Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

29. The connection between birds and parentage is found elsewhere in the bestiary: ‘Although partridges steal one another’s eggs, nonetheless the young born of those eggs always return to their true mother’ (H1 8v); and, in what seems a classically Freudian text, ‘Pigeons are a symbol of ingratitude, for when they are old enough not to need feeding any more, they begin to fight with the father, and this struggle does not end until the young one drives the father out, and takes his wife, making her his own’ (ibid., 7r).

  30. 64v, CA 1033r/370r-a.

  31. CA393r/145r-a; PC 2.279. The camel: H1 10v. ‘Usare con’ = to be familiar with, or used to, hence a euphemism for sexual intimacy. The phrase is found in the ‘Confessionale’ of Leonardo’s half-brother Lorenzo di Ser Piero da Vinci, c. 1520 (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 1420, 8or), which refers to illegitimate children produced by men ‘who have sex just once with a woman [useranno un tempo con una femmina]… such as a concubine or a serving-girl’, a comment which may refer to his father’s relations with Caterina. On Lorenzo, see Part II n. 90 below.

  32. Pfister, 1913, 147. Freud incorporated this, with some reservations, into his second edition, 1919: see Freud 2001, 70–72.

  33. CA 765r/282r-b. According to an unreliable tradition the mill was owned by Leonardo’s uncle Francesco. By the later sixteenth century it was owned by the Ridolfifamily, and it appears on the ‘Guelf map’ of Vinci (c. 1580) as ‘Mulino di Doccia di Ridolfi’.

  34. CA 1033r/370r-a. On sixteenth-century oliviculture see P.Vettori, Trattato dello lodi de gl’ulive (Florence, 1569); Vezzosi 1990.

  35. In 1504–5, the probable date of the note, Leonardo was painting the Battle of Anghiari mural in Florence, a large-scale project requiring industrial quantities of paint.

  36. CA 18r/4r-b.

  37. Ma I 46v–47r, mid-1490s; an earlier horse-driven press (‘strettoio’) is in CA 47r/14r-a. See Vezzosi 1990, 14–17.

  38. Dante, Paradiso, canto 14, 129, also playing on vinci = conquer (line 124); cf. Boethius, De Consolatione, Bk 3: ‘Felice è quei che spezza il vinco del amor terreno’ – ‘Happy is he who breaks the bonds of earthly love.’ Leonardo uses the word in C 19v, describing a trick using ‘an osier-shoot [vincho] and an arrow’.

  39. On the academy engravings see below, Part V n. 111; the spelling of the words varies (often ‘Achademia’). On the ‘fantasia dei vinci’ by Correggio (a patron of Leonardo’s friend Antonio Cammelli), see Kemp 1981, 187.

  40. CA 888r/324r. A memo list of c. 1490 (CA 611r/225r-b) includes the phrase ‘gruppi di Bramante’: Richter (R 1448) translates gruppi as ‘groups’, but it is probably a variant of groppi, referring to knot-designs by Leonardo’s friend Donato Bramante.

  41. Lomazzo 1584, 430; PC 2.328.

  42. The ‘Madrid book-list’ of c. 1504 (Ma II 2v-3v) contains three copies of Aesop: a ‘favole d’isopo’, an ‘isopo in versi’, and a French edition, ‘isopo illingia francosa’, perhaps Les Fables de Esope (Lyons, 1484).

  43. Newsletter printed in Florence in 1516, titled Letter of Andrea Corsali to the Illustrious Duke Giuliano de’ Medici which arrived from the Indies in the month of October 1516. Leonardo was in Giuliano’s service in 1513–16. See Vecce 1998, 317, 442.

  44. Ammirato 1637, 2.242.

  45. Horse shown from behind: RL 12308r. Ox and ass: RL 12362r. Others: Zöllner 2003, nos. 89–93. Also early is the proportional study of a horse, RL 12318, perhaps connected to Verrocchio’s project for the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni. See Clayton 2002, 34.

  46. Zöllner 2003, no. 13, silverpoint on buff-coloured prepared paper. At auction it ‘soared past its £3.5m estimate in seconds’ (Maeve Kennedy, Guardian, 11 July 2001).

  47. RL 12653.

  48. BM 1895–9–15–447 (Zöllner 2003, no. 157); I 48r. See also RL 12361 – red chalk with right-handed shading, thus probably a Melzi copy – and RL 12714.

  49. F 47r, c. 1508.

  50. See Part III n. 10 below.

  51. H 109r.

  52. RL 12363.

  53. CA 477v/175v–a.

  54. See Embolden 1987, 213–15, for a full list of trees and plants mentioned by Leonardo. Leonardo’s depiction of the complex organic clusterings of wild plants is seen in his studies of brambles (RL 12419–20, ’25–6, ’29), probably related to early studies for the Leda, c. 1504–5, and in his depiction of a woodland copse (RL 12431r) with a single tree (robinia) on the verso.

  55. CU 12r, McM 42.

  56. BN 2038, 27v, formerly part of A, c. 1490–92.

  57. CA 505v/184v-c, R 493. The word ‘philosopher’ in the heading appears to be crossed out.

  58. Bramly 1992, 86.

  59. CU 12r–12v, McM 42.

  60. Uffizi GDS 436E; RL 12685.

  61. For recent attempts to identify the landscape, see Natali 1999, 137–48, Nanni 1999, 7–17.

  62. Tn 6v.

  63. Landucci 1927, 35. The Capella di Santa Cecilia in Lucca, which originally housed a miraculous image of the Virgin, was also built outside the walls, though it is now enclosed in the larger arc of the Renaissance walls.

  64. Bramly 1992, 84–5; PC 2.314.

  65. Pedretti 1992, 163.

  66. CA 327v/119v-a: ‘Because I am not well-educated I know certain arrogant people think they can justifiably disparage me as an unlettered man.’

  67. On the two educational systems of the Italian Renaissance, see Burke 1972.

  68. RL 19086.

  69. Ghiberti 1998, 46; Alberti, De re aedificatoria (1485; also called De architectura), 1.3.

  70. F 96V. Cf. E 55r: ‘My intention is first to record the experience and then by means of reason show why it must be so.’

  71. CA 323r/117r-b, one of a series of texts headed ‘Proemio’ (‘Preface’), written c. 1490 (PC 1.109). His views are summed up by one of the empiricist mottos of the Royal Society: ‘Nullius in verba’ – ‘Take no man’s word for it.’

  72. CA 392r/141r-b, R 660.

  73. Ibid. After Giotto, he says, ‘this art declined again, because everyone imitated what had been done by him’, but was then revived by ‘Tommaso the Florentine, called Masaccio’, whose ‘perfect works’ were once more based on a study of Nature.

  74. BN 2038, 19r.

  75. CA 349v/206v-a.

  76. Vezzosi 1998, 20, interpreting geometric patterns on a folio at Christ Church College, Oxford. Cf. Leic 28v and F 48v for rough-sketched designs for potters’ lathes.

  77. Donatello’s Magdalene: Museo del Opera del Duomo, Florence. The Vinci Magdalene: Museo della Collegiata di Sant’Andrea, Empoli. The Madonna of the Welcome has been attributed to Bartolomeo Bellano.

  78. King 2000, 113–17. The design of the craft is debated. A near-contemporary illustration by Marciano Taccola depicts it as a fourteen-wheeled wagon converted into a raft – an amphibious vehicle like a modern ‘duck’ – while other descriptions suggest a boat or barge with paddle-wheels. Its motive was economic: the high price of Carrara marble was partly due to the costs of transporting it from the quarry, in the Apuan Alps 60 miles north-west of Florence.

  79. On Leonardo’s left-handedness see Bambach 2003a, 31–57; on the evolution of his handwriting see PC 1.100–103. The earliest notice of his mirror-script is by his friend Luca Pacioli: ‘He wrote in reverse, left-handed, and it could not be read except with a mirror, or by holding the back of the sheet up against the light’ (De viribus quantitatis [‘Of the Powers of Quantity’], Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 250, before 1508). An eighteenth-century owner of the Codex Leicester, probably the Roman painter Giuseppe Ghezzi, compared the script to Hebrew (‘He wrote according to the custom of the Jews’) and thought its motive was secrecy: ‘He did this so that all could not read his writings so easily.’ Leonardo’s left-handed shading and hatching are an important tool for identifying his work, particularly in pen and ink. The lines typically (but not exclusively) course from lower right to upper left, the direction of a line being signalled by a slight indentation at the beginning of the st
roke and by a small angular hook at the end where the pen left the paper. Leonardo was able to draw right-handed, and to write in the conventional direction (see illustration), but did not retrain himself to do so, as did Michelangelo, another natural southpaw.

  PART TWO: Apprenticeship, 1466–1477

  1. Michelangelo was apprenticed by his father to the Ghirlandaio workshop on 1 April 1488, a couple of weeks after his thirteenth birthday. The contract was for three years at a wage averaging 8 florins a year (Vasari 1987, 1.327–8). Botticini was also waged when he entered Neri di Bicci’s workshop on 22 October 1449 (GDA, s.v. Botticini). However, both had previous artistic training, and were thus taken on as assistants (garzoni). In the case of an unskilled pupil (discepolo) the boy’s family paid the maestro for tuition and upkeep; this was probably the arrangement between Ser Piero and Verrocchio. That Leonardo began his apprenticeship in c. 1466 is argued by Beck 1988, 5–6, and Brown 1998, 76–7. Earlier writers like Clark and Venturier favoured c. 1469–70, because Ser Piero’s 1469 tax return lists Leonardo among his bocche at Vinci; but this is a generalized claim of dependence, and it was anyway rejected by the inspectors, who put a cancelling line next to Leonardo’s name. Vasari’s statement that Ser Piero was a ‘friend’ of Verrocchio is strengthened by recently discovered documents which show him acting as Verrocchio’s notary in various rental agreements between 1465 and 1471: see Cecchi 2003, 124.

  2. Necrologia Fiorentina, San Biagio; cited Cianchi 1953, 49.

  3. First documented in Ser Piero’s tax return of 1469 (ASF, Catasto 1469, Quartiere San Spirito, Gonfalone Drago, filza 909/239, carta 498). The house was demolished when Via delle Prestanze (now Via Gondi) was redeveloped in the 1490s.

  4. Cianchi 1953, 74.

  5. Benedetto Dei, Cronica Fiorentina (1472), in Fanelli 1980, 82–5.

  6. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. The map is a large woodcut attributed to the workshop of Francesco Rosselli; its name derives from the device of a lock and chain in the top left-hand corner (not visible in the reproduction on pp. 62–3). It shows a composite view of the city from the area between Bellosguardo and Monte Oliveto. See L. Ettlinger, ‘A fifteenth century view of Florence’, Burlington Magazine 581 (June 1952), 162–7.

  7. Hibbert 1993, 155.

  8. Rubinstein 1995, 72.

  9. Bracciolini: Dialogus contra avaritiam, ed. G. Germano (Livorno, 1998). Savonarola: Lucas-Dubreton 1960, 46n.

  10. Landucci 1927, 48 (20 August 1489); Lucas-Dubreton 1960, 131.

  11. Machiavelli, La Mandragola, 2.3, 14–15.

  12. Accused of promoting worthless supporters to political office, Cosimo retorted, ‘A worthy man can be made with two braccia of crimson cloth’ (i.e. to make the lucco or mantle of the Florentine legislator). Half a century later his great-grandson Pope Leo X espoused the same policy: ‘Assure yourself of the Otto and the Balia [legislative committees], and… be sure to elect to the offices of the Monte [the city bank] keen-witted, secret and trusty men entirely devoted to you’. See Villari 1892, 2.43, 456. On Cosimo: Kent 2000.

  13. Cecchi 2003, 123–4; other religious foundations which regularly used Ser Piero’s services were La Badia Fiorentina and Sant’Apollonia.

  14. Vecce 1998, 33. Cf. Vasari on the early career of Brunelleschi, also the son of a notary. His father wanted him to take up the profession, and was ‘upset’ because he showed no aptitude for it. ‘Seeing the boy was always investigating ingenious problems of art and mechanics, he made him learn arithmetic and writing, and then apprenticed him to the goldsmith’ art with a friend of his so that he might study design’ (Vasari 1987, 1.134). This seems parallel to Leonardo’s course fifty years later.

  15. G. Calvi, RV 13 (1926), 35–7. The rental agreement is dated 25 October 1468; the premises were owned by La Badia. In 1472 Ser Piero chose the church as the site of the family tomb (Beltrami 1919, no. 6), and he was buried there in 1504.

  16. Jardine 1996, 37–44.

  17. CA 42v/12v-a, R 1439.

  18. Hauser 1962, 2.3–6.

  19. Cristoforo Landino, Comento sopra la Commedia di Dante (Florence, 1481), iv r; Baxandall 1988, 114–17.

  20. These feats are described in the anonymous Life of Alberti, in Latin, which survives in an eighteenth-century transcription by Antonio Muratori; though written in the third person, it is almost certainly a precocious – and not very reliable – autobiography, written c. 1438. See Grafton 2000, 14–17.

  21. Ibid., 18. In one of his facetiae, Leonardo wrote of ‘a good man who was censured by another for being illegitimate’. He replied, ‘Judged by the laws of humanity and nature I am legitimate, while you are a bastard because you have the habits of a beast rather than a man’ (Ma II 65r, PC 2.276).

  22. Grafton 2000, 9–29; M. Baxandall, ‘Alberti’s self’, Fenway Court (1990–91), 31–6.

  23. Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, Codex Magliabechiano XI 121. In 1468 Toscanelli installed a marble gnomon inside the dome of Florence cathedral, by which he could ‘determine midday to half a second’ (F. Streicher, ‘Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli’, Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1912), vol. 14).

  24. Cited in G. Uzielli, La vita e i tempi di Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (Rome, 1894), 20.

  25. GDA s.v. Uccello.

  26. On the varied output of Verrocchio’s studio, see Butterfield 1997, Rubin and Wright 1999. ‘Verrocchio & Co.’: Clark 1988, 49. Paul Hills remarks on the ‘coarsening’ of Verrocchio’s style through commercialism: ‘Between invention and replication something is lost’ (‘The power of make-believe’, TLS, 7 January 2000).

  27. In 1462 Verrocchio’s bottega is described as ‘at the top’ (a capo) of Via Ghibellina, but the street did not then begin at the corner of the Bargello, as it does today; this western stretch of the street was then called Via del Palagio. The bottega probably stood near the present intersection of Via Ghibellina with Via Giuseppe Verdi. See Brown 2000, 13. This is probably the area referred to by the diarist Landucci as the ‘Canto delle Stinche’; he records a murder taking place there in 1500, ‘outside the butcher’s shop at the corner of Via Ghibellina next to the Stinche’ (Landucci 1927, 176).

  28. For Verrocchio the area outside the Porta alla Croce had other associations. Here, in August 1452, the teenage Andrea threw a stone during a scuffle with other youths; it hit a fourteen-year-old woolworker called Antonio di Domenico, who later died of the injury, and Andrea was briefly arrested on a charge of manslaughter. See Vasari 1878, 3.358n; Butterfield 1997, 3.

  29. Butterfield 1997, 21–31; on Leonardo as model, Nicodemi 1934, 14–15, Brown 2000, 10.

  30. GDA, s.v. Ferrucci; other pages of the sketchbook are in London, New York, Berlin, Dijon, Chantilly and Hamburg. The page with a line of Leonardo handwriting (Louvre) is reproduced in Pedretti 1998, 22.

  31. ASF, Tribunale della Mercanzia 1539, 301r-302v; Covi 1966, 103. The document is part of a legal dispute between Verrocchio’s brother Tommaso and his executor Lorenzo di Credi.

  32. ‘Pistole d’ovidio’ in a book-list of the early 1490s (CA 559r/210r-a); ‘ovidio metamorfoseos’ in the ‘Madrid book-list’ of c. 1504 (Ma II 2v-3v). Leonardo quotes from the Metamorphoses on a folio of c. 1480, CA 879r/320r-b.

  33. The Uffizi portrait is variously credited to Credi, Raphael and Perugino himself; on the pen-and-ink drawing (Uffizi GDS 250E) see Rubin and Wright 1999, 144.

  34. Gilbert 1992, 34. On Florentine artistic apprenticeship see also Rubin and Wright 1999, 78ff.; Luchinat 1992.

  35. Cennini 1933, 4–5

  36. PC 1.11 (part of the fragmentary supplement to Giovio’s Leonardi Vincii vita).

  37. Rubin and Wright 1999, no. 29; cf. RL 12515.

  38. The drapery study illustrated (Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins RF 2255; Zöllner 2003, no. 183) is similar but not identical to the Virgin’s drapery in the Annunciation. It is also close to the drapery of the Madonna in another work from the Verrocchio studio, Lorenzo di Credi’s Pistoia altarpiece (c. 1476–85), but it is closest of all to
Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Madonna Enthroned with Saints, c. 1484 (Uffizi), one of various suggestions of interchange between these two workshops.

  39. Vezzosi 1997, 32.

  40. Drapery in the Trattato: CU 167r–170v, McM 559–74 ‘Thin cloths’ etc.: RL 19121r.

  41. The Youthful Christ (see illustration, p. 122), about 13 inches (33 cm) high, is in a private collection (Coll. Gallendt, Rome). On its identity with the ‘little head’ (testicciola) owned by Lomazzo, see M. Kemp, ALV 4 (1991), 171–6; Pedretti 1998b, 15–16.

  42. Lomazzo 1584, 159.

  43. CA 888r/342r.

  44. BM 1895–9–15–474, metalpoint on cream-coloured paper, usually dated c. 1472–5. According to Vasari, Verrocchio’s Darius was commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici to send to Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, together with a companion piece showing Alexander the Great; the Darius is echoed in a glazed terracotta profile from the della Robbia workshop, c. 1500, which is very similar to Leonardo’s drawing. The profile is a type found elsewhere in Verrocchio’s work: in one of the soldiers of his silver relief for the Baptistery, the Beheading of St John, 1477–80; and in his statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni done in Venice in the mid-1480s.

  45. He did not get this commission: six Virtues were painted by the Pollaiuolo brothers and one, Fortitude (Uffizi), was subcontracted by them to Botticelli (GDA 4.493, s.v. Botticelli).

  46. A Ir, R 628.

  47. See Dunkerton and Roy 1996 for a technical analysis of Florentine panel paintings of the 1470s and ’80s (by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi et al.) in the National Gallery, London. The artists’ choice of paint was ‘relatively conservative’; they used some oil paint for specific colours, but generally preferred the ‘light and brilliant tonality’ of egg tempera; ‘they seem to have rejected, perhaps quite consciously, the more innovative and experimental technique of the oil medium.’

  48. Baxandall 1988, 6.

  49. An ‘artificial’ malachite, a precipitate of copper salts, was also used: it is found in the landscape of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (National Gallery, London), dating from the 1430s; see Dunkerton and Roy 1996, 28, 31.