary and I said to him that I hoped His Lordship might ask tomorrow for the supplication to be read and registered. His Lordship answered that this would be very difficult, and that the supplication required many things which could not easily be done, seeing that the benefice was for such a small sum, and that if it had been something more substantial it would have been registered without such difficulty.17

  Thus drily Leonardo records the realities of papal bureaucracy: if the benefice had been bigger the matter could have been dealt with, presumably with a percentage to oil the deal. The papal datary (the officer responsible for registering and dating papal bulls) who replied so unhelpfully to Leonardo’s enquiries was a Monsignor Baldassare Turini, a fellow Tuscan, from the hill-town of Pescia. He seems to have valued Leonardo’s skills, if not the size of his brother’s benefices, for according to Vasari he commissioned two small paintings from him.18

  The eventual outcome of Giuliano da Vinci’s supplication is not recorded, but we have a more human document in the form of a letter to him from his wife, Alessandra, in Florence.19 The letter, dated 14 December 1514, is mostly about her problems with a goldsmith named Bastiano – ‘There’s a chain he lent you and he’s going crazy about it… I don’t know what chain he is talking about but I think it’s the one I’m wearing round my neck’ – but she appends a long and rather poignant postscript, which includes a greeting to Leonardo:

  Ser Giuliano: La Lessandra your wife is very sick, and is almost dead with the pain. I forgot to ask you to remember me to your brother Lionardo, a most excellent and singular man. Everyone knows that La Lessandra has lost her wits and has become a woman of shadows. And above all else I commend and recommend and completely recommend myself to you, and keep in mind that Florence is just as beautiful as Rome, especially as your wife and your daughter are here.

  This is a sweet letter, with its story of the gold chain, and its loneliness, and its salutations to her ‘eccellentissimo e singularissimo’ brother-in-law Leonardo. The fact that it remains among Leonardo’s papers must surely mean that Giuliano gave it to him, at some meeting between them in Rome in the winter of 1514–15.

  Leonardo used the empty space at the bottom of the letter for some notes on geometry, and on the verso he wrote, ‘My book is in the hands of Messer Battista dell’Aquila, private steward to the Pope.’ Below this are the words ‘De Vocie’ – ‘On the Voice’ – which may be the title of the book which dell’Aquila now has. The phrase recurs in Leonardo’s Roman notebook: ‘De vocie – why a swift wind passing through the pipes makes a shrill sound.’20 There is material on vocal acoustics scattered through the later anatomical notes. Is this treatise or ‘book’ in dell’Aquila’s hands because the papal steward wants the pleasure of reading it, or do we discern a note of official surveillance, perhaps connected with the controver
sy over Leonardo’s anatomical studies in 1515?

  On 9 January 1515 Leonardo writes, ‘The Magnifico Giuliano left Rome at dawn to go and marry a wife in Savoy; and on the same day occurred the death of the King of France.’21 In fact Louis XII had died ten days earlier, so this perhaps tells us the day that Leonardo learned of his death. Giuliano de’ Medici’s bride was Philiberte of Savoy, the aunt of the new king, François I: it was decidedly a marriage of political alliance.

  Going into France, Giuliano seems to have taken with him some Leonardian designs, for at Lyon on 12 July 1515, a ‘mechanical lion’ designed by Leonardo was the pièce de résistance of a pageant in honour of François. This mechanism utilized the same principles as the automata or robots of the 1490s (which in turn embodied ideas already explored in the late 1470s). An account of it is given by G. P. Lomazzo: ‘One day, before François I, King of France, he [Leonardo] set in motion a Lion, made with wonderful artifice; it moved from its place in the hall and when it came to a halt its breast opened, and was full of lilies and other flowers.’22 The lion is an old symbol of Florence; the lilies are the fleurs-de-lis of France. Thus Leonardo’s automaton enacts, in a banqueting-hall in Lyon, the political amity between the Medici and the new French king. Leonardo was not there himself, however, as Lomazzo’s account might imply.