The Florentines called it ‘entering the great sea’. Did Leonardo embark on this last journey philosophically, in the equanimity of pious resignation? His writings suggest not.
O slumberer, what is sleep? Sleep is the semblance of death. O why then do you not create such works that after your death will make you seem perfectly alive, instead of sleeping while you are alive and making yourself seem like the sad dead…
Every hurt leaves a displeasure in the memory, except for the supreme hurt, which is death, which kills the memory together with life…
The soul desires to remain with its body, because without the physical instruments of that body it can do nothing and feel nothing.91
Sleeping, forgetting, feeling nothing: these are images of death consonant with the essentially Aristotelian materialism of the Renaissance scientist. Of the resurrection and the life to come we hear nothing. And when Leonardo does write of the divinity of the soul it is still to maintain that it must ‘dwell in its works’ – the material world, the body – in order to be ‘at ease’: ‘Whatever it is, the soul is a divine thing, therefore leave it to dwell in its works, and be at ease there… for it takes its leave of the body very unwillingly, and indeed I believe that its grief and pain are not without cause.’ This is from an anatomical folio of c. 1510, where he writes exaltedly of anatomy as ‘this labour of mine’ wherein are discernible ‘the marvellous works of Nature’.92 Physical life is the soul’s habitat, death its eviction; it leaves ‘very unwillingly’, and does not seem headed for a home on high. Vasari engineers a deathbed repentance for Leonardo which sounds less than convincing: ‘Feeling he was near to death he earnestly resolved to learn the doctrines of the Catholic faith and of the good and holy Catholic religion, and then, lamenting bitterly, he confessed and repented, and though he could not stand up, supported by his friends and servants he received the blessed sacrament from his bed.’ It could be true, though this late conversion to the Faith sounds like something wished more by Vasari than by Leonardo. More convincing is Vasari’s further comment that Leonardo ‘protested that he had offended God and mankind by not working harder at his art, as he should have done’. It was not sin and hellfire he feared, but the dreadful weight of that last ‘etcetera’, and the empty grey paper beneath it – all that had not been completed.
He died on 2 May 1519, at the age of sixty-seven. According to Vasari, our only source, King François was present, and cradled him in his arms. As the final seizure came – ‘a paroxysm, messenger of death’ – the King ‘held his head up, to help him and bring him comfort’. It is an affecting image – if one detaches it from a pair of thoroughly over-egged French paintings on the subject, done in the early nineteenth century – but it has since been discovered that on 3 May, the day after Leonardo’s death, a royal edict was issued at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. As it took two days on horseback to travel there from Amboise, King François could not have been at Leonardo’s side on 2 May and at Saint-Germain on the 3rd. The veracity of Vasari’s account now hinges on the unresolved question of whether or not this edict – boldly inscribed ‘Par le Roy’, but not actually signed by him – required the King’s presence in Saint-Germain.93 Though ‘duly considering the certainty of death’, as the incipit of his will puts it, Leonardo departs on this characteristic note of uncertainty, and, in the absence of any known last words, the troublesome quirk of the Saint-Germain edict reminds us of his profound conviction that everything must be doubted, and tested, before it is held to be true.
Vasari concludes, ‘All those who knew him grieved without measure the loss of Leonardo,’ at which point I forget about the King altogether, and see Francesco Melzi by the bedside in tears. It was not until 1 June that Melzi wrote to the half-brothers in Florence with news of the death. ‘He was like the best of fathers to me,’ he wrote. ‘As long as I have breath in my body I shall feel the sadness, for all time. He gave me every day the proofs of his most passionate and ardent affection.’94 Melzi, this young man of whom we know so little, repaid that affection: as the assiduous guardian and editor of that ‘infinity’ of writings and drawings which – perhaps even more than the paintings – take us directly into the life of Leonardo, as if they are themselves a kind of memory, cluttered with fragmentary records
The Pointing Lady.
of the travails of his days, the secrets of his dreams, the flights of his mind.
His bodily remains fared less well than this metaphysical cargo of memories, dreams and reflections. There must have been a provisional interment in May, for the substantial funeral envisaged in the will did not take place for over three months; the burial certificate in the register of the royal collegiate church of St Florentin is dated 12 August 1519. The church suffered during the French Revolution, and in 1802 was deemed to be past saving. It was demolished, and the stones and leads – including those in the graveyard – were used for repairing the chateau. It is said that the gardener of the church, one Goujon, took up all the scattered bones and buried them in a corner of the courtyard, Leonardo’s perhaps among them.
In 1863 the poet and Leonardiste Arsène Houssaye excavated the site of St Florentin; among the shards he found fragments of a tomb-slab inscription (‘EO [… ] DUS VINC’) and one nearly whole skeleton whose remarkable skull-size immediately convinced him he had found the remains of Leonardo. ‘We have never before seen a head so magnificently designed by or for intelligence,’ he wrote. ‘After three and a half centuries, death had not yet been able to reduce the pride of this majestic head.’95 These bones now lie buried in the chapel of St Hubert, within the precincts of the chateau, beneath a plaque set up by the Comte de Paris. Their only connection with Leonardo, however, is the dubious phrenological deduction of Houssaye.
It is just possible that the capacious skull interred at St Hubert once housed the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, but one certainty, at least, is that it does so no longer. The cage is empty; the mind has flown.
1. Leonardo at twenty-nine. Probable self-portrait from the Adoration of the Magi.
2. Landscape near Vinci, in Leonardo’s earliest dated drawing.
3. Study of a lily.
4. The dog from Andrea del Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel, probably contributed by Leonardo.
5. The Annunciation.
6. Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci.
7. Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, with kneeling angel and landscape by Leonardo.
8. Terracotta angel at San Gennaro, attributed to Leonardo.
9. The Benois Madonna.
10. The Adoration of the Magi, left unfinished in 1482.
11. The Louvre Virgin of the Rocks.
12. The Lady with an Ermine, a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani.
13. The Musician.
14. Portrait called La Belle Ferronnière, probably of Lucrezia Crivelli.
15. Leonardo in late middle age. Portrait attributed to Francesco Melzi, c. 1510–12.
16. Metalpoint studies of a horse, early 1490s.
17. Leonardo, Bird’s eye map of Val di Chiana, c. 1502–4.
18. Five grotesque heads (possibly a man tricked by gypsies).
19. The smile. Detail from a sheet of studies of lips and mouths.
20. The hands. Detail from a sixteenth-century copy of Leonardo’s portrait drawing of Isabella d’Este.
21. The ghost. Image on the verso of Leonardo’s portrait of Isabella d’Este.
22. The bridge. Detail from the Madonna of the Yarnwinder by Leonardo and assistants.
23. Mona Lisa.
24. Cartoon for a Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John (‘Burlington House cartoon’).
25. Reversed image of a portrait sketch of Leonardo, c. 1510.
(Right) 26. Detail from Giampietrino’s altarpiece at Ospedaletto Lodigiano.
27. One of the late ‘Deluge’ drawings.
(Above) 28. St John the Baptist, possibly Leonardo’s last painting.
(Right) 29. Leda and the Swan. Version of a lost wo
rk of Leonardo’s by a pupil or follower (Cesare da Sesto?).
30. The mystery of creation. Detail from a sheet of studies of the foetus in the womb.
Notes
Alphabetical references refer to the manuscripts and collections listed in Sources. Author/date references refer to the books and articles listed there.
Introduction
1. Ar 245V, dated by comparison with CA 673r/249r-b, written 24 June 1518; see Pedretti a1975.
2. R 1566. In the surviving transcripts of Leonardo’s will, in Italian, she is ‘Maturina’, but she was almost certainly French, hence Mathurine.
3.K2 50v.
4. Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries (London, 1640), in Complete Poems, ed. G. Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1975), 394.
5. Richter’s 1939 index of Leonardo manuscripts totals 5,421 pages (taking ‘page’ to mean one side of a manuscript folio) but omits the following: versos of glued-down fragments in the Codex Atlanticus; notebook covers and inside-covers with manuscript contents; and the two Madrid codices discovered in 1967. These bring the count up to about 7,200 pages. See Richter 1970, 2.400–401; PC 1.92–7. On reported sightings of Libro W (designated thus by Leonardo’s secretary Melzi) in Milan in 1866 and 1958: Pedretti 1965, 147–8. See Part V n. 17.
6. Charles Rogers, A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings (2 vols., London, 1778), 1.5. On the provenance of the collection (probably brought from Spain by the Earl of Arundel and sold to Charles in c. 1641) see Clark and Pedretti 1968, 1.x–xiii.
7. Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Discorsi (Venice, 1554), 193–6, citing the reminiscence of his father, Cristoforo Giraldi, a Ferrarese diplomat in Milan.
8. L 77r.
9. CA 534v/199v-a.
10. RL 12665r. The lines are added to his ‘Description of the Deluge’, c. 1515, but undoubtedly record earlier observations at Piombino, probably in autumn 1504.
11. K ir. The page is very faded; the correct reading of the second line was established by infra-red examination in 1979.
12. Ar Ir, written in early 1508, when he was beginning the task of organizing his manuscripts; cf. Leic 2r: ‘So, reader, you need not wonder, nor laugh at me, if here we jump from one subject to another.’
13. F 35r; RL 19095v; RL 19070V (cf. 19115r: ‘Show the movement of the woodpecker’s tongue.’).
14. CA 52or/191r-a; PC 2.313. He wrote this c. 1490–92, above a drawing of a spiral entitled ‘Corpo nato dalla prospettiva’ (‘Body born of perspective’): see illustration on p. 58. On the same sheet, now separated (CA 521v/191v-b, R1368), he wrote, ‘M° [i.e. Maestro] Leonardo fiorentino in Milano.’ Other autographs in the notebooks: Fors 3 62v, c. 1493, written left to right (see illustration on p. 58); Fors 11 3v, ‘principiato da me Leonardo da Vinci’, dated 12 July 1505; CA 1054r/ 379r-a, ‘Io Lionardo’ – ‘I, Leonardo’.
15. CU 122r–125v, McM 396–410.
16. Michelangelo 1878, 12.
17. The most comprehensive edition of Vasari’s writings remains the nine-volume Opere, ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1878–85; 2nd edn 1906), in which the annotated Life of Leonardo is 4.57–90. See also Le vite, ed. R. Batterani and P. Barocchi (4 vols., Florence, 1966–76). The earliest English translation was a brief selection by William Aglonby, 1685; the most accessible modern translation is by George Bull (Harmondsworth, 1987), in which the Life of Leonardo is 1.255–71. On my selective references to Vasari and other early biographers, see Sources: Early biographies.
18. Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, Codex Magliabechiano XIII 89 and XXV 636; see Benedettucci 1991.
19. Codex Magliabechiano XVII 17. The account of Leonardo occupies fols. 88r–91v and 121v–122r. See Fabriczy 1893; Ficarra 1968.
20. Giovio’s life of Leonardo (‘Leonardi Vincii vita’) was first published by G. Tiraboschi in 1796; a parallel text in Latin and English is in Richter 1970, 1.2–3. Additional material on Leonardo, from another part of the Dialogi, is in PC 1.9–11.
21. On the genesis of the Lives, see Boase 1971, 43–8.
22. Material on Leonardo is also found in Lomazzo’s Sogni e raggionamenti (‘Dreams and discourses’), a manuscript of the early 1560s containing imagined dialogues (British Library, Add. MS 12196, 5or-224r, especially Raggionamenti 5 and 6, 117v–175r); and in his Idea del tempio della pittura (The Idea of the Temple of Painting) (Milan, 1590). His writings are collected in Scritti sulle arti, ed. R. Ciardi (2 vols., Pisa, 1973).
23. RL 12726. A copy, probably also by Melzi, is in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.
PART ONE: Childhood, 1452–1466
1. Uzielli 1872, doc. 1.
2. E. Repetti, Dizionario geografico della Toscana (Florence, 1845), 5.789. Cf. Uzielli 1896, 36–42. In the 1940s the house was donated to the Comune of Vinci by its owner, Count Guglielmo Rasini di Castelcampo; it was opened to the public in 1952, the four-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s birth.
3. Cianchi 1960; Vecce 1998, 23–5.
4. ASF, Notarile anticosimiano 16192, 105v.
5. See Bruschi 1997 on the possibility that Leonardo’s baptismal record was still extant in the mid nineteenth century. On 13 October 1857 Gaetano Milanesi wrote to Cesare Guasti, ‘If you go to Pistoia, would you please tell Mons. Breschi that I would be very obliged if he would let me have Leonardo da Vinci’s baptismal certificate, which he has discovered.’ Breschi was dean of the diocese of Pistoia and Prato, to which the parish of Vinci belonged. Nothing seems to have come of Milanesi’s enquiry, though the recent discovery of a letter to Breschi from Fr Ferdinando Visconti, then the parish priest of Vinci, has excited interest. It was posted on 17 May 1857 (five months before the date of Milanesi’s letter). A sizeable portion of paper, almost exactly square, is missing from the lower part of the second page – was this the fugitive document? If so, what happened to it?
6. Cianchi 1953, 64–9.
7. See J. Temple-Leader, Sir John Hawkwood (London, 1992); T. Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Mercenary (London, 1994); Chaucer, ‘The Parson’s Tale’, Canterbury Tales, Fragment X, 1 (ed. F. Robinson, Oxford, 1957, 254).
8. Cianchi 1953, 69–70; Vecce 1998, 22.
9. This house, described as ‘in the borgo’, was probably built on the extramural plot of land mentioned in the 1427 catasto, and is almost certainly the town-house recorded in more detail in the 1451 catasto; Leonardo must have known it well as a child.
10. Viroli 1998, 7–9; this copy was possibly the one later used by Niccolò Machiavelli when writing his Discourses on Livy (1513).
11. Ridolfi1963, 4.
12. On Ser Piero’s early career: Cecchi 2003, 122–5; Vecce 1998, 384. The insignia: ASF, Notarile anticosimiano 16826, 1r.
13. Cf. Antonio da Vinci’s 1457 declaration (see n. 18 below), which says of Francesco, ‘He is in the country and does nothing.’ These are formulaic disclaimers.
14. See Eissler 1962, 95–8, for psychoanalytical reflections on Leonardo’s ‘very live’ relationship with Francesco.
15. The manuscript, which has many scribal errors, actually describes Leonardo as the ‘legittimo… figluolo’ of Ser Piero. The adjective as it stands is redundant, and it is generally assumed that ‘illegittimo’ or ‘non legittimo’ is meant. The idea that Caterina was ‘of good blood’ may perhaps imply that she too was illegitimate.
16. Schlossmuseum, Weimar; PC 2.110: a double-sided sheet of anatomical studies originally joined to RL 19052.
17. On Accattabriga and his family: Cianchi 1975, with facsimiles of documents; Vecce 1998, 27–30.
18. ASF, Catasto antico 795, 502–3; Villata 1999, no. 2. This is the first official documentation of Leonardo’s existence.
19. In 1427 she is ‘Monna Piera donna di Piero [Buti]’, aged twenty-five; but she must have died young, as in later catasti Piero Buti’s wife is Monna Antonia.
20. Of the other children whose lives are traceable, Piera married a Vinci man, Andrea del Biancho, in 1475, and was a widow by 1487; Lisabetta also married, and produced a daughter,
Maddalena, in c. 1490 – as far as we know, Caterina’s first randchild.
21. CA 186v/66v-b. The original reads, ‘Questo scriversì distintamente del nibio par che sia mio destino, perche nela prima / ricordatione della mia infantia e’ mi parea che, essendo io in culla, che un nibbio venissin me / e mi aprissi la bocha chola sua coda, e molte volte mi percuotesse con tal coda dentro alle labra.’
22. J. Parry-Jones, Birds of Prey (Newent, n.d.), 10.
23. Written thus on the inside cover of the notebook, and repeated almost identically on fol. 18v.
24. Tn 18v: ‘The cortone, a bird of prey which I saw going to Fiesole, above the place of the Barbiga, on 14 March 1505’.
25. The source of the error was the German edition of Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1903), which rendered the correct Russian korshun (kite) as Geier.
26. Freud 2001, 36–7.
27. Ibid., 41, 77. Freud’s broader interpretation of the kite fantasy draws on theories of infantile sexuality expounded in ‘On the sexual theories of children’ (1908). He also identifies a homosexual content (‘the situation in the fantasy… corresponds to an idea of the act of fellatio’), thus finding in the fantasy an unconscious link between early mother-fixation and adult homosexuality.
28. H1 5v. This bestiary version suggests to Beck ‘that the “dream” of the kite was neither a dream nor a memory but a fantasy based on the reintegration of some literary text familiar to Leonardo’ (Beck 1993, 8).
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