Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  18. CA 676r/250r-a, R III. Similarities of paper-type and stitch indentations suggest that this sheet was also once bound together with MS C.

  19. BN 2038 (ex MS A), 14v, 29r.

  20. Triv 11v, R 177. The medieval scholiast Roger Bacon, whose work interested Leonardo (Ar 71V, says that ‘spiritual’ in Aristotle ‘is not taken from the spirit, nor is the word used in its proper sense… for it is taken in the sense of imperceptible’ (Optical Science, ch. 4, in PC 1.167).

  21. CU 208v, 196r, McM 844, 840.

  22. BN 2038 14V. Cf. CU 41V, McM 132: ‘shadows appear smoky, that is indeterminate’; and RL 19076r: shadows with ‘smoky edges’.

  23. CU 49r-v, McM 218.

  24. Thirty-three of the purloined folios, purchased by Lord Ashburnham and returned by him to Paris, now comprise BN 2038.

  25. BN 2038 20V, R 520.

  26. BN 2038 22V, R 508.

  27. CU 33v–34r, McM 93. Explored by C. Pedretti in ‘Le macchie di Leonardo’ (Lettura Vinciana 54, 17 April 2004: to be published in 2005).

  28. Pacioli 1509, 1r; Lomazzo 1584, 158; PC 1.76–82.

  29.Trattato di architettura civile e militare (Biblioteca Laurenziana, Codice Ashburnham 361): the MS is c. 1484 or earlier, but Leonardo’s marginal notes and doodles probably date from c. 1504 (Vezzosi 1997, 96–7). On Francesco’s influence on Leonardo’s technical drawings, see Zwijnenberg 1999.

  30. Beltrami 1919, docs. 48–50. According to Richter, a ground-plan captioned ‘sagrestia’ (B 52r) is a design for the sacristies of Pavia cathedral, which were built in 1492. See Richter 1970, 2.41, 80.

  31. B 66r.

  32. B 58r, R 1023 (chimneys), R 1506 (Witelo); CA 609r/225r-a. A Witelo MS ‘on optics’ mentioned by Pacioli, and a ‘prospettiva di Vitelleone’ mentioned by Lomazzo, may be the same document (PC 2.187).

  33. C 15v.

  34. On Salai see DBI, s.v. Caprotti; Shell and Sironi 1992. A rental agreement between Leonardo and Salai’s father (July 1501, Villata 1999, no. 153) describes the latter as ‘Pietro di Messer Giovanni da Oppreno’, again suggesting the grandfather’s status.

  35. First mention of ‘Salai’: H2 16v. The name may also contain a studio pun: salare (to salt or season) had a slang meaning, ‘to shirk’; salai is therefore an existent word meaning ‘I bunked off’, and might be applied to a lazy young apprentice. A document of 1510 (Shell and Sironi 1992, doc. 26) refers to ‘Giovanni Giacomo known as Salibeni’, probably a clerk’s garbling. The non-existent ‘Andrea Salaino’ is one of the supporting figures on the nineteeenth-century statue of Leonardo in the Piazza della Scala in Milan.

  36. RL 12276v, 12432r.

  37. Louvre, Dépt des Arts Graphiques 2251; Bambach 2003, fig. 203. Two profiles of Salai are found on anatomical folios: RL 19093r and Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Pedretti 2001, 63).

  38. ‘Salaino expenses’: L 94r. Rose-coloured stockings: Ar 229V. Sister’s dowry: F, inside cover.

  39. Salai is first named in a document relating to the property on 6 March 1510 (Shell and Simon 1992, doc. 26). He leased it to one Antonio Meda in September 1513 (ibid., doc. 27) – perhaps on Leonardo’s behalf, though this is not stated in any of the documents.

  40. CA 663v/234v-a, c. 1508.

  41. A brief memorandum in Leic 26v – ‘parla co genovese del mare’ (‘talk of the sea with the man from Genoa’) – has been improbably canvassed as an allusion to Columbus, who was indeed born in Genoa but who was probably dead (d. 1506) when the note was written. Leonardo may well have known the Florentine seafarer Amerigo di Vespucci, after whom ‘America’ was named. Vasari claimed to own a charcoal sketch by Leonardo showing Amerigo as ‘a very handsome old man’; if so, it would have been drawn in or before 1505 (after which Vespucci was continuously in Spain till his death in 1512), and would show him only in his early fifties. It is not impossible that it was an early work showing Vespucci’s grandfather, also Amerigo (d. 1471). The ‘Vespuccio’ mentioned in a list of c. 1503 (Ar 132v, R 1452) is probably Machiavelli’s secretary Agostino di Vespucci.

  42. Mountain range: RL 12410, 12413–14, compared to photographs of the Grigne in Conato 1986, 119–204. Storm over a town: RL 12409. Depiction of rains: CU 25r, McM 55.

  43. Written both sides of CA 573b/214e (R 1031–2).

  44. Photographs in Conato 1986, 201.

  45. Ibid., 206.

  46. Leic 11v, R 1029.

  47. Head of a bear: private collection (formerly Colville Collection). Bear walking: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975. 1.369 (Zöllner 2003, nos. 158–9). The latter has a faint underdrawing of a pregnant woman.

  48. RL 12372–5, Clark and Pedretti 1968, 1.52.

  49. Leic 4r; A. Recalcati, ‘Le Prealpi Lombarde ritratte da Leonardo’ (ALV 10, 1997, 125–31). Monte Bo (height 8,385 feet), south-west of Monte Rosa, would fit linguistically, but does not fit Leonardo’s description topographically.

  50. Paracelsus (i.e. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), Sieben defensiones, ch. 4, in Opera, ed. Johann Huser (Strasbourg, 1603), 1.159.

  51. Discovery of Madrid MSS: New York Times, 14, 15, 17 (etc.) February 1967; Reti 1968. The provenance of the codices can be broadly tracked. They were probably among the Leonardo manuscripts brought to Spain by Pompeo Leoni, and inherited in 1608 by his nephew Polidoro Calchi; and they were probably the ‘two books drawn and written by the hand of the great Leonardo da Vinci, of great learning and curiosity’ seen by Vincencio Carducho in the library of Juan de Espina in the early 1620s. These Espina ‘would at no price sell to the Prince of Wales [the future Charles I]… considering himself the only worthy owner until our Lord the King should inherit them at his death’ (Reti 1968, pt 1, 10). Espina kept his promise, despite the efforts of Lord Arundel to ‘change his foolish humour’, and on his death in 1642 he left his collection to King Philip IV; the codices were probably part of this bequest. They were transferred from the Escorial to the Biblioteca Nacional sometime before 1800, when they were listed in an inventory prepared by the librarian, Antonio Gonzalez; this was later noticed by Tammaro de Marinis, but he found that the shelf-marks given them in the inventory led to other books and eventually gave up the search (RV 2 (1906), 89ff.).

  52. Ma II, 157v, 151v.

  53. On Renaissance ‘lost-wax’ casting techniques: Cole 1983, 124–5. On Leonardo’s modifications of the technique: CA 976r/352r-c, PC 2.12; Kemp 1981, 205–7.

  54. RL 12346.

  55. RL 12349 This sheet can be dated to c. 1492; it contains a brief text about the inconveniences of studying what does not interest you, which is repeated almost verbatim in BN 2038 34r (formerly MS A), dated 10 July 1492. The pulleys and cog-wheels on the Windsor sheet are comparable to those on A 62r, which also has two horses’ heads squared for proportion.

  56. Ma II 140r (illustrated).

  57. Vasari 1878–85, 4.276; Vecce 1998, 138–9. Sangallo’s design for a palazzo for Il Moro is in the Vatican, Codex Barberiniano Latino 4424, 15v.

  58. The height of 12 braccia (Ma II 151v) is confirmed by Luca Pacioli (Divina proportione, preface); see R. Cianchi, RV 20 (1964), 277–97, for other contemporary statistics and estimates. In 1977 an American pilot and art-collector, Charles Dent, conceived the idea of recreating the Horse from Leonardo’s notes and drawings: the end product (23 feet high, 13 tons), sculpted by Nina Akumu, was unveiled at San Siro racecourse, Milan, in 1999 (Neil Ascherson, Observer, 25 July 1999). A smaller replica of it stands in the main piazza of Vinci. The cost of the sculpture was about $6 million.

  59. Taccone: see Part IV n. 120. Lancino Curzio, Epigrammaton et sylvarum libri (Milan, 1521), 1.7r, 49r. The Horse is often said to have been exhibited in the piazza in front of the castle, but Beatrice Sforza, writing to her sister Isabella d’Este, 29 December 1493, speaks of the equestrian ‘effigy’ of Francesco Sforza being set up under a triumphal arch in the cathedral (Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Vigevano E49/2; Vecce 1998, 145).

  60. Ma II 151v.

  61. The treatise on ‘mechanical e
lements’ is referred to in a note of 1502 about efficient wheel-sizes on a cart, ‘as I showed in the first of the 5th [chapter] of the Elements’ (L 72r), and in later sheets: RL 19009r, c. 1510, and CA 10r/2r-a, c. 1515. The ‘book on physics’ is a lost work contemporary with Fors 22, c. 1495-7, which also covers physics (or ‘de ponderibus’ – ‘the science of weights’), gravity, percussion, etc. See Pedretti 1995, 35.

  62. Ma I 12v.

  63. Ma I 100v; Reti 1968, pt 1, 16–17: the formula given by Leonardo is ‘a hard tin-copper compound (SnCu3) embedded in a softer tin-copper alloy’.

  64. Ma I 4r, 16r, Fors 22, 65r, v; Rosheim 2001.

  65. CA 812r/296v-a. Repubblica, 24 April 2004: the reconstruction consisted of an exhibition model (170 x 150 cm), a working model (50 x 60 cm) and interactive digital designs (http://www.imss.fi.it). On Verrocchio’s clock, see Vasari 1987, 1.240: the putto’s ‘arms are raised to sound the hours with a hammer held in his hands’, which ‘was considered very attractive and novel at the time’.

  66. Rosheim 2001, 23.

  67. Lomazzo 1973, 1.299, 2.96.

  68. Arrival of Caterina: Fors 3 88r. Payments to her (two of 10 soldi each), 29 January 1494: H3 64v. Funeral expenses: Fors 2 64v.

  69. Freud 2001, 75–6. Cf. Eissler 1962, app. C; Fumagalli 1952, 56. A list of names on Fors 3 88v (i.e. overleaf from the note of Caterina’s arrival) reads, ‘Antonio, Bartolomeo, Lucia, Piero, Lionardo’, which Vecce interprets as referring to Leonardo’s grandparents Antonio and Lucia and his father Piero: a brusque family-tree, emotionally connected to the recent arrival of his mother (Vecce 1998, 142). But Bartolomeo cannot be Leonardo’s half-brother, as Vecce suggests: he was not born till 1497. A fragmentary note (CA 195r/71r-a, PC 2.310), ‘essapimi dire sella chaterina vuole fare’ (‘and let me know if La Caterina wants to do it’), probably refers to his mother, but this is much earlier, c. 1480.

  70. Fors 3 14r, 17V, 20V, 43V, 44V, 47V.

  71. H 16v, 33v.

  72. H 64v, 65V, 41r, 38r, 109r, 124V. A visit to Cremona (H 62v) may also have been made at this time: see Part VII n. 92.

  73. H 4or. On the political background of these emblems, see Solmi 1912, Reti 1959. The sketched head of a young black boy (H 103V) is probably an allusion to the Moor; there are descriptions (PC 2.214) of an allegorical painting at the Castello Sforzesco showing a black servant (Ludovico) brushing the dress of a lady (Italy).

  74. H 130V.

  75. The caption (H 288v) is separate from the drawing (Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, 656; Popham 1946, no. 109b), but obviously refers to it.

  76. I1138v; cf. related drawing in RL 12497. Leonardo introduces Poverty with the word ‘ancora’ in the narrative sense of ‘then’ (‘Then the frightening figure of Poverty comes running’ etc.), which suggests he is thinking of a dramatic representation rather than a pictorial image.

  77. CA866r/315v-a. On Bascapé: PC 2.296. Bellincioni addressed a fulsome sonnet to him asking him to seek the Moor’s permission to publish his poems (R 1344n).

  78. H 31v.

  79. H 105r.

  80. Noyes 1908, 173–5.

  81. Vecce 1998,149–51; M. Sanudo, La spedizione di Carlo VIII (Venice, 1873), 118–19.

  82. CA 914r/335v-a.

  83. Bandello: see Part IV n. 121.

  84. In a letter to Prior Vincenzo Bandello, 4 December 1497 (Archivio storico Lombardo 1 (1874), 33–4), Ludovico lists what he has commissioned and paid for at the Grazie (tribune, sacristy, dormitories, etc.). The ‘paintings’ he mentions probably refer exclusively to Leonardo’s work: Montorfano’s fresco was commissioned by the prior himself. As well as the Last Supper, Leonardo painted two lost works in the Grazie: a Redentore (Christ the Redeemer), above the door between the monastery and the church; and an Assunta (Virgin of the Assumption) in the lunette over the main entrance of the church, destroyed when the door was enlarged in 1603. The former may be related to the Head of Christ in the Brera, Milan, which is possibly a Leonardo with later repainting. Small oil portraits of Ludovico, Beatrice and their children in the corners of Montorfano’s fresco, now almost indecipherable, are also by Leonardo.

  85. RL 12542. A geometrical note and drawing on the lower part of the sheet may be related to Luca Pacioli’s Summa arithmetica (Venice, 1494), a copy of which Leonardo owned. If so, the publication of the latter (10 November 1494) gives an approximate terminus a quo for the compositional study.

  86. Accademia, Venice, no. 254; Popham 1946, no. 162. The retouching has distorted Leonardo’s intentions, but the drawing and the handwriting are both his.

  87. Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins 2022 (Zöllner 2003, no. 130).

  88. Judas: RL 12547r (illustrated). Peter: Albertina, Vienna, inv. no. 17614. St James: RL 12552r (illustrated). St Philip: RL 12551r. Hands: RL 12543r. Sleeve: RL 12546r.

  89. Fors 216r, Fors 3 1v; Fors 21 3r, v. A ‘Cristoforo Castiglione’ appears in a Milanese document of 1486 (Calvi 1925, 59); he may be connected to the author Baldassare Castiglione, who was in Milan in the 1490s. Richter translates ‘Giovan conte’ as ‘Count Giovanni’, but the way Leonardo writes it, and the fact that the man is ‘with’ (i.e. in the service of) the Cardinal, makes me think Conte is a name rather than a rank. Luigi of Aragon’s comment: Beatis 1979, 182.

  90. Fors 2 1v-2r; Clark 1988, 152.

  91. On the profound originality of Leonardo’s conception of the Last Supper, see Kemp 1981, 189ff.; Laurenza 1999; Steinberg 1973, 2002. Among earlier critics see Guiseppe Bossi’s monograph, Il Cenacolo (Milan, 1810), and Goethe’s ‘Abend-mahl von Leonardo da Vinci’, in Kunst und Altertum (1818). Max Marmor (ALV 5 (1992), 114–16) gives a translation of Jacob Burckhardt’s first essay on the painting, from Der Wanderer in der Schweiz 5(‘Bilder aus Italien’), 1839.

  92. Marani 2000a, 13–14.

  93. Pacioli 1509, preface. The ‘dramatic moment’ here described is the subject of Steinberg’s searching analyses. He advances the ‘sacramental’ interpretation: that the painting contains a range of images referring to the Eucharist, thus implying a narrative within the composition from Christ’s announcement to the taking of the first communion. The hands of Thaddeus (second from right), for instance, can be read as one hand about to slap against the other, as if to say ‘What did I tell you?’ (broadly Goethe’s interpretation), but also as a cupping of the hands as if to take the Eucharistic bread.

  94. For Giraldi, see Introduction n. 7.

  95. Technical data in Barcelon and Marani 2001, 408ff., on which this paragraph is based.

  96. CA 189r/68r-a (written from right to left), CA 713r/264r-b. The former is echoed in I 53v, ‘benedetto 17 October’, which is doubtless contemporary with the shopping-list dated 17 October 1497 a few pages earlier (I 49v). However, this may mark the end of Benedetto’s first year.

  97. Barcelon and Marani 2001, 413–14.

  98. Beltrami 1919, doc. 70; PC 2.296.

  99. CA 866r/315v-a, R 1344.

  100. G. Bugatti, Historia universale (Venice, 1570) 6.689.

  101. Vecce 1998, 165.

  102. Vasari 1987, 1.215.

  103. Work on the window: Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 96; the entry survives in an eighteenth-century transcription. Ludovico to Stanga: ASM Registro Ducale, s.n, carta 16.

  104. Beatis 1979, 182; Vasari 1878–85, 5.424; Barcelon and Marani 2001, 21–35.

  105. Clark 1988, 147. Kemp notes that recovered details from recent restorations ‘confirm Clark’s intuition that the expression of the heads had been deadened by earlier restorations’ (ibid., Introduction, 31). There were a dozen copies done within Leonardo’s lifetime: the earliest were oil paintings by Bramantino (1503) and Marco d’Oggiono (1506), both lost, though a later copy by Marco (c. 1520) is at the Brera, Milan. Two fresco copies by Antonio da Gessate (c. 1506) and Andrea Solario (before 1514) were destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943. Giampietrino’s superb copy, c. 1515–20, formerly in the Certosa, Pavia, now in the Royal Academy collection, is held at Magdalen College, Oxford.

/>   106. Barcelon and Marani 2001, 328.

  107. Purchase of the Summa: CA 228r/104r-a. On the influence of Pacioli: Marinoni 1982.

  108. Pacioli 1509, 28v. The presentation MSS of 1498 are in Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS A170 sup.) and Geneva (Bib. Publique et Universitaire, MS Langues Etrangères 210); an illustration from the Ambrosiana codex is in Vezzosi 1997, 81.

  109. RL 19084r: ‘He who does not know the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion.’ Cf. G 96v.

  110. CA 331r/120r-d. The geometry of Pacioli’s Summa is squarely based on Euclid’s Elements, though it also borrows from Boethius, Sacrobosco, Leonardo Fibonacci (Leonardo da Pisa) and his old master Piero della Francesca. The first European edition of the Elements, translated from Arabic into Latin, had appeared as recently as 1482.

  111. Six exemplars are in the Biblioteca Ambrosia, inv. nos. 09595, 09596A–E. See Alberici 1984, 21–2; C. Bambach, ALV4 (1991), 72–98. A Dürer copy, based on 09596D, is in Pedretti 1992, 25. In a letter from Venice (13 October 1506) Dürer spoke of his studies in the ‘art of secret perspective’, and of his intention to visit someone in Bologna who would instruct him in it: this may be Pacioli, whose influence is discernible in Dürer’s engraving Melancholia I.

  112. G. Borsieri, Supplimento della nobilità (Milan, 1619), 57–8; PC 2.395.

  113. CA 611r/225r-b (cf. Part I n. 40). Lomazzo 1584, 430.

  114. Noyes 1908, 161–3. His views on Bramante are contested in sonnets by Bellincioni. A manuscript copy of Visconti’s poem ‘Paulo e Daria’ (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin) has pro-Ludovico miniatures somewhat parallel to Leonardo’s political emblems of c. 1493–4. Visconti is probably the ‘Bissconte’ whose son was killed by the French in 1500, as recorded by Leonardo (L, inside cover).

  115. Vecce 1998, 173.

  116. CA 243v/89v-b, 1037v/372v-a, PC 2.236.

  117. CA 609r/225r-a, Fors 3 37v, Fors 2143v. The ‘Messer Fazio’ in the third item is Fazio Cardano, father of the mathematician Girolamo Cardano (or Jerome Cardan).