51. Anon., Il Manganello, Cvr; Pedretti 2001, 49–50.
52. I2 139r; Antonio Pucci, Reina d’Oriente (Bologna, 1862), 81. Overleaf (I2 139v) is a literary pun: ‘Delle taccole e stornelli’, which means both ‘jackdaws and starlings’ and ‘tricks and satirical poems’.
53. RL 12692r, v. See Marinoni 1954, 1960.
54. RL 12693–6, 12699; CA 207v, 76v-a; Fors 1 41r, 2 63r.
55. CA 1033r/370r-a. The prophecies are later, mostly c. 1497–1500; there are about 175 in all, the bulk of them concentrated on two folios of the Atlanticus (CA 1033/370a, 393/145a) and in I2 63–7.
56. All from CA 1033r/370r-a.
57. I2 63v, 65r, Fors 11 9v, CA 393r/145r-a.
58. The majority of the fables belong to the early 1490s. Those on CA 323/117b and 327/117b are related to the short essays called ‘Proemi’ (‘Prefaces’) which appear on the same sheets, and are datable to c. 1490. Those on CA 188/67b (‘The Ant and the Grain of Millet’, ‘The Spider in the Grapes’, ‘The Ass Who Fell Asleep’, ‘The Falcon and the Duck’, ‘The Spider and the Hornet’, ‘The Eagle and the Owl’, etc.) are on a sheet previously joined to CA 207/76a, which is dated 23 April 1490. A few appear in the pocketbook MS H, and are therefore from c. 1493–4.
59. CA 187r/67r-a, 188r/67r-b, 207r/76r-a.
60. CA 188v/67v-b (first two); CA 327r/119r-a (also found on a torn folio, CA 994v/358v-a, with the title ‘Risposta faceta’ – ‘A Witty Retort’); Triv iv.
61. Beltrami 1919, docs. 31–3.
62. B 27r; Richter 1939, plate C5.
63. CA 73or/27or-c, R 1347A. Cf. Antonio Averlino (known as Filarete): ‘I will show you that buildings are just like living men, and… they get sick and die, and often they can be healed through the offices of a good doctor’ (Trattato d’architettura, Bk 1, 15). The medical theories underlying the analogy are found in standard texts like Galen’s De constitutione artis medicae.
64. Leonardo’s model was returned to him in May 1490, so he could repair it, but he does not seem to have bothered: as late as 1494 (Beltrami 1919, doc. 54) the Duomo was expecting him to repay 12 lire he had received. Among others who tendered for the tiburio project were the ducal engineer Pietro da Gorgonzola, the Florentine architect Luca Fancelli, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. There is a review by Bramante of the short-listed models (‘Opinio supra domicilium seu templum magnum’), Archivio storico Lombardo 5 (1878), 547.
65. BN 2037 5v (illustrated), B 17v, 22r, 25v, 39v, 56v, etc.; Richter 1939, plates 89–93. A similar temple in CA 717r/265v-a, also c. 1487, is reminiscent of the apse of Florence cathedral.
66. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, Bk 9, ch. 6. On the ‘theta progression’ and the Renaissance theory of ‘incommensurate proportions’ to which it belongs, see PC 2.34. Bramante was ‘profoundly influenced by Leonardo’s vision, though his mastery of volume and interval avoids the rather cluttered effects of Leonardo’s unrelievedly dense designs’ (Kemp 1989, 206). His tempietto (‘little temple’) of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, c. 1502, is similar to the Leonardo drawings of MS B.
67. CA IIIIV/399v-b, c. 1490–93. Cf. Ma I IIV, c. 1497: ‘axles within axles, as at Chiaravalle’.
68. B 11v–12r. Pedretti adduces paleographic evidence that the drawings were done in or before the spring of 1489. The spread of MS B in which they occur contains writing of three distinct kinds; the latest addition is in handwriting very close to that of RL 19059, dated 2 April 1489. A contract to supply Leonardo with stone for the pavilion, dated 28 March 1490, is a later forgery (G. Calvi, RV 14, 344–5).
69. The lost folio (B 3): A. Houssaye, Histoire de Léonard de Vinci (Paris, 1869), 84. Plumbing notes: I 28V, 34r (‘for heating the water in the Duchess’s stove’). See Beltrami 1894, ch. 12.
70. Lubkin 1999, 122.
71. On Cecilia and her family, see DBI; Rzepińska 1990; F. Calvi, Famiglie notabili Milanesi (Milan, 1874), vol. 3.
72. P. Ghinzoni, ‘Lettera inedita di Bernardo Bellincioni’, Archivio storico Lombardo 16 (1889), 417f.
73. Sonnet, ‘Sopra il retracto de Madona Cicilia qual fece maestro Leonardo’, in Rime (Milan, 1493), C6v-C7r.
74. CU 13v, McM 33. The story may anyway be a fiction. Leonardo also claims that a painting can frighten a dog and make it bark, and that he has personal experience of this (CU 5v, McM 31), but in fact dogs cannot interpret painted surfaces as representations of reality. Another fiction, probably, is that Leonardo addressed Cecilia as ‘magnificent Cecilia, most beloved goddess’: the words appear on a much later sheet (CA 816r/297v-a, c. 1515) and are not in Leonardo’s hand.
75. H 12r. Another version, differently worded, appears on the same page, headed ‘Temperance reins in all vices’.
76. Bellincioni, Rime, sonnet 128; C. Pedretti, ‘La Dama con l’Ermellino come allegoria politica’, in S. Ghilardo and F. Barcia, eds., Studi politici in onore di Luigi Firpo (Milan, 1990), 164ff. Leonardo’s tiny circular drawing (diameter 9 cm) showing a grim-faced hunter about to kill a stoat (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Zöllner 2003, no. 401) is doubtless related to the ermine folklore, and may be specifically related to Ludovico’s investiture. The ermine was also the emblem of Anne de Bretagne, wife of Charles VIII, and of the dukes of Urbino; Carpaccio’s knight (Coll. Thyssen, Lugarno) is often identified as Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino.
77. Aristotele Fioravanti to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, 1476, in M. Gualandi, Aristotele Fioravanti, meccanico ed ingegnere (Bologna, 1870), 10.
78. The letters (Beltrami 1919, doc. 51) were first published by A. Luzio, Archivio storico dell’arte 1 (1888), 45,181.
79. Amoretti 1804, 155–8; cf. Rzepińska 1990, on which my account of the painting’s later history is based.
80. Pietro Novellara to Isabella d’Este, 3 April 1501 (see Part VI n. 20). On Leonardo’s Milanese studio, see Marani 1998, Shell 1995.
81. BN 2038 25r (formerly MS A).
82. On Boltraffio see DBI; Fiorio 1998; M. Davies, The Earlier Italian Schools, National Gallery catalogue (London, 1961). On Marco d’Oggiono, see GDA; Shell 1998b; D. Sedoni, Marco d’Oggiono (Rome, 1989).
83. G. Casio, Cronica (Bologna, 1525), in Pedretti 1998a, 27. In this epitaph on Boltraffio (d. 1516) Casio praises him as a portraitist who ‘with stylus and brush made every man more beautiful than Nature made him’.
84. C 15v.
85. Interestingly, the prototypes are earlier Florentine works. Francesco’s Sebastian is close to Leonardo’s drawing of the Baptist (RL 12572), which is dated by its connection with Credi’s Pistoia altarpiece to the mid-1470s; and the pose of Francesco’s Baptist echoes Leonardo’s St Jerome.
86. J. Shell and G. Sironi, ‘Some documents for Francesco Galli “dictus Neapolus”’, RV 23 (1989), 155–66.
87. H 106v.
88. CA 886r/315v-a (R 1344). Cf. CA 914r/335v-a (R 1345) with similar fragments of the same date, referring to ‘two maestri continuously in my pay for two years’.
89. Galeazzo (enrolled March 1494): H 41r. The others: CA 189r/68r-a, 713r/ 264r-b, both c. 1497, possibly recording an expanded personnel for painting the Last Supper.
90. Lomazzo 1973, 87.
91. On the Musician (oil and tempera, 45 × 32 cm), see Ottino della Chiesa 1967, no. 25; Marani 2000a, 160–66.
92. RL 19115r. On Gaffurio, see DBI; C. Sartori, ‘Franchino Gaffurio’, Storia di Milano (Milan, 1961), 9.740–48.
93. Marani 2000a, 165. Other contenders are Josquin des Prez, a French singer who performed often in Milan cathedral, and lutenist Francesco da Milano.
94. Leonardo’s portrait of Lucrezia was celebrated by an anonymous court poet in three Latin epigrams (CA 456v/167v-c, R 1560). The first says, ‘Vincius might have shown her soul, as he has portrayed everything else. He did not, and this makes the image truer still, for the truth is that her soul belongs to her lover Maurus [i.e. Il Moro].’ The Belle Ferronnière (oil on wood, 62 × 44 cm) may be the portrait of a ‘lady of Lombardy’ seen by Antonio de Beatis at Blois in 15
17 (see p. 492 above), and is certainly the ‘lady of Mantua by Leonardo’ in a 1642 catalogue of the French royal collection. It has recently been argued that the Ferronnière and the portrait of Cecilia were painted on panels from the same walnut-tree; if so, the former would probably be c. 1488–90, and therefore unlikely to show Lucrezia: see B. Fabjan and P. Marani, eds., La Dama con l’ermellino (exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1998). However, earlier technical analysis by the Louvre identified the panel as oak (Ottino della Chiesa 1967, no. 28).
95. Clark’s argument that the Litta Madonna was the ‘almost finished’ Madonna in profile listed by Leonardo in c. 1482 (see Part III n. 4) is challenged by David A. Brown. Brown identifies three preparatory drawings for the painting as the work of Milanese pupils. One showing the Madonna’s face in full profile (Metropolitan Museum, New York) is clearly superseded by Leonardo’s own study in the Louvre (illustrated), which shows her in the slightly turned profile of the finished painting. By this argument the Louvre study was done in Milan and not, as in Clark’s hypothesis, in Florence. Brown sees the painting as part of a Lombard tradition of breast-feeding Madonnas (examples by Foppa and Bergognone). See Brown 1990. Berenson has some tart comments about the sickly tendencies of the Leonardeschi: North Italian Painting of the Renaissance (London, 1907), 114.
96. The young man is sometimes identified as Francesco Archinto; the elaborate monogram signature reads ‘APMF’ – i.e. ‘Ambrosius Predis Mediolanus fecit.’
97. R. Wittkower, ‘Inigo Jones: Puritanissimo fiero’, Burlington Magazine 90 (1948), 50–51. Jones’s is one of the earliest extant references to Leonardo in England. The earliest, I believe, is in Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, though this is no more than a name-check (‘Leonard’) in a list of Italian painters. The original (canto 33, verse 2) first appeared in the 1532 edition of Orlando furioso. The most extensive early references to Leonardo in English are in the translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato by Richard Haydocke, ‘student in physic’ at Oxford, published in 1598.
98. J. Shell and G. Sironi, ‘Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco d’Oggiono: La resurrezione di Cristo’, RV 23 (1989), 119–54.
99. The fee for the Virgin of the Rocks was 800 lire, which at current exchange rates was worth about 200 ducats.
100. Colluccio Salutati, Tractatus de nobilitate legum et medicinae (c. 1399), in White 2000, 50. Hindered in anatomy: CA 671r/247v-b.
101. RL 19021v.
102. On the Battle, engraved by Antonio del Pollaiuolo and widely circulated as a template for depicting muscles, see Mayor 1984, 50.
103. RL 19059v, 19037v, the latter a prospectus headed ‘The order of the book’. Both sheets have additions written nearly twenty years later, when Leonardo returned to anatomy with renewed enthusiasm: most of the anatomical folios at Windsor date from the later period, c. 1507–15. Another early sheet is the full-length figure showing the arterial system (RL 12597r), which relates to the intention in the prospectus to ‘describe how bodies are composed of veins’. The ‘gidone’ of the Atlanticus book-list (c. 1492) may be the surgeon’s manual Cyrurgia by Guido da Cauliaco, a useful book for the trainee anatomist.
104. RL 19057r (illustrated), 19058r-v, 19059r. A slightly later study (RL 12603) records the layers of the skull (‘hair, scalp, lacterous flesh, pericranium, cranium, pia mater, dura mater, brain’) and draws a section of an onion in comparison.
105. RL 12603. The basic theory, which Leonardo modifies, is found in Aristotle’s De anima.
106. RL 12613v.
107. Many at Windsor (RL 12601, 12606–7, 19132, 19134–40 etc.), conveniently gathered and elegantly analysed in Clayton 2002; see also Biblioteca Reale, Turin, inv. no. 15574DC, and Accademia, Venice, inv. no. 236r, v (Zöllner 2003, 226, 229–30).
108. Accademia, Venice, inv. no. 228.
109. Villata 1999, no. 44.
110. For Lorenzo’s reply, dated 8 August 1489, see L. Fusco and G. Corti, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici on the Sforza monument’, ALV 10 (1997), 35.
111. C 15v. Payment from Stanga: B 4r.
112. RL 12318r, c. 1479; it is interesting to compare the drawing style with the more robust and detailed proportional analysis on blue paper (RL 12319r) for the Sforza monument.
113. RL 12358; Clark and Pedretti 1968, 1.41.
114. RL 12357. The prostrate foe also features in Pollaiuolo’s study for the monument in Munich.
115. CA 399r/147r-b. The trotting horse was later excised from the sheet and is now RL 12345.
116. RL 12319 (R 716), ‘il ginetto grosso di Messer Galeazzo’; RL 12294 (R 717), ‘Siciliano [“The Sicilian”] di Messer Galeazzo’.
117. Pietro Aretino to Vasari, 7 June 1536, in Lettere (Venice, 1538), 101v; PC 2.11.
118. Noyes 1908, 254.
119. Fors 3 49v, R 1512. The ground-plan among the rebuses (RL 12692) is hard to see in reproduction, as only part of the metalpoint has been inked in; it is repeated, in the same scale, in CA 217r-a.
120. Baldassare Taccone, Coronazione e sposalitio de la serenissima regina Maria Bianca (Milan, 1493), 99.
121. Matteo Bandello, Novelle (Lucca, 1554), 1.58, in Opere, ed. F. Flora (Milan, 1996), 1.646–7.
122. CA 1006v/361v-b; PC 2.221.
123. Girolamo Cardano (Jerome Cardan), De subtilitate libri xxi (Basle, 1611), 816.
124. Leic 9v, R 989.
125. H3 137V, c. 1493–4.
126. CA 207r/76r-a, R 1143; CU 20v, McM 51 (part of the paragone, or comparison, between painting and other arts.)
PART FIVE: At Court, 1490–1499
1. On the festivities, see Malaguzzi-Valeri 1913–23, 1.530; E. Solmi, Archivio storico Lombardo 31 (1904); Lopez 1982, 58–65. The couple had been married by proxy in 1488, but Isabella’s arrival in Lombardy was overshadowed by a quarrel between the Moor’s secretary Stefano da Cremona and the King of Naples’s secretary Giovanni Pontano (see the splenetic sonnet by Bellincioni, ‘Contra il Pontano’) and by the death of her mother. Leonardo may have been involved in entertainments at the welcoming banquet at Tortona in January 1489, which featured a series of mythological interludes: that of Orpheus playing the lyre, surrounded by a ‘troupe of pretty boys’ (stuolo di amorini), sounds like his work, and may be a first outing for Atalante Migliorotti’s performance in the role a year later, for Isabella d’Este. Another entertainment was a life-size automaton of a soldier on horseback set up in the piazza. The rider had a black face and a white tunic, representing the Moor in the ermine livery bestowed on him by Isabella’s grandfather the King of Naples. This ‘automaton’ – essentially a pantomine horse with a man inside working the mechanism – sounds oddly like an early version of the Sforza Horse. It is hard to think of anyone in Milan more likely to have created this than Leonardo, but there seems to be no evidence that he did.
2. Bellincioni, Rime, 149V; Beltrami 1919, doc. 41.
3. Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Cod. Ital. 521a; Villata 1999, no. 49.
4. B 4r, Ar 227r.
5. Castiglione 1967, 66.
6. C 15v.
7. Tristano Calco, Nuptiae Mediolanensium et Estensium principum (Milan, 1634), 94–5; G. Calvi, Archivio storico Lombardo 43 (1916), 479ff; Vecce 1998, 132–4. The imagery of the uomo selvatico is associated with native Americans in Amerigo di Vespucci’s De novo mondo (Florence, 1505). From selvatico (literally ‘forest-dwelling’) derives ‘savage’ (the Elizabethan ‘salvage’ is transitional; the word is used of Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest). A later patron of Leonardo, Charles d’Amboise, had ‘an impresa showing a wild man with a greenwood club in hand’, with the motto ‘Mitem animum agresti sub tegmine servo’ – ‘Beneath my rough exterior I have a gentle soul’ (Clark and Pedretti 1968, 1.116).
8. CU 5r, 6v, McM 35, 24. Cf. RL 12371, a devil with horns and hanging goitres (c. 1508).
9. RL 12585r; Winternitz 1974, 129. Popham (1946, 60) notes the similarity, probably coincidental, with Dürer’s drawing of a man on horseback playing bagpipes (V
& A, London).
10. RL 12367.
11. RL 12492. For a range of these grotesques see Clayton 2002, 73–99; cf. Clark and Pedretti 1968, vol. 1, app. B; Gombrich 1954. On Hollar’s versions see R. Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar (Cambridge, 1982), in which the ‘dame’ (christened the ‘Queen of Tunis’ by Hollar) is no. 1603.
12. RL 12495. Two of the figures appear in Massys’s Martyrdom of St John the Evangelist (Koninklijk, Antwerp), c. 1508–11, and three of them in the Grotesque Betrothal (São Paolo), discussed in the next paragraph.
13. Richter 1939, 2.260. A fragmentary and partly illegible text on the verso of the drawing (R 1355, further deciphered in PC 2.309) may conceivably have clues to its meaning to Leonardo: ‘If there is any man who is trustworthy and kind he will be treated badly by other men, just as I am… I have known this man well, against my will: he is a receptacle of villainy, and a warning to us of rank ingratitude mixed with every kind of vice.’ The press of malevolent faces round the old man might relate to Leonardo being ‘treated badly by other men’, but the text has much else with no discernible relevance to the drawing.
14. Clayton 2002, 96–9.
15. CA 877v/319v-b, R 1534.
16. Lomazzo, 1584, 106–7; PC 2.259. Giraldi: see Introduction n. 7.
17. A curiosity of Paris MS C is that the leather binding (which dates from 1603) was made for a much larger volume. Pedretti shows that the missing portion was another treatise on light and shade, used by Melzi when compiling the Codex Urbinas, and designated ‘Libro W’. This seems to have been Leonardo’s later reworking (c. 1508) of material in MS C. It was probably removed from the binding in or before 1609, when the volume entered the Biblioteca Ambrosiana; early catalogues describe it as it is today. In 1866 it was reported that a certain Dr Ortori had discovered an unknown Leonardo manuscript of 112 pages ‘treating of phenomena of light as they relate to painting’ (Gazzetta di Milano, 30 March 1866). This sounds remarkably like ‘Libro W’, but nothing further was heard of it, nor of a rumour in the late 1950s that a similar document had been seen in one of the libraries of the Princes Borromeo in Milan. See Pedretti 1965, 147–8; Pedretti and Cianchi 1995, 24–5.
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