Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  118. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, R 705A; Malaguzzi-Valeri 1913-23, 1.534; RV 11 (1920), 226f.

  119. Villata 1999, no. 111. A useful edition of this rare pamphlet is at http:// www.liberliber.it, with an introduction by Rosanna Scippacercola. On the candidates for authorship, see D. Brown, ‘The Apollo Belvedere at the garden of Guiliano della Rovere’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986), 235–7; E. Guidoni, Ricerche su Giorgione e sulla pittura del Rinascimento (Rome, 1998). The latter dates the poem to 1497 and attributes it to Bramantino. The dedication to Leonardo is in the form of two sonneti caudati (sonnets with a ‘tail’) as found frequently in the Burchiellesci.

  120. On the case for Ambrogio’s authorship, see Vecce 1998, 163, 401. On a comparable acronymic signature by him, see Part IV n. 96.

  121. P. Marani, La pittura a Milano al tempo di Bramante (Milan, 1995).

  122. Gottardo Panigarola, Ludovico’s chancellor from 1481, might be thought a likely commissioner of the frescos, but the Panigarola family did not own the house till 1548 (G. Mulazzani, Bramante pittore, Milan, 1978, 85–6).

  123. Ficino, Divini Platonis omnia opera (Basle 1561), 637; Pedretti 1977, n.12.

  124. Vincenzo de’ Pagave, ‘Dialogo fra un forestiere ed un pittore’ (Milan, Sforza Castle MS C.VI.28), xv–xvi; Pedretti 1977, 123, 129.

  125. Bramante had a fondness for painting philosophers: his earliest known work, a fresco cycle in the Palazzo del Podestà in Bergamo (c. 1478), also features ‘seated figures of philosophers’ (GDA). Leonardo’s estimate for decoration work at Vigevano, c. 1494, included ’24 philosophers’ (H 124v).

  126. CU 127r-v, McM 420. The face of Heraclitus seems to be echoed in a portrait drawing (BM 1895–9–15–481) showing a curly-haired man screwing up his eyes: it is attributed to the Leonardesco artist Giovanni Agostino da Lodi (d. c. 1502). The wrinkling round the eyes and the curling of the hair are similar to the Bramante portrait; both heads are slightly turned from full face, but in opposite directions.

  127. Beltrami 1919, doc. 90.

  128. Beltrami 1920; cf. G. Biscaro, Archivio storico Lombardo 36 (1909).

  129. Shell and Sironi 1992, doc. 27. At some point, probably as he prepared to leave Milan in 1499, Leonardo leased the property to Salai’s father, Pietro. In an ‘istrumento’ of 29 July 1501, drawn up in Florence (Villata 1999, no. 153), Leonardo states that he has received rent due from him. Officially, however, it seems the property was confiscated during the French occupation (hard otherwise to interpret its restoration to him by the French in 1507: see p. 409). Later documents show Salai almost exclusively in charge of it. In his will (R 1539), Leonardo bequeathed half of the land to Salai, and half to his servant Battista de Vilanis.

  130. I 50r, 51r, 58r, 59r, 118v (R 1405–6); L91r; CA422r/156r-a. Pedretti warns that the calculations should be read with caution: other computations by Leonardo suggest that 1 pertica =1,862 square braccia. See Pedretti 1972, 290–91.

  131. CA 1050v/377v-a; Pedretti 1972, 22, 291–2.

  132. CA 484r/177v-b, 1079r/389r-b.

  133. Pedretti 1972, 16; Vasari 1987, 1.193 (Life of Piero della Francesca).

  134. The figurehead of the Atellani salon was Carlo Attelani’s wife, Barbara, whom Leonardo mentions by her maiden name, Barbara Stampa (CA 2r/1r-c). See p. 457 above.

  135. I 118r9119v.

  136. CA 426/158a (Embolden 1987, fig. 27) has ground-plans, calculations and notes in the hand of the client on the verso and Leonardo’s own notes on the recto. CA 1090r/393r-a (Embolden 1987, fig. 28) may show his plans for the Guiscardi garden, with a central path and a circular area at the top, probably a pond or nymphaeum.

  137. B 12v.

  138. Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 99–100.

  139. Kemp 1981, 181–8.

  140. Museo d’Arte Antica, Castello Sforzesco: itinerary, rm VII.

  141. CA 187r/67r-a.

  142. CA 773r/284r, R 1468. Arrigo is later referred to in CA 570v/214r-b, c. 1506–8, PC 2.353.

  143. Ma I 61r.

  144. CA 289r/104r-b; I 28v, 34r.

  145. B. Corio, L’historia di Milano (Venice, 1554), 49v.

  146. CA 669/247a, R 1379; cf. G. Calvi, RV 3 (1907).

  147. CA 628r/230v-c; Vecce 1998, 208.

  148. Beltrami 1919, doc. 101. The cash was deposited in Florence on 7 and 15 January 1500.

  PART SIX: On the Move, 1500–1506

  1. M. Brown, ‘ “Lo insaciabile desiderio nostro de cose antique”: new documents for Isabella d’Este’s collection of antiquities’, in Clough 1976, 324–53. See also Daniela Pizzagalli, La Signora del Rinascimento: vita e splendore di Isabella d’Este alla Corte di Mantova (Milan, 2002); Jardine 1996, 408–16.

  2. Jardine 1996, 410–11.

  3. Archivio del Stato, Mantua, Gonzaga 1439, 55; Beltrami 1919, doc. 103. The painting’s relationship to the Louvre drawing is uncertain. A Leonardo drawing of Isabella remained in Mantua, for a year later she was hoping he would send her ‘another sketch of our portrait’ because her husband had given away ‘the one which he [Leonardo] left here’ (letter to Fra Pietro Novellara, 29 March 1501: see n. 20). This may or may not have been the Louvre drawing. Isabella’s wording assumes the existence of at least one other ‘sketch’ of her, and there may have been various studies in various poses.

  4. CA 638dv/234v-c, PC 2.196–8. Deliberations of the Senate: Vecce 1998, 191.

  5. CA 215r/ 79r-c, c. 1515.

  6. Ar 270V, c. 1517.

  7. CU 3r, McM 18.

  8. Sabba Castiglione, Ricordi (Venice, 1555), 51 v. The first edition was published in Bologna in 1546. Vasari says the clay Horse ws ‘smashed to pieces’ when the French first entered Milan (Vasari 1987, 1.264), but it seems it was still intact in September 1501, when the Duke of Ferrara wrote to Milan about the possibility of acquiring it (Villata 1999, no. 155).

  9. Beltrami 1919, doc. 101. The account contained the savings Leonardo had transferred from Milan in December 1499. There is no documentation of him visiting Florence during his eighteen years in Milan, though it is sometimes said he made a short trip back in c. 1495. This derives from Vasari’s comment (added to the second edition of the Lives) that the building of the Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio by Simone del Pollaiuolo and Giuliano da Sangallo was ‘done according to his judgement and advice’ (see Vasari 1987,1.267, though the phrase is lost in Bull’s translation of the passage). This work was begun in 1495.

  10. Pietro da Novellara to Isabella d’Este, 3 April 1501: see n. 20.

  11. Ser Piero is first recorded as notary to the Servites on 20 August 1466 (Uzielli 1872, 148; Cecchi 2003, 123–4).

  12. Vecce 1998, 199. The later fortunes of the Annunziata altarpiece are recounted in Vasari’s Life of Perugino (Vasari 1987, 2.98).

  13. see n. 20.

  14. Some believe Leonardo was already working on the Virgin and St Anne group before he left Milan, e.g. Popham, who dates the Venice sketch and another at the Louvre to ‘about 1498–99’ (Popham 1946, 73, 152). The eighteenth-century collector Fra Sebastiano Resta states that Louis XII commissioned a cartoon of Saint Anne from Leonardo in Milan in 1499, and that Leonardo ‘made a preliminary sketch which is now in the collection of the Counts Arconati in Milan’ (Lettere pittoriche (Milan, 1759), 3.326; Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 102). However, Resta is not thought to be reliable: he was keen to establish a provenance for a ‘more finished’ cartoon on the same subject which he owned. This was not, as he claimed, an original Leonardo, but a copy of the Louvre Virgin and St Anne painting (or its cartoon) from the Esterhazy collection in Budapest. A sonnet by the Bolognese poet Girolamo Casio, patron of Leonardo’s former assistant Boltraffio, is also advanced as evidence for the early date of the composition. It is entitled, ‘For St Anna, whom L. Vinci painted holding in her arms the M[adonna] who does not wish the son to reach down to a lamb’. Boltraffio was with Casio in Bologna in 1500, and Leonardo may have visited them en route from Venice to Florence in April of that ye
ar, but there is no indication that the sonnet was written then; the title says Leonardo had ‘painted [dipinse]’ St Anne, which seems to refer to the Louvre painting, probably done in Milan in c. 1509–11. The poem, undated, was first published in Casio’s Cronica (Bologna, 1525).

  15. The drawing, ‘done with Leonardo Vinci’s own hand’, was sent to the Marquis by Francesco Malatesta. In the covering letter (Villata 1999, no. 146) he adds, ‘Leonardo says that to make it [the replica of the villa] perfect you would need to transport its setting to the place where you want to build it’: an ironic comment, surely, though retailed by Malatesta with apparent seriousness.

  16. RL 12689, possibly by Salai; Ar 77r.

  17. ASF, Carte Strozziane II 51/1, 454r–v; ALV 4 (1991), 158–70. A note in H130v mentions objections by ‘the millers of San Niccolò, who do not want their water-course obstructed’.

  18. CA 618v/227v-a. (The note is dated Florentine style, ‘1500 a di 10 marzo’, i.e. 1501).

  19. G. Mongeri, ed., Lerovine di Roma (Milan, 1875), 57r. The album of drawings, of which this is a lithographic facsimile, is in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan; it is attributed to an artist in the circle of Bramantino (Vecce 1998, 200, 406).

  20. Isabella to Novellara, 29 March: Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Gonzaga F II 9, busta 2993, copialettere 12/80; Villata 1999, no. 149. Novellara to Isabella, 3 April: Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Gonzaga E XXVIII 3, busta 1103; Villata 1999, no. 150. Novellara to Isabella, 14 April (illustrated; ibid., no. 151): formerly in Archivio di San Fedele, Milan (G. L. Calvi, Notizie dei principali professori di belle arti in Milano (Milan, 1869), 3.97), by the early 1980s in a private collection in Geneva, and from 1995 in a private collection in New York (see C. Pedretti, ALV 5 (1992), 170–75). Girolamo Casio says of Novellara that his sermons were ‘hated [i.e. envied] by St Paul’ (‘in pulpito era per San Paolo odito’) and that he ‘died young and was buried in Mantua’ (Cronica (1525), 12r).

  21. Florimond Robertet, Baron d’Aluye, Bury et Brou, then in his early forties, was secretary and treasurer successively to Charles VIII, Louis XII and François I. A medallion portrait of him dated 1512 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Cabinet des medailles no. 4003) is in Starnazzi 2000, plates 7, 8.

  22. News reports, 28 August 2003 (the theft occurred on the 27th at about 11 a.m.); an estimated value of the painting is £30 million. A detailed comparative analysis of the two versions is in Kemp 1992. A third version (also privately owned), attributed to Cesare del Sesto, was exhibited at Camaiore in 1998 (Pedretti 1998b, cat. no. 10). A free version attributed to Fernando Yañez de la Almedina (probably the ‘Ferrando Spagnolo’ of the Anghiari accounts: see p. 389) is in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. A contemporary copy of the latter, until recently in the Paoletti Chelini collection in Lucca (V. Bernardi, ‘Una versione lucchese della Madonna dell’Aspo’, Notiziario filatelico 134, August 1972) seems also to have disappeared.

  23. C. Pedretti, ‘The missing basket’, in Starnazzi 2000, 49–50.

  24. Starnazzi 2000, plates 23–25.

  25. Villata 1999, no. 154. Manfredo styles himself ‘ducal orator’.

  26. Beltrami 1919, doc. 113.

  27. Villata 1999, no. 159, in response to Isabella’s letter of 3 May (ibid., no. 158).

  28. F. Guicciardini in E. R. Chamberlain, The Fall of the House of Borgia (London, 1989). On the Borgia family, see Michael Mallett, Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty (London, 1969); Ivan Cloulas, Les Borgias (Paris, 1987); Russell Aiuto, The Borgias (Dark Horse Multimedia, 1999, at http://www.crime library.com); Marion Johnson, The Borgias (London, 2002). Hard to find, but worth the search, is Frederick Rolfe (a.k.a. Baron Corvo), Chronicles of the House of Borgia (London, 1901), the background to which is entertainingly investigated in A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo (London, 1934), 93ff.

  29. Andrea Boccaccio, c. 1492, in Aiuto (see n. 28). On Cesare, see DBI; Bradford 1976. His mother, Vanozza, ran a hotel for tourists and pilgrims, La Vacca, which is still in business in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.

  30. Villari 1892, 1.291–3. The full text is in Niccolò Machiavelli, Legazioni e commisssarie, ed. S. Bertelli (Milan, 1964), 1.267–8. Cf. Vickie Sullivan, ‘Patricide and the plot of The Prince: Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli’s Italy’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (1993), 83–102.

  31. Masters 1999, 79–80.

  32. L iv, R 1416; Ar 202v, R 1420. The date of the latter list is uncertain: the item ‘boxes in the customs house’ has been thought to date the list to 1503, after Leonardo’s return from the Borgia adventure, but the boxes might equally have been brought from Milan in 1500, and still be at the customs two years later; compare the slow passage of ‘one bundle of clothes transported from Rome’, on which he paid 18 lire customs duty in April 1505 (Beltrami 1919, doc. 165). Another item in the list, ‘falleri’, refers to a book, the Epistole de Phalari (1472), which is also mentioned in a note of c. 1499 (CA 638b/234r–b).

  33. Piombino: L 6v. Populonia: L 82v-83r.

  34. Starnazzi 1995, 1996, 2000, the latter with photographs of the Balze in relation to Leonardo landscapes (plates 26–30).

  35. L 19v, 40r, 8r.

  36. L 2r. Another reference to the ‘Archimedes of the Bishop of Padua’ is on L 94v. Solmi suggests that ‘Borges’ was Antoine Boyer, Archbishop of Bourges, who was then a cardinal in Rome (Solmi 1908, 96), but in a much later note (CA 968b/ 349v-f, c. 1515) Leonardo refers to a ‘complete Archimedes’ which was ‘formerly in the library of the Duke of Urbino, and was taken from there in the time of Duke Valentino’: it seems likely that this is the manuscript he was hoping to get off Borgia in 1502. He may have known of the other manuscript from Pacioli, who was a native of Borgo San Sepolcro.

  37. L 8r, cover, 78r, 46V, 36v. He has further thoughts on the musical fountain in Ma II 55r – ‘Let us create a harmony from the waterfall of a fountain by means of a bagpipe’ – and resolves to ‘ask Messer Marcello about the sound made by water as described by Vitruvius’. A jotting on the cover of L, ‘Marcello lives at the house of Giacomo da Mengardino’, probably refers to the same man: he may be Marcello Virgilio Berti, a scholarly colleague of Machaivelli who lectured at the Florentine Studio.

  38. L 47r, 77r.

  39. K1 2r.

  40. L 72r.

  41. The original is conserved at Villa Melzi, Vaprio d’Adda (Archivio Melzi d’Eril). The document is in the hand of one of Borgia’s secretaries. An autograph letter by Borgia to the Florentine Signoria (Forlì, 6 April 1501) was recently sold at Sotheby’s (Books and Manuscripts Sale, 25 May 2000, lot 162). A single page written in a ‘particularly elegant italic or cancelleresca hand’, with a red wax armorial seal featuring two crested helmets, it sold for over £7,500.

  42. L 65v-66r.

  43. Pacioli, De viribus quantitatis 2.85 (Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, MS 250, 193v–194r).

  44. CU 59v, McM 266, describing the contorted bodies of soldiers in action, ‘who take part in such discord or, one might say, in this most brutal kind of madness [pazzia bestialissima]’.

  45. L 29r; cf. CA 133r/48r-b.

  46. He recalls conversing at Nantes with the King’s foreign minister: ‘When the Cardinal of Rouen said to me that the Italians do not understand war, I replied to him that the French do not understand the State, because if they understood it they would not have let the Church come to such greatness’ (Machiavelli 1961, 43–4; 1966, 1.67). In other words, they had unwisely aggrandized the Pope by supporting Cesare Borgia – a prescient comment in November 1500.

  47. Dispatch of 7 October 1502, in Legazioni (see n. 30), 1.341; Villari 1892, 1.310.

  48. CA 121v/43 v-b.

  49. Masters 1999, 85–7.

  50. Map: RL 12284. Rough sheet: RL 12686. Similar sketches and data on Urbino and Cesena are found in MS L, and may have resulted in similar maps.

  51. RL 12278. On Leonardo’s maps of 1502–4, see Clayton 1996, 89ff.

  52. Rough sheets and notes: RL
12682, CA 336r/122r-a.

  53. RL 12277; Clayton 1996, 94–5. The scale is about 1:570,000. On Leonardo’s use of the map at Urbino, see Susan Kish, ‘The cartography of Leonardo da Vinci’, in Imago et mensura mundi: Atti del XI0 congresso internazionale di storia della cartografia, ed. Carla Clivia Marzoli, 3 vols., Florence, 1985.

  54. Villari 1892, 1.314–15.

  55. Ibid., 1.320–22; Viroli 2000, 62–5. Machiavelli later wrote up these events in a report drily entitled ‘Description of the method used by Duke Valentino to murder Vitellozzo Vitelli’ (Machiavelli 1966, 2.785–91). Cf. Richard Cavendish, ‘Cesare Borgia at Senigallia’, History Today, 12 January 2002.

  56. L 33V; cf. another reference to Siena, L 19v.

  57. Machiavelli 1961, 60–61; 1966, 1.77.

  58. He withdraw money from his Florentine bank on 4 March: see n. 64.

  59. Topkapi Museum, Istanbul, E 6184; first published by E. Babingher, Nach-richten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen 52 (1952), 1ff. A reproduction of part of the document is in Vecce 1998, plate 38.

  60. L 66r, R 1109.

  61. Vasari 1987, 1.346–7; Condivi 1976, ch. 33.

  62. PC 2.214. Topographical notes: CA 910r/334r. The bridge was designed by Andrea Gurrieri da Imola.

  63. See ‘The Leonardo project’, http://www.vebjorn-sand.com; Guardian, 1 November 2001.

  64. The bank’s records (Beltrami 1919, doc. 123) date the transaction to 4 March, though Leonardo’s own note of it reads, ‘Saturday 5 March I withdrew 50 gold ducats from Santa Maria Nuova, leaving 450’ (CA 211r/77r-b). The bank is probably right: the first Saturday of March 1503 was the 4th. On the verso of Leonardo’s note is ‘in africo addì 5 di marzo 1503’, probably written by the river Affrico outside the city walls.

  65. Ar 229v. The ‘rose pink’ (rosato) favoured by Leonardo and Salai seems to have had a particular connotation of dressiness: Cosimo de’ Medici, seeking to smarten up the scruffy Donatello, sent him a ‘pink cloak’ to wear on feast days (Lucas-Dubreton 1960, 217). I translate ‘pitocco’ as ‘tunic’. The word, now obsolete, is defined in elderly dictionaries as a ‘short garment [veste corte] comparable to the cotta worn by soldiers’; the latter is a tabard (a ‘loose upper garment without sleeves’: Shorter Oxford Dictionary) or surcoat. The pitocco’s shortness is contrasted with the toga-like lucco worn by respectable Florentines. In Machiavelli’s Mandrake (1516), an amorous young blade dons a ‘pitocchino’ before serenading his girlfriend with lute songs. Leonardo has some scathing comments on the ‘mad inventions’ of fashion – garments at one time worn so long ‘that men continually had their arms laden with clothes so as not to tread on them’, and then, at the opposite extreme, ‘going only as far as their hips and elbows, and so tight that they suffered great torment’ (CU 170r-v, McM 574).