Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  One pores over this page, as if with a magnifying-glass, trying to capture its traces of documentary reality, its frissons of presence. Just the other side of this text are these people who are physically there with him – ‘All this we saw with our own eyes’: oculatamente.

  After cordialities in the salon downstairs, the refreshments provided by Mathurine, and a brief holy interlude in the little chapel – for these very worldly visitors are men of the cloth – they have been conducted up the stairs to the inner sanctum of Leonardo’s studio, where the autumnal light is augmented by candles, and now they are listening to him as he describes and explains, with what one discerns as a mix of innate courtesy and magisterial brusqueness. As they look at the Mona Lisa he tells them something, but not a lot. She is a Florentine lady; he painted her at the request – no, the urging: instantia – of the late Magnifico Giuliano. They look at the soft-toned Virgin and Child with St Anne and the sultry St John, and then come out the great folios of anatomical drawings, the pages turned by the indispensable Melzi, and for a moment they feel a shiver at their proximity to this gentle-looking old man whose hands have dismembered corpses and unravelled intestines – ‘more than thirty bodies, both men and women, of all ages’: a moment of volubility. These feats of anatomy are given special prominence by Beatis as something unique, ‘never… done by anyone before’, and perhaps this is a valuation expressed or anyway implied by Leonardo himself as he spoke to his guests.

  There are other books – on water, on machinery. Beatis notes that these are in the ‘vernacular’, and should be ‘brought to light’ – by which he presumably means published – but he does not mention the oddest feature about them. This is a curious omission: Leonardo’s mirror-writing was not something widely known and therefore not worth mentioning, so one has to wonder if Beatis actually saw any of it.77 The visitors were probably shown particular sheets and pages: properly worked-up drawings. Leonardo is an old hand: he has received these studio visits a hundred times. He affects a certain nonchalance, but shows people just exactly what he wants them to see, and the rest is a kind of hinterland of wonders, to be indicated with a vague magisterial wave of his good hand: the manuscripts and notebooks, libri and libricini, heaped around on the desks and shelves of his studio – ‘as he himself put it, an infinity of volumes’. One hears the disarming mix of self-pride and self-mockery, the phrase arrived at, savoured for its ironies, almost a punchline, as he contemplates the tonnage of paper and ink he has created, the intractable multiplicity of his investigations, the impossible distances that the mind must fly to encompass it all.

  ‘An infinity of volumes…’

  And young Melzi, whose love of Leonardo will be expressed by a curatorial career stretching on over more than half a century, smiles ruefully at these words.

  The visitors take their leave, well pleased, and the punctilious Beatis writes up his journal that evening (or so one assumes: the manuscript that survives is a fair copy or digest, done sometime after the date of the last entry, 31 August 1521). The following day they proceed to another royal castle, Blois [‘Bles’], and see ‘a portrait in oils of a certain lady of Lombardy, done from life; she is rather beautiful, but in my opinion not as beautiful as Signora Gualanda’. This painting was plausibly Leonardo’s portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, which today hangs in the Louvre; it may well have been removed to Louis XII’s chateau at Blois some time after the French takeover of Milan in 1499; it would not yet have acquired its misleading title of La Belle Ferronnière. Isabella Gualanda was the noted Neapolitan beauty and friend of the poetess Costanza d’Avalos; she is not the ‘true’ subject of the Mona Lisa, otherwise Beatis would have said so when he saw the painting the previous day.

  Of course one wants to shake Antonio by the shoulders to get some more out of him: all that he saw and felt and knew but failed to mention. Was Leonardo tall still, or shrunken? Was his voice – the voice that once sang so beautifully to the tune of a lira – sonorous or quavery? One wants to ask why the ‘somewhat paralysed’ right hand should have meant that the left-handed maestro was unlikely to do any more painting. Is there a more general diminution suggested in the next sentence – he cannot ‘colour with such sweetness as he used to’ – implying a loss of technique more than a physical handicap?

  What Beatis fails to mention can in part be supplied by looking once more at the famous self-portrait in red chalk at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, which must show Leonardo at around this time – a man in his mid-sixties, but looking, just as Beatis says he did, like ‘an old man of over seventy’. In the popular imagination it is the definitive self-portrait of Leonardo, and has fixed him in this druidic mode within our minds. There are doubts among some art-historians, who feel that the style and the medium suggest an earlier date. Is it perhaps a portrait of his father, not long before Ser Piero’s death in 1504; or some antique god or philosopher from the time of the Leda studies; or simply some old man ‘of striking appearance’, one of those faces which fascinated him and which, according to Vasari, ‘he would follow all day long to draw’? Even the Italian inscription below the drawing is controversial, faded to the point of illegibility: does it describe it as a ‘portrait of himself in old age’ or merely as a drawing ‘done by him in old age’? But like many others, I continue to believe in it as a potent and unflinching portrait of himself at the end of his life – the ‘conventional’ view: like the view that the Mona Lisa really does show Mona Lisa. The sheet is unusually long and thin, and the drawing may well have been cropped at the sides, almost losing the shape of the shoulders.78 In fact they are just visible, in angled horizontal lines at either side of the head, almost at the level of the mouth, and seeing them one realizes that the iconic image of the Turin drawing is not the erect, commanding figure he now seems but an old man hunched and bent beneath the weight of the years: venerable still, but also vulnerable. He has almost become that stooped decrepit figure drawn at the Villa Melzi some five years earlier, sitting on a rock, watching the play of the river as it journeys on past him.

  Contemporary with the Turin self-portrait is the haunting black-chalk drawing at Windsor known as the Pointing Lady (page 501), sometimes associated with Matelda in Dante’s Purgatorio – a soft, romantic, windswept figure on a riverbank, surrounded by tall flowers. Martin Kemp calls it an ‘emotional pendant to the Deluge drawings’, promising ‘transition into a world of ineffable tranquillity rather than immersion in a world of physical destruction’.79 She turns back towards the spectator – turns, in Dante’s words, ‘like a woman who’s dancing’ – but her left hand points away from us, into the depths of the picture, signalling something we cannot see.

  ‘NIGHT WAS CHASED AWAY’

  At the end of 1517 Leonardo attends François at Romorantin, upriver from Amboise, where he is ambitiously planning for the King a vast new palace complex, complete with a connecting network of canals between the Loire and the Saône. Designs for this are found in the Codex Atlanticus, a reprise of those utopian city-scapes sketched out thirty years earlier.80 The Romorantin project never left the drawing-board, though architectural historians point to the influence of Leonardo’s designs on the evolution of chateau-design in the Loire. He remained there until 16 January 1518: ‘On the eve of St Anthony’s I returned from Romorantino to Ambuosa.’ An official requisition of horses from the King’s stables – ‘pour envoyer à Maistre Lyonard florentin paintre du Roy pour les affers du dit seigneur’ – remains among his papers.81

  With the spring comes the season of masques and pageants and parties, for which his ardour is quite undimmed. At Amboise on 3 May 1518 there is a double festivity with a Florentine overtone, celebrating the baptism of the King’s son, the Dauphin Henri, and the marriage of his niece, Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne. Her husband was Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, nephew of the Pope, and now Duke of Urbino (the dukedom so courteously refused by his late uncle Giuliano). Among the attendant Florentines were probably men who knew Leonardo, and many others
who knew of him, and so the news of him would travel back to Florence. The marriage was brief: both partners were dead within a year, though not before producing a daughter, Caterina, who later became Queen of France – the infamous ‘Madame la Serpente’, Catherine de’ Medici.

  The show put on by Leonardo is described in newsletters sent to the Gonzaga in Mantua: the Marchioness was still keeping a distant eye on Leonardo, the one who got away.82 In the square standing to the north of the chateau a triumphal arch was set up. On it stood a nude figure bearing lilies in one hand and an effigy of a dolphin (for the Dauphin) in the other. On one side of the arch was a salamander with the King’s motto, ‘Nutrisco et extinguo’; on the other was an ermine with the motto ‘Potius mori quam foedari’ (‘Better to die than be besmirched’) – an impresa of the Duke of Urbino, and for Leonardo a memory of Milanese days, and the captivating Cecilia Gallerani. One of the Gonzaga envoys writes of the tremendous esteem which Leonardo enjoys with King François. The King is anxious to employ more Italian painters, he reports; the name of Lorenzo Costa, court artist at Mantua, has been mentioned.

  A couple of weeks later, on 15 May, there was another pageant, almost certainly organized by Leonardo. The siege and capture of a castle were represented, commemorating the Battle of Marignano three years previously. From its battlements, falconets fired up carnival missiles of rag and paper, while great booming mortars delighted the crowd by raining down ‘inflated balloons which bounce around when they land in the square, to the great delight of all and with no harm done to anyone: a new invention, beautifully done’.83 Leonardo’s great skill of surprise, his mastery of the theatrical moment, never deserted him.

  Some fine drawings of costumed masqueraders are among the last of

  Masquerader on horseback, and in the guise of a poor prisoner.

  Leonardo’s works, done in black chalk like the Pointing Lady – this is the favoured medium of his late drawings, the line precise and assured, yet tending also to a soft, cloudy gleam. We see a horseman in a raffish broad-brimmed hat; a young man with flowing gauzy sleeves and a hunting-horn at his waist; an elaborately coiffed woman whose muscular legs suggest she is actually a man – ludic figures that seem part Renaissance showbiz and part ethereal magic. The ragged, mendicant prisoner in shackles, with his food-bowl and his wild-man staff, is also an actor in costume rather than an actual prisoner.84 For a moment one sees – in the curls of the hair, in the face behind the small fluffy beard – a reminiscence of Salai. But how much Salai was part of the French household is uncertain. He is listed in the French accounts, which cover two years, 1517–18, as receiving 100 écus – a decent sum, but only an eighth of what was paid to Melzi; the disparity may well be explained by his absence for some of the time. He was certainly back in Milan in spring 1518: he is recorded there on 13 April, lending a sum of money.85 There is no mention of him among the witnesses of Leonardo’s will a year later.

  19 June 1518: a big thank you to the King of France – a party in his honour, put on in Leonardo’s gardens at Cloux. All week the workmen have been busy constructing the tall wooden scaffolding. Over this is draped a canopy of blue cloth spangled with stars, creating a kind of pavilion or marquee. It covers an area 30 x 60 braccia (60 x 120 feet). Inside there is a raised dais for the royal guests. The columns of the scaffold are festooned with coloured cloths and wreaths of ivy. The lighting and the music and the scents of the midsummer evening one must imagine.

  The show was a reprise of what was, as far as we know, Leonardo’s first production, the Paradiso, performed at the Castello Sforzesco in 1490 for the doomed young Duke of Milan and his bride, Isabella of Aragon. And by coincidence this last festa, almost thirty years later, was seen by another young Milanese, Galeazzo Visconti, and recounted by him in a letter to the news-hungry Gonzaga:

  The whole courtyard was canopied in sheets of sky-blue cloth which had stars in gold in the likeness of the heavens, and then there were the principal planets, with the sun on one side and the moon on the other: it was a wonderful sight. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were there, in their proper order, and the twelve celestial signs… and there must have been four hundred torches burning, so that it seemed the night was chased away.86

  The show finishes, the royal compliments are received, the revellers disperse. The gardens of Cloux are quiet once more. There is a scattering of festive debris, the smell of trampled grass, and what was for a few minutes a vision of paradise is now just a big blue tent which they will take down in the morning. This festa is the last identifiable work by Leonardo da Vinci, an ephemeron so fragile that soon no trace of it remained except in the memories of those who were there and saw with their own eyes the night ‘chased away’. ‘Pareva fusse cacciata la notte…’

  A few days later Leonardo wrote the last of those little dated notes: miniature graffiti which say nothing more than here I am, on this day, in this place: ‘On the 24th day of June, St John’s Day 1518, in Amboise in the palace of Clu.’ A flagged moment, perhaps recalling the great St John’s Day parades and festivities in Florence. Around this time, in similarly nostalgic vein, he draws a brief sketch-plan and captions it, ‘The lion-house in Florence’.87 It is perhaps intended as an idea for Romorantin, but it remains on the page as the marker of an old man in exile, prey to the random offerings of memory. He remembered the lion he had seen there, stripping the skin off a lamb; perhaps it was the one he used for the lion in his painting of St Jerome. Leone… Leonardo. He had always been the lion, perhaps since childhood, and indeed it would not be a bad synopsis of the Turin self-portrait to say he looks there like a grizzled old lion, with his mane of grey hair and his fierce eyes: a lonely survivor.

  And around this time he is sitting at a table, in his studio at Cloux, working on some geometry – another little theorem, another piece of the jigsaw – when he hears a voice calling him, and he knows he must put down his pen, and put aside his questions, because he must live with the rest of us in this material world of appetites and contingencies, represented at this moment, not at all unpleasantly, by a bowl of Mathurine’s hot vegetable soup, which is almost as good (though he would never tell her that ‘almost’) as a Tuscan minestrone.

  So he writes on the page, ‘Etcetera, perche la minesstra si fredda’ – the ‘etcetera’ a mere formulaic squiggle, the glyph of non-completion.

  The view from Clos Lucé, in a sketch attributed to Melzi.

  THE GREAT SEA

  When I thought I was learning to live I was also learning to die.

  Codex Atlanticus, fol. 252r-a

  At Clos Lucé on Saturday 23 April 1519, the day before Easter, Leonardo da Vinci, ‘painter to the King’, drew up his will in the presence of the royal notary, Guillaume Borian, and seven witnesses: Francesco Melzi, Battista de Vilanis, two French priests and three Franciscan friars.88 Conspicuously missing from the list of witnesses is Salai. His absence from Amboise is confirmed by other documents, which locate him in Paris on 5 March and again on 16 May. On both occasions he met there with one Giovanni Battista Confalonieri, an agent of Massimiliano Sforza, Duke of Milan. On the second occasion he received a payment of 100 scudi, paid to him on behalf of the Duke, and the promise of a further 500 over the next four years. What sort of services was Salai offering in return? One possibility is that he was being paid to supply political information gleaned from his proximity to King François at Amboise – a last disreputable twist to his long and often ambivalent relationship with Leonardo.89

  In the will Leonardo gives instructions for his burial in the church of St Florentin at Amboise; for the procession that will accompany his body ‘from the said place to the said church’; for the saying of three high masses and thirty low masses in his memory; for the distribution of 40 pounds of wax in thick candles to be placed in the churches where the masses were celebrated; and for the funeral itself, with ‘sixty tapers to be carried by sixty poor men who shall be given money for carrying them’.

  The bequests of the will are as foll
ows:

  To Messer Francesco da Melzo, gentleman of Milan, each and all of the books the Testator is at present possessed of; and the instruments and portraits appertaining to his art and calling as a painter… and the remainder of his pension, and all sums of money which are owing to him from the past until the day of his death; and each and all of his clothes which he now possesses at the said place of Cloux

  To Battista de Vilanis his servant, one half of his garden outside the walls of Milan… and the right of water which King Louis XII of pious memory gave to the said da Vinci, being the stream of the Naviglio di Santo Cristoforo; and each and all of the furnishing and utensils of his house at the said place of Cloux

  To Salai his servant, the other half of the same garden, in which garden the same Salai has built and constructed a house which shall be and remain henceforth the property of Salai

  To Maturina his serving woman, a cloak of good black cloth lined with fur, and a length of cloth, and a single payment of two ducats

  To his brothers now living in Florence, the sum of four hundred scudi which he has deposited with the treasurer of Santa Maria Nuova in the city of Florence, with all the interest and usufruct that may have accrued up to the present time

  The apportioning is somehow elegant: to Melzi the unparalleled intellectual inheritance of his writings and paintings; to Salai and Battista property; to Mathurine a fur coat; and to the da Vinci brothers cash.90