Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  On 8 October 1515 Leonardo enrolled in the Confraternity of St John of the Florentines, which had its headquarters across the Tiber from the Vatican. He may have done so for a number of reasons: a resurgence of his sense of himself as Florentine; a late touch of religiosity; a desire to ensure a decent burial. Burial was one of the roles of these lay associations or confraternities – they were ‘confraternità della buona morte’, providing mutual assistance in case of sickness, and arranging funerals in case of death. His election is recorded, with the usual faintly bizarre particularities, in the Confraternity’s register:

  Novice: Leonardo da Vinci, painter and sculptor, was voted in by the committee by a majority of 3 black beans, and was then voted in by the whole company by a majority of 41 black beans and 2 white beans. He was put forward by Maestro Gaiacqo the doctor, who was his guarantor for the entry fee.

  However in a later, undated note in the ledger the governor of the Confraternity proposes to cancel Leonardo’s membership – ‘mettere nel buondì’: ‘to bid him good day’ – because he has not paid the entry fee in the appointed time.56

  It may be that Leonardo’s failure to pay his dues was a matter of circumstance rather than a change of heart, for in this month of October 1515 he left Rome as a member of the papal entourage, bound for Florence and Bologna, where a historic meeting was scheduled between the Pope and the new French king, François I (recently victorious over the revived Sforza of Milan at the Battle of Marignano): a meeting of superpowers which should ensure their alliance and – so it was touted by Pope Leo – a new period of ‘peace for Christianity’. The sneering joke, the hindered studies: Leonardo has an edgy relationship with the sharp-witted, gross-featured Pope, so different from the quixotic Giuliano. But he is part of the retinue for this papal visit, and he is glad enough to be out of Rome for a while.

  They journeyed first to the old port of Civitavecchia. It was probably on this occasion that Leonardo made some notes on the ancient harbour there: ‘4 braccia long, 2½ braccia wide, 2¼ braccia deep: thus are the stones which stand in the front parts of the breakwater of the port of Civitavecchia.’57 His curiosity is undimmed despite the physical setbacks of this year.

  The papal circus arrived in Florence on 30 November, with a triumphal entry for the Florentine pope. Among those who witnessed the junkets was the apothecary Luca Landucci: ‘All the chief citizens went in procession to meet him and among others about fifty youths, only the richest and foremost, dressed in a livery of clothing of purple cloth with fur collars, going on foot, and each with a type of small, silvered lance in his hands – a most beautiful thing.’58 The procession passed through a triumphal four-fronted arch, one of the architectural ephemera constructed for the occasion. Leonardo did a drawing of it, and at the top of the sheet are three words in the hand of Melzi: ‘illustrissimo signor magnifico’ – i.e. Giuliano de’ Medici, with whom Leonardo was reunited here.59

  Among the grandiose schemes planned by the papal spin-doctors was a convocation of artists and architects to discuss the urban regeneration of Florence, and particularly the Medici quarter – the surrounds of the old Palazzo Medici on Via Larga, and the church of San Lorenzo with its Medici chapels. Painters, architects, sculptors, woodcarvers and decorators had been informed of the papal intentions. New façades, in the form of full-scale wooden models, had been erected in front of San Lorenzo and the Duomo. Leonardo’s own ideas for a new façade for San Lorenzo are recorded in a drawing at the Venice Accademia. Typically, he is not content with just the façade, but imagines a complete transformation of the surroundings, enlarging and lengthening the adjacent piazza as a scenographic background for the renovated church. Another sketch-plan envisages the demolition of whole blocks of housing in front of the church, and a long piazza extending to Via Larga, where the side-wall of the Palazzo Medici is transformed into the façade facing the square.60 Thus Leonardo sketches out imperious swathes of destruction through the old streets and quarters of his youth – purely practical, architectural considerations, but one has the feeling he is rather enjoying himself as the Medicean modernizer: a ‘Maestro Ruinante’ like his friend Bramante.

  During the week that the papal court spent in Florence, Leo X presided over a consistory of cardinals in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, where the magnificent fragment of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari could still be seen. It is likely that Leonardo was present. Forty years later the Medici grand-duke Cosimo I commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint the huge cycle of frescos which now covers the walls – controversially so, because of the ghostly presence of the Anghiari fresco beneath it – and among the scenes included was a representation of this dynastic moment when a Medici pope sat in state in the political heart of Florence. In the background of the scene Vasari included a group of four men, which he explained thus:

  I have painted in life-size, so that they may be recognizable there in the background of the composition, distinct from the ranks of the consistory, Duke Giuliano de’ Medici and Duke Lorenzo his nephew, conversing with two of the greatest geniuses of their time: one of them, the old man with that mane of white ringletted hair, is Leonardo da Vinci, the great maestro of painting and sculpture, who is shown talking to Duke Lorenzo standing next to him; and the other is Michelangelo Buonarroti.61

  This little grouping ironically reconciles the two artists, precisely here in the Palazzo Vecchio where their rivalry began, and enshrines them as the twin stars of Medici-fostered art. The portrait of Leonardo is stereotypical – it is based on the Melzi profile, which Vasari had seen at Vaprio62 – but it retains a kind of folk-memory of Leonardo’s last recorded visit to Florence.

  On about 7 December 1515 the papal procession wound up towards Bologna. Here the Pope and François I conferred, and here Leonardo met for the first time his last and most devoted patron. The new king was twenty-one years old, immensely tall, charismatic, with his confidence riding high after his routing of the Sforza’s Swiss mercenaries at Marignano. He had an enormous nose, and an amorous reputation to match – ‘he is lascivious and enjoys entering the gardens of others to drink different waters’, as Antonio de Beatis puts it. His motto was ‘Nutrisco et extinguo’: ‘I feed and I extinguish.’ That the King already knew of the great Leonardo is certain – through the paintings so highly prized by his father-in-law, Louis XII; and the Last Supper, which he had doubtless seen in reconquered Milan; and that ingenious mechanical lion which had performed for him at the Lyon triumphs of July. And so once more Leonardo is drawn into a French ambit, which for him means a patronage underwritten by a sovereign ruler such as Italy could not boast, and by a cultivated appreciation which he did not always enjoy from his Italian masters. Among the French courtiers in Bologna was one Artus Boissif, and on 14 December Leonardo drew his portrait in red chalk, annotated by Melzi, ‘Portrait of M. Artus, chamberlain to King Francesco I, at the meeting with Pope Leo X.’63

  The Pope left Bologna on 17 December, somewhat rattled by François’s high-handed attitude and only partly mollified by the royal grant of dukedom to Giuliano de’ Medici, who became Duke of Nemours. But Giuliano did not enjoy his new title long, for he died of consumption three months later, on 17 March 1516, at the age of about thirty-seven.64 Leonardo lingered on in Rome for a few months after this, his activities obscure, his life once more in flux. Some measurements for the Basilica of San Paolo Fuori are dated August 1516: they are the last brief record of Leonardo in Italy.65

  MAISTRE LYENARD

  Leonardo’s decision to leave for France must surely have been made by the summer of 1516, since he well knew the difficulties of crossing the Alps after autumn. No summons or supplication survives: no diplomatic communiqué; no curlicued laissez-passer. The meeting with the King in Bologna and the death of Giuliano de’ Medici are the prelude, and then one day the decision is made, and sometime in August or September, at the age of sixty-four, Leonardo embarks on the longest journey of his life.

  He probably stopped at Milan on the
way; Salai remained there, attending to the house in the vineyard which had become his province, and which would be formally ceded to him in Leonardo’s will.66 From Milan, escorted perhaps by emissaries from the King, accompanied by Melzi and a Milanese servant named Battista de Vilanis, Leonardo heads north into the mountains. A note in the Codex Atlanticus was probably written along the way: ‘River Arna at Ginevra, a quarter of a mile into Savoia where the fair is held.’67

  By the end of the year he is settled in the Loire valley, by the royal stronghold of Amboise, in the service of the French king, with a handsome pension of 1,000 scudi per annum. An authorization or record of two years’ payment is in the Archive Nationale in Paris: ‘A Maistre Lyenard de Vince, paintre ytalien, la somme de 2000 écus soleil, pour sa pension di celles deux années.’68 In the same document Leonardo is formally styled ‘paintre du Roy’ – ‘the King’s painter’.

  His relationship with François was rich. The young king was awestruck, fascinated and very generous. Many years later the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini had these recollections from François himself, whom he too served:

  François I of France, c. 1515–20.

  The manor-house at Cloux (now Clos Lucé).

  Because he was a man of such plentiful and great talents, and had some knowledge of Latin and Greek, King François was completely besotted [innamorato gagliardissimamente] with those great virtues of Leonardo’s, and took such pleasure in hearing him discourse that there were few days in the year when he was parted from him, which was one of the reasons why Leonardo did not manage to pursue to the end his miraculous studies, done with such discipline. I cannot resist repeating the words which I heard the King say of him. He said he could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only of sculpture, painting and architecture, and that he was truly a great philosopher.69

  Perhaps the most important of the King’s gifts was not the generous salary but a place to live. Leonardo’s last address was the handsome manor-house of Cloux (now Clos Lucé) half a mile south of the great chateau of Amboise. It was then quite new, built in the late fifteenth century by Estienne Leloup, bailiff to King Louis XI. Among those who had lived there was the Count Ligny whom Leonardo had known in Milan in 1499. The house is of red brick and grey tufa. It stands on gently sloping ground, behind a long protective wall in which a watch-tower and a small gun-emplacement remain from its days as a fortified manor-house. On the inside of the defensive wall is a long upper gallery forming a kind of loggia. To the north of the house an L-shaped range of stables and workshops forms a courtyard closed on three sides. On the fourth side, to the west, the land drops away sharply. Here are the kitchen gardens and, lower, a green-mantled pool.

  The house was smaller then than it is now – the rooms to the west of the spired central tower are eighteenth century – but the layout of the central part is probably unchanged since Leonardo’s day. The main front door, south-facing, leads in next to a little chapel, built for Anne de Bretagne, wife of Charles VIII.70 Downstairs there is the large hall, where the household ate and visitors were received, and next to it the kitchen, with its terracotta floor, its cooking-range, and iron rings in the cross-beam for hanging meat and game. To the right of the front door is a wide staircase. The top landing gives on to two large rooms. The one above the dining-hall is said to have been Leonardo’s studio. The windows face north-west, giving a distant view of the turrets and spires of the chateau, and trees, and a sense of space where the river is – the same view can be seen in a delicate black-chalk drawing at Windsor, probably by Melzi.71 The upper room above the kitchen is said to have been Leonardo’s bedroom, and is probably the room where he died.

  The house has a mellow, well-appointed, comfortable feel. It is pleasantly spacious rather than grand and formal. Even its spires have a slightly playful air, mimicking in miniature the chateau down the road. The large fireplaces, the oak beams, the soft Touraine light at the windows, the faint aura of old wood-smoke – one is persuaded that Leonardo felt rested and tranquil in these twilight years. With the house, probably, came the housekeeper or cook Mathurine. In the only reference to her, in Leonardo’s will, she is called Maturina: but the will survives in an Italian copy, in which other French names are Italianized, and she is more likely to be local than Italian (unless, of course, La Cremona had become with age La Maturina). In French books about Leonardo – of which there is a long and honourable tradition – she is invariably Mathurine, and the cuisine of Leonardo’s last years unimpeachably French.

  Here he sets once more to organizing his manuscripts and drawings, and to producing more of each, though Beatis tells us he no longer painted. As ever, there are books he wants – in Melzi’s hand: ‘Egidius Romanus, De informatione corporis humani in utero matris [On the Formation of the Human Body in the Womb]’, which had been published in Paris in 1515, and ‘Rugieri Bacon in a printed edition’72 – the great English scholiast Roger Bacon, a Leonardian figure of thirteenth-century Oxford, who discoursed on the possibility of human flight. On fine days he can be seen in the town, or down on the river, sketching the courses of the Loire – or, as he writes it, the ‘Era’ – as it ‘passes through Anbosa’.73 His spellings are unacclimatized. The expatriate, it is said, is a foreigner in two countries: the one he lives in and the one he has left behind.

  THE CARDINAL CALLS

  Autumn in the Loire valley, the perfect time to visit, and at Amboise in early October 1517 arrives a party of distinguished Italian sightseers. Cardinal Luigi of Aragon was a grandson of the King of Naples and a cousin of Isabella of Aragon, Leonardo’s former neighbour at the Corte Vecchia in Milan. He was a thin-faced man in his early forties: a probable portrait of him by Raphael is in the Prado in Madrid. He had jockeyed for the papacy after the death of Julius II in 1513, and, though defeated in this hope by the election of Leo X, he remained close to Leo – mostly in the encouraged belief that the Pope would create him King of Naples. Leonardo may have met him in Rome, where he was known for his lavish hospitality and his beautiful mistress, the courtesan Giulia Campana, by whom he had a daughter, Tullia.

  There hung over him a graver charge: that he had ordered the murder of his brother-in-law Antonio da Bologna, and possibly even that of his sister Giovanna, Duchess of Amalfi, who mysteriously disappeared in early 1513. It is not impossible that Leonardo knew something of this as well, as Antonio da Bologna was in Milan in 1512, and was murdered there the following year. The story is famously recounted in John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, in which Luigi appears (‘The Cardinal’) in a sinister role; Webster based his play on an English version of a novella by Matteo Bandello, the young boy who had watched Leonardo at work on the Last Supper.74

  The Cardinal was on the homeward leg of a protracted European journey, partly to distance himself from a conspiracy against Pope Leo the previous year, and partly to meet the new King of Spain, Charles V; he did so at Middelburg, on the coast of Holland. English agents there kept a wary eye and reported back to Cardinal Wolsey about Aragon’s ostentatious arrival at Charles’s court, with his retinue of forty horsemen, and his cloak draped carelessly about his shoulders and his sword strapped to his side: ‘Your Grace may conjecture what manner of man he is… The said Cardinal’s profession is rather of a temporal lord than spiritual.’75 Thereafter the Cardinal descended south through France. Among his travelling party was his chaplain and secretary, Antonio de Beatis, whose chatty travel diary is the source of what follows.76

  Raphael’s Portrait of a Cardinal, probably a portrait of Luigi of Aragon.

  On 9 October they were at Tours (‘Turso’), and from there, after an early lunch, they went on to Amboise, ‘a distance of seven leagues’. Beatis finds it ‘a small well-kept town in a fine position’; they are put up in the chateau, on its ‘little hill’; it is ‘not strongly fortified, but the rooms are comfortable, and the view is lovely’. The following day, 10 October, they went to ‘one o
f the suburbs’ of the town, ‘to see messer Lunardo Vinci the Florentine’. We have a slight sense that Leonardo is another tourist attraction to be ‘done’ by the Cardinal.

  Beatis’s brief but vividly specific account of their visit to Clos Lucé is our last snapshot of Leonardo. It begins with an error: Leonardo is described as ‘an old man of over seventy’, which again might seem faintly touristic – an exaggeration which makes him even more picturesquely venerable – though it can also be taken as an eyewitness statement that Leonardo looked some years old than he really was (sixty-five). The account continues:

  He showed His Lordship three pictures, one of a certain Florentine lady, done from life at the instigation of the late Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici, another of the young St John the Baptist, and another of the Madonna and Child placed on the lap of St Anne: all quite perfect [perfettissimo, which might also mean ‘completely finished’]. However, we cannot expect any more great work from him, since he is now somewhat paralysed in his right hand. He has trained up a Milanese pupil who works well. And while Master Leonardo can no longer colour with such sweetness as he used to, he is none the less able to do drawings and to teach others. This gentleman has written a great deal about anatomy, with many illustrations of the parts of the body, such as the muscles, nerves, veins and the coilings of intestines, and this makes it possible to understand the bodies of both men and women in a way that has never been done by anyone before. All this we saw with our own eyes, and he told us he had already dissected more than thirty bodies, both men and women, of all ages. He has also written, as he himself put it, an infinity of volumes on the nature of waters, on various machines, and on other things, all in the vernacular, and if these were to be brought to light they would be both useful and delightful. Besides his expenses and lodgings, he receives from the King of France a pension of 1,000 scudi a year, and his pupil gets three hundred.