20. H 106v.
21. Benvenuto della Golpaja, ‘Libro di macchine’ (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale di San Marco, HIV 41); Pedretti 1957, 26.
22. Ar 148r-v, R 1548–9.
23. ASF, Antica Badia Fiorentina, Familiari XI 322, 146ff; Brescia and Tomio 1999, 69–70. The letter also mentions Tommaso’s sister, Maddalena, ‘riding furiously through the woods’ at Quaracci, looking like an ‘amazone’.
24. CA 950v/346v-a. On the tarantula, see also H 17v: ‘The bite of a tarantula fixes a man in his intention, that is, what he was thinking when he was bitten.’ Though nowadays referring to hairy spiders of tropical America (genus Mygale), the original tarantula was a large spider found in southern Italy (genus Lycosa). It was named after the Pugliese town of Taranto. Its bite was supposed to cause ‘tarantism’, a hysterical malady resembling St Vitus’s dance (or Sydenham’s chorea), though the cause of these communal hysterias is now thought to be ergot-poisoning.
25. A. Grazzini, Le Cene, ed. C. Verzone (Florence, 1890), 140–41.
26. V. Borghini, Discorsi (Florence, 1584), 163; Pedretti 1976, plate 13.
27. Vasari 1876, 4.446.
28. Hydraulic devices: CA 1069r/386r-b (illustrated), 1069v/386v-b; 26r/7r-a, 26v/7v-a; 1048r/376r-a (Zöllner 2003, nos. 509, 511–14). Hygrometer: Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins 2022; Zöllner 2003, no. 130. Vasari also says that as a ‘young man’ Leonardo ‘was the first to propose canalizing the Arno river between Pisa and Florence’. This is often dismissed as a confusion with Leonardo’s later canalization projects, c. 1503–4, but it is perfectly possible that he had earlier thoughts that way. Brunelleschi’s aborted project to inundate the plain around Lucca (at war with Florence in the 1420s) would be a precedent.
29. CA 42v/12v-a
30. A 64r, c. 1490–92; PC 2.119–20. The treatise (Biblioteca Riccardiana, Cod. 211) may have been written for Toscanelli’s friend Brunelleschi.
31. CA 5r/1 bis r-a.
32. On Argyropoulos, see DBI; G. Cammelli, Giovanni Argiropulo (Florence, 1941).
33. Alberti, De re aedificatoria (1485), Bk 10, ch. 10; Pedretti 1976, 8.
34. Uffizi GDS 447E; Pedretti 1957, 211–16.
35. ‘Antonio da Pistoia’: CA 18r/4r-b. On Cammelli, see DBI; A. Capelli, ‘Notizie di Antonio Cammelli’, in Cammelli 1884, xxv-lix. He is also sometimes known as Antonio Vinci, referring to his birthplace, San Piero a Vincio, then a village outside the western gate of Pistoia.
36. Capelli, ‘Notizie’ (see n. 35), xxxiii, xlii, citing Berni’s sonnet, ‘I1 medico Guazzaletto’, and Aretino’s Ragionamenti.
37. Cammelli 1884, 180.
38. Ibid., 165.
39. CA 80r/28r-b.
40. CA 195r/71r-a; Pedretti 1957, 79–89; Luca Pulci, Pistole, 8.130–32.
41. CA 55r/16v-a; PC 2.386. Cf. Cammelli’s sonnet against Bellincioni, envisaging him ‘crowned with a wreath of stinging nettles’ (Cammelli 1884, 53). On Bellincioni see DBI, and Fanfani’s introduction to the Rime (Bellincioni 1876). Bellincioni praised Leonardo’s ‘drawings and colours, of which both ancients and moderns are in awe’ (Sonnet 77, c. 1485–90), and collaborated with Leonardo in Milan in 1490 (see pp. 257–8 above).
42. National Music Museum, South Dakota, no. 4203 (http://www.usd.edu/smm); Winternitz 1982, 25–38; Katherine Powers, ‘The lira da braccio in the angel’s hands in Renaissance Madonna Enthroned paintings’, Music in Art 26 (2001).
43. Cellini 2002, 9–11.
44. T. Smollet, Travels through France and Italy (London, 1776), letter 27 (28 January 1765).
45. CU 18v, McM 41. On Ficino’s orphic hymns, see Yates 1965, 78–80.
46. RL 12697; my thanks to Sasha, who played me this melody. Another version of this riddle is in RL 12699.
47. The 32 inch (85 cm) replica, constructed by Cremonese lutenist Giorgio Scolari and acoustic scientist Andrea Iorio, was exhibited in 2002. The stringed instrument in the shape of a monster’s head (BN 2037, fol. C, formerly part of MS B, c. 1487–90) is the nearest we get to the ‘skull lyre’ and may conceivably be the illustration referred to by Amoretti (1804, 32–3). On Leonardo’s other musical inventions, see Richter 1970, 1.69f., Winternitz 1982.
48. A 22v.
49. CA 888r/324r. Richter reads it as ‘Atalanta’ (R 680), though this legendary Greek beauty was usually depicted running rather than raising her face. On Migliorotti, see Vecce 1998, 72–5. There is a fragmentary draft of a letter to him (‘Talante’) by Leonardo (CA 890r/325r-b).
50. Louvre, Cabinet de Dessins 2022, c. 1480; Zöllner 2003, no. 130. The musician is top right; the sheet also contains a design for a hygrometer with notes, and some figure studies suggestive of a Last Supper.
51. RL 12276. The lower half of a sketch of a kneeling angel (BM 1913–6–17–1) is also related to the painting, though not a study for it.
52. Papa 2000, 37.
53. On the similarity to Santa Maria Novella, see Pedretti 1988, 280; Papa 2000, 40. My suggestion that the painting was commissioned by Rucellai is speculative, but no more so than the idea that it was commissioned for the Ferranti chapel at the Badia, and that the later St Jerome painted for the chapel by Filippino Lippi (c. 1489) was a substitute for it (A. Cecchi, Uffizi studi e ricerche 5 (1998), 59–72). On the possibility that Leonardo travelled with Rucellai to Milan in 1482, see p. 177 above. He seems to have taken the painting with him: it is echoed on the title-page of the Milanese poem Antiquarie prospettiche romane, addressed to Leonardo c. 1495–1500. The ‘San Girolamo’ recorded among the paintings owned by Leonardo’s pupil Salai in 1524 (Shell and Sironi 1991) is unlikely to be the extant painting, but may be a copy of it by Salai. An inventory of paintings in Parma in 1680 includes a St Jerome attributed to Leonardo, but the description and the measurements given do not correspond with the extant painting (Chiesa 1967, 92). According to a well-worn story, the picture was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century by Cardinal Fesch, an uncle of Napoleon, who found half of it in a Roman junk-shop, and the other half many months later in a shoemaker’s shop, being used as a bench. The story sounds apocryphal (one happy chance too many), though it is true that the painting was at one stage sawn in two. In 1845 it was bought from Fesch’s estate by Pope Pius IX for the Vatican Gallery, at a cost of 2,500 francs.
54. Landucci 1927, 44, 275. On a late sheet (CA 803r/294r-a, c. 1517–18), Leonardo sketches a ground plan of the Florentine lion-house (‘stanze de lioni di firenze’).
55. RL 19114V. Bestiary: H1 11r, R 1232, cf. H1 18v.
56. RL 12692r. On Alberti’s fables, with a fictional ‘letter to Aesop’, see Grafton 2000, 213–14. Leonello d’Este also used a lion as his emblem.
57. Ar 155r, R 1339.
58. Ar 224r, 231v.
59. This is not to exclude other possible glosses on the cave, among them a Freudian analogy with bodily orifices. The gaping vulva in an anatomical sheet of c. 1509 (RL 19095v, see illustration on p. 421) might suggest that the ‘threatening dark cave’ refers at a subconscious level to the disturbing mysteries of female sexuality. The cave as ‘residence of Pluto’ may also relate to misogynistic imagery of female genitalia as a ‘hell’, as found in Ghigo Brunelleschi and Ser Domenico da Prato’s erotic poem Geta e Birria (Florence, c. 1476), where the protagonist plunges his member ‘into the measureless depths of hell’ (‘senza misura nello ’nferno’): Leonardo owned a copy of this poem in 1504. In one of Leonardo’s fables (CA 188r/67r-b, R 1282), a goblet of wine prepares for the ‘death’ of being swallowed into the ‘foul and fetid caverns of the human body’.
60. Bramly 1992, 156.
61. Vasari 1987,1.331.
62. Leonardo’s memorandum ‘Fatiche d’erchole a pier f ginori / L’orto de medici’ (‘The Labours of Hercules for Pierfrancesco Ginori. The garden of the Medici’), CA 782v/288v-a, may refer to the San Marco gardens, and to a statue he was intending to copy, but the date of the note is c. 1508, long after Lorenzo was dead.
63. E. Camesasca, L’Opera completa del
Perugino, Rizzoli Classici dell’Arte 3 (Milan, 1969), 91–2.
64. CA 429r/159r-c, R 1368A; cf. F 96v on physicians as ‘destroyers of lives’.
65. RL 12439, formerly CA 902r/329r-b; Pedretti 1957, plate 23.
66. ASF, Corporazioni religiose soppresse 140/3, 74r; Villata 1999, no. 14.
67. ASF, ibid., 75r, 77v, 79r, 8IV Villata 1999, nos. 15–17.
68. On the religious iconography of the painting, see Natali 2001, 40ff.; Zöllner 2003, 56–9.
69. Beck quoted by Catherine Milner, Daily Telegraph, 3 June 2001. A letter denouncing the plan as a ‘folly’ was signed by forty experts including Sir Ernst Gombrich (Artwatch UK, June 2001).
70. Conversation with Alfio del Serra, 29 June 2001.
71. Melinda Henneburger, ‘The Leonardo cover-up’, New York Times, 21 April 2002.
72. On Vasari’s woodcuts and their accuracy: Boase 1971, 68–72. On Renaissance self-portraiture: Zöllner 1992; Woods-Marsden 1998.
73. The face in a medallion in Mantegna’s early fresco St James Preaching (Erematani, Padua) was probably also a self-portrait, but the frescos were destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944, and the photographs that remain do not show the face clearly.
74. Pedretti 1998a, 25; Grafton 2000, 127–33.
75. Vecce 1998, 75–6; Pedretti 1957, 34. For a later connection between Rucellai and Leonardo, see Benvenuto della Golpaja, ‘Libro di macchine’ (see Part III n. 21), 7v, where a drawing of a hydraulic device is said to be ‘a copy of an instrument sent by Leonardo da Vinci to Bernardo Rucellai’; the drawing resembles some studies in G93v-95r, c. 1510.
76. Bellincioni, Rime (Milan, 1493), 1v; Uzielli 1872, 99.
77. CA 1082r/391r-a. I give the paragraphs in the order indicated by corrections on the original (e.g. paragraph 9, about naval weapons, appears in the original after paragraph 4). The renumbering is obviously later than the text, but probably not much later as it is in the same hand.
78. Mangonel: ‘a military engine for casting stones’; caltrop: ‘an iron ball with four sharp prongs… used to impede cavalry’ (Shorter Oxford Dictionary).
79. On some drawings related to weaponry described in the prospectus, mostly mid-1480s, see Part IV n. 9. That they only existed on paper is not provable, of course. The light, portable bridge of paragraph 1 is realized in the wooden bridge ‘using neither iron nor rope’ which Leonardo constructed for Cesare Borgia’s troops in 1502 (Luca Pacioli, De viribus quantitatis, 2.85); and some machinery for draining trenches (paragraph 2) was designed, and probably used, for the abortive Arno deviation of 1503–4. But of actual weapons produced to his specifications there is no record.
80. Studies for the monument by Antonio del Pollaiuolo: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
PART FOUR: New Horizons, 1482–1490
1. CA 1113r/400r-b, referring to a journey from Milan to Florence in September 1513.
2. C 19v.
3. Bramly 1992, 198. On Ludovico Sforza, see Lopez 1982; Malaguzzi-Valeri 1913–23; C. Santoro, Gli Sforza (Milan, 1929).
4. CA 199v/73v-a, c. 1510. Other sketch-maps of the city are in RL 19115 and CA 184v/65v-b. Of early printed maps the fullest is Braun and Hogenberg’s (Civitatis orbis terrarum (1572), vol. 1, map 42), based on an engraving by Antonio Lafreri, 1560. There do not seem to be any printed maps before the sixteenth-century expansion. The only medieval gate still standing is the elegant triple-arched Porta Nuova (or Porta Orientale), dated 1171.
5. The Porta Romana reliefs are now in the Museo d’Arte Antica at the Castello Sforzesco, as is the relief of a woman making an obscene gesture (sometimes said to show the wife of Barbarossa) from the Porta Tosa, removed in the sixteenth century on the orders of St Carlo Borromeo.
6. Codex Magliabechiano II 4, 195; PC 2.31.
7. Ma I, note on inside cover.
8. Bramly 1992, 200.
9. Scattershot cannon: RL 12652. Armoured car (illustrated): BM 1860–6–16–99. See Kemp 1989, 138–9, 230–32.
10. Artillery-yard: RL 12647.
11. CA 611r/225r-b, R 1448. A painting in the Portinari family chapel in Sant’Egidio, described by Vasari, is now identified with The Passions of Christ, c. 1470, by the Flemish master Hans Memling (Galleria Sabauda, Turin). Its dramatic rendition of the Last Supper may have influenced Leonardo’s treatment of the subject: see R. Papa, ‘Giuda, disordine e la grazia’, in Pedretti 1999.
12. On Dei, see DBI; L. Courtney, The Trumpet of Truth (Monash, Australia, 1992); and his Cronica, ed. R. Barducci (Florence, 1984). ‘In principio era buio’: Pulci, Morgante maggiore (1482), canto 28, 42; P. Orvieto, Annali d’italianistica 1 (1983), 19–33.
13. See n. 50 below.
14. Landucci 1927, 33 and note.
15. On Bramante, see DBI; A. Bruschi, Bramante (London, 1977); Malaguzzi-Valeri, 1913–23, vol. 2: Bramante e Leonardo.
16. On Ambrogio and his family, see Shell 2000, 123–30.
17. Beltrami 1919, docs. 23–4. On the complex history of this painting, see Davies 1947; Sironi 1981; Marani 2003; Zöllner, Burlington Magazine 143 (2001), 35–7; Zöllner 2003, 223–4.
18. Clark 1988,90–91. One of the difficulties of this argument is that the painting was to fit a frame constructed in 1482 (Maino was paid for it on 7 August 1482). A study for the Christ-child (BM 253a) is on blue prepared paper of a type that Leonardo used in Florence, but other sheets of the same kind of paper (CA 1094r/ 394r-b; RL 12652r) have drawings probably done in the early years in Milan. See PC 2.312.
19. ASM, Autografidei pittori 102/34, 10; Glasser 1977, 345–6. A document apparently showing the payment of 730 lire to Leonardo and the de Predis on 28 December 1484 may give the date of completion of the Louvre painting (Shell and Sironi 2000), but Marani questions the reading of the date, which he thinks is 1489 (Marani 2003, 7).
20. For some of the links in this speculative chain, see Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 93–5; Marani 2001, 140–42; Gould 1975. On Ambrogio’s presence in Innsbruck, see Shell 1998a, 124; Malaguzzi-Valeri 1913–23, 3.7–8.
21. RL 12519. Cf. Clark and Pedretti 1968, 1.92; Clayton 2002, 55.
22. On the setting, see R. Papa, ‘Il misterio dell’ origine’, Art e dossier 159 (2000).
23. Embolden 1987, 125–32.
24. Triv 6v, (R 891) with diagram.
25. CA 184v/65v-b, R 1203, c. 1493
26. CA 950v/346v-a. ‘Spirits of wine’ = aqua vitae. Cf. B 3v: ‘Note how spirit collects in itself all the colours and scents of wild flowers.’
27. B 15v-16r (illustrated), 36r-39r, etc. The lavatory: 53r. A painting of the ‘ideal city’ in the studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino is attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini, whom Leonardo knew in Milan. In a later phase of urban planning (n. 25 above) Leonardo envisaged a scheme for dividing Milan into ten satellite towns, each with 5,000 dwellings. Cf. Fors 3 64V, which studies an area between the Porta Romana and the Porta Tosa, representing one of these tenths.
28. CA 1059v/381v-b, c. 1485.
29. Daily Telegraph, 17 March 2000 (preparation) and 27 June 2000 (jump); Sunday Times, 2 July 2000. The ‘coated linen’ (pannolino intasato, literally ‘blocked-up linen’) of Leonardo’s specification probably means starched.
30. Inventory nos. JBS 17r, v (both illustrated), 18r, v. One of the allegories (18r), featuring snakes, foxes and an eagle, is clearly political, though its exact message is obscure: see Kemp 1989, 156–7.
31. Triv 96r, 98r; G. Perro, Archivio storico Lombardo 8, Pt 4 (1881); R 676n.
32. RL 19097, c. 1493.
33. Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Zöllner 2003, no. 396.
34. Popham 1946, 58.
35. On the handwriting of MS B, see Marinoni’s introduction to the facsimile edition, 1990; Calvi 1925, 45; Pedretti 1995, 22.
36. According to notes by Gulielmo Libri, one of the lost pages of MS B (fol. 3) bore the date 1482. See PC 2.401. The fragmentary but unmistakable outline of the standing Leda on fol. 94r (now
BN 2037, fol. D) is mysterious: no studies of Leda are known before c. 1504. It was possibly a chance imprint from a later sheet.
37. B 39v.
38. B33r.
39. Kemp 1989, 236–9; M. Cianchi 1984, 45–55. These designs are similar to the ornithopter of CA 824v/302v-a, also c. 1487. The design on B 74v (illustrated) was the chief source for the full-size model constructed by James Wink (Tetra Associates for the Hayward Gallery, London, 1989). The model had a wing-span of over 35 feet and was about 10 feet long. Built from materials specified by, or available to, Leonardo – beech-wood, iron and brass, hemp rope, tarred marline, leather, tallow – it weighed in at 650 pounds, illustrating the primary problem of Leonardian aviation: a lack of sufficiently light materials to achieve the power-to-weight ratio necessary for flight.
40. B 89r.
41. Kemp 1989, 236. On the evolution of Leonardo’s flying-machines, see Giacomelli 1936.
42. B 88v.
43. B83v. Cf. Pedretti 1957, 125–9; Giacomelli 1936, 78ff.
44. ‘Maestro Lodovicho’ is not, given his title, Ludovico Sforza, but may be the Milanese engineer Giovan Lodovico de Raufi(Calvi 1925, 87).
45. Fors I2, 14 folios, 5.5 × 4 inches (13.5 × 10 cm), is the second of the two notebooks bound together as Forster Codex 1 (the first is later, c. 1505). The Forster codices were owned by John Forster, friend and biographer of Dickens.
46. Triv 2r. The Trivulzio Codex, 55 folios, 7.5 x 5 inches (19.5 x 13.5 cm), is midway in size between B and Fors 12. It was donated to the Castello Sforzesco in 1935.
47. Belt 1949. On Bisticci: Jardine 1996, 137, 188–94.
48. It might be an edition of Albertus Magnus’s work on minerals, e.g. Mineralium libri v (Rome, 1476). The ‘lapidario’ of the Madrid list is thought to be Speculum Lapidum (The Mirror of Stones) by Camillo Leonardi di Pesaro, published in 1502 with a dedication to Cesare Borgia; Leonardo may have known the author. This book is too late for the Trivulzian reference.
49. CA 559r/210r-a; notes on the verso reappear on A 52r.
50. CA 852r/311r-a; 265v/96v-b; R 1354. A similar feigned letter of c. 1500 is addressed to the ‘Diodario [i.e. probably Defterdar, or local governor] of Syria’ (CA 393v/145v-b, R 1336).
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