Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  66. Beltrami 1919, doc. 125; CA 98r/35v-a.

  67. From the contemporary report on the Pisa diversion by Biagio Buonaccorso (see n. 73). An excellent account of this project is in Masters 1999, 96–133.

  68. Villata 1999, no. 178. Sketches of La Verruca are in Ma II 4r and 7v–8r, the latter showing its setting in the Pisan hills.

  69. Sketch of the Arno: Ma II 1r. Guiducci’s dispatch: Villata 1999, no. 180.

  70. Ibid., no. 181. Giovanni di Andrea Piffero recurs in documents relating to the Anghiari mural: an intermediary between Leonardo and the Signoria. On Giovanni Cellini as piffero, see Cellini 2002, 10–16.

  71. CA 562r/210r-b, Masters 1999, 123–7 The route of the intended diversion is shown on various rough sketch-maps: RL 12279, Ma II 22v-23r, 52v–53r.

  72. Mechanical digger: CA 4r/1v-b, Zöllner 2003, no. 544. Shovel-loads and barrow-loads: Ma II 22v.

  73. Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, MS Machiavelli C 6.78; PC 2.175–7. Part of this report, with a diagram showing the path of the diversion, is reproduced in Masters 1999, fig. 7.4 (printed back to front, however). Cf. Landucci 1927, 216 (22 August 1504).

  74. CA 127r/46r-b, R 1001; cf. CA 1107r/398r-a.

  75. RL 12279, R 1006. Cf. RL 12678, 12683. The system of locks and sluices for the canal is studied in RL 12680.

  76. Sassoon 2002.

  77. Today the Mona Lisa and La Gioconda refer interchangeably to the same painting, but that inveterate dealer of Leonardian wild-cards G. P. Lomazzo clearly refers to them as two separate paintings: ‘the portrait of the Gioconda and that of Monna Lisa, in which he has marvellously caught, among other things, the mouth in the act of laughing’ (Lomazzo 1584, 434). The relative pronoun is plural (‘quali’) so he definitely means two paintings. The explanation of this may be the so-called ‘Nude Giocondas’, a group of paintings probably based on a lost Leonardo original, showing a bare-breasted woman in the Mona Lisa pose, the most famous of which, attributed to Salai, is in the Hermitage (see p. 441). It is possible that Lomazzo is distinguishing between the original portrait (the Mona Lisa) and the later sauced-up version (the Gioconda). Elsewhere he speaks of a ‘Monna Lisa Napoletana’ (Lomazzo 1590, 6), which might also mean the ‘Nude Gioconda’ (i.e. as distinct from the ‘Florentine’ Mona Lisa), except that he says it is in the French royal collection at Fontainebleau, which none of the ‘Nude Gioconda’ paintings ever was. The earliest documentary reference to a painting called La Gioconda (or ‘La Joconda’) is in 1525 (Shell and Sironi 1991; Jestaz 1999).

  78. The phrasing suggests that Vasari wrote this passage sometime before the death of François in March 1547.

  79. Cassiano dal Pozzo, whose account of the painting (Biblioteca Barberini, Rome, LX/64, 192v-194v) is the first actual record of its presence in the French royal collection.

  80. J. Atkinson and D. Sices, eds., Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence (De Kalb, Ill 1996), 87. The only other portrait Leonardo is known to have painted in Florence, the Ginevra, is unlikely to be in Ugolini’s mind: it had been done a quarter of a century before, and was probably taken to Venice (Vasari had certainly never seen it). Ugolini may, of course, be referring to portrait drawings by Leonardo.

  81. RL 12514; a derivative drawing, perhaps by Cesare da Sesto, is in Venice (Accademia, no. 141; Starnazzi 2000, plate 10). The pose shown in the unfinished portrait of Isabella is unknown (see n. 3 above). In her letter to Leonardo of 14 May 1504 (see p. 375) Isabella suggests that, if he cannot travel to Mantua, he might ‘satisfy the obligations of our agreement by converting our portrait into another figure even more gracious, that of a Youthful Christ of about 12 years old’. If by ‘converting’ her portrait she means changing its features, this makes it unlikely that the portrait was in full profile: this pose would be highly unusual for a representation of Christ.

  82. RL 19055v (Anat MS B 38v). A text on the same subject (RL 19046r, Anat MS B 29r) is datable to c. 1508; see PC 1.345–8.

  83. Biographical material on Lisa was first compiled by Giovanni Poggi (Il Marzocco, 21 December 1913; Poggi 1919, 35). The fullest account of her is in Zöllner 1993, on which my account is based.

  84. Maddalena married Agnolo Doni in early 1504; Raphael’s portraits of them (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) are dated c. 1505–6. The affinities with the Mona Lisa are particularly strong in the preparatory drawing (Louvre), which features the framing columns that are vestigially present in Leonardo’s painting. These also appear in Raphael’s Woman with a Unicorn of the same period (Galleria Borghese, Rome), whose pose is also reminiscent of the Mona Lisa. It seems that Raphael saw the portrait, or its cartoon, during his sojourn in Florence in c. 1504–6. His Madonna and Child with Saints at San Florenzo, Perugia, which has the date ‘MDV’ or ‘MDVI’ (1505 or 1506) on the hem of the Virgin’s mantle, was possibly painted in Florence; the Baptist on the left echoes the Leonardo prototype seen in RL 12572 and in Credi’s Pistoia altarpiece (see p. 124).

  85. Zöllner 1993, 126; Maestro Valerio died in January 1521.

  86. Beatis 1979, 132.

  87. On Pacifica Brandano, see Pedretti 1957, 138–9; Ammirato 1637, 3.134–5. Pacifica and Giuliano’s illegitimate son, Ippolito, was created a cardinal by Pope Clement VII. On Isabella Gualanda, see Vecce 1990. Her friend Costanza d’Avalos, Duchess of Francavilla, has also been canvassed, initially by Adolfo Venturi in Storia dell’arte in Italia (Milan, 1925), 9.37–42: a poem by Enea Irpino (Canzoniere, MS c. 1520) seems to allude to a portrait of her by Leonardo showing her wearing a black veil (‘sotto il bel velo negro’), though proponents of La Gualanda claim the poem refers to her. More recently Caterina Sforza, illegitimate daughter of Duke Galeazzo Maria, has been proposed, on the basis of a supposed likeness of the Mona Lisa to an earlier portrait of Caterina by Lorenzo di Credi. For Freud the famous half-smile was a recovered memory of Leonardo’s mother; for others the painting is an idealized portrait representing no one in particular, or it is a depiction of Chastity. In the face of these uncertaintries Kemp laconically captioned the painting Portrait of a Lady on a Balcony (Kemp 1981), though even this will not satisfy those who believe that she is really a man, and perhaps even Leonardo himself in drag.

  88. Beatis 1979, 133–4.

  89. Shell and Sironi 1991.

  90. A small documentary curiosity is that in the original imbreviatura listing Salai’s goods the painting is referred to not as ‘La Joconda’, but as ‘La Honda’. Discarding the supernumerary Latin h, one arrives at the curious idea that the clerk who wrote this list thought the painting was called La Onda – ‘The Wave’: in a strictly chronological sense this is the painting’s first known title.

  91. Zöllner 1993, 118. Zöllner further wonders if Piero del Giocondo was Vasari’s source on the painting; but Vasari might have had an even better source – Lisa herself. She was certainly alive in 1539, when she transferred ownership of a property in Chianti to her daughter Ludovica (document discovered by Giuseppe Pallanti: Sunday Telegraph, 1 August 2004), and she was probably still living in 1551. That she was alive when Vasari wrote about the painting tends to strengthen his account of it: this is the kind of simple human factor which tends to be overlooked by the ingenious proponents of alternative sitters.

  92. Sassoon 2001, 113–15, citing Gautier’s review of Paul Foucher’s play La Joconde (1855), and his Les dieux et les demi-dieux de la peinture (Paris, 1865). Gautier was the dedicatee of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1857), which includes a fine poem mentioning Leonardo, ‘Les phares’ (‘Beacons’): ‘Léonard de Vinci, miroir profond et sombre…’ – ‘Leonardo da Vinci, deep dark mirror’.

  93. Sassoon 2001, 128, 98, citing the journals of Jules Michelet (ed. C. Digeon, Paris, 1976, 3.83) and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (Paris, 1956, 1.719).

  94. See Yeats’s introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford, 1936), viii. Pater’s influential essay on Leonardo originally appeared in Fortnightly Review, November 1869. Sassoon discerns echoes of it in J
oyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): see Sassoon 2002, 157–8. On the nineteenth-century ‘cult’ of Leonardo see also Severi 1992.

  95. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890), in Complete Works (London, 1969), 1028–9. See also his short story ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’.

  96. E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (1907; repr. Harmondsworth 1955), 95.

  97. Somerset Maugham, Christmas Holiday (1939), 213; Berenson 1916, 1–4; T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in The Sacred Wood (1920, repr. 1960), 99.

  98. Full and entertaining accounts of the theft and its aftermath are in Sassoon 2002, 173–210; McMullen 1975, 197–215. See also A. Manson, Le roman vrai de la IIIe République (Paris, 1957), vol. 3: ‘Le vol de la Joconde’. For some cultural ramifications of the theft, see Leader 2002.

  99. Alfredo Geri, in McMullen 1975, 209.

  100. See Johannes Wilde, ‘The hall of the Great Council of Florence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8 (1944), 65–81.

  101. Villata 1999, no. 183.

  102. ASF, Signori e collegi 106, 40v–41r (Villata 1999, no. 189). Cf. the later deliberazione authorizing payment of 45 florins for three months, April–June 1504 (ASF, Operai del Palazzo, Stanziamenti 10, 64v; Villata 1999, no. 194).

  103. ASF, Signori e collegi 106, 36r; Villata 1999, no. 187. For the activities of February in the next paragraph: ibid., no. 188.

  104. CA 1109r/398v-c, PC 2.382.

  105. CA 202a/74r-b, v-c, R 669. On Leonardo Dati see Pedretti 1972, 417–25.

  106. Istorie fiorentine, Bk 5, ch. 33, in Machiavelli 1966, 2.656–7.

  107. Numerous preparatory sketches, including battle studies (Accademia, Venice, nos. 214–16; RL 12338–9), individual horsemen (RL 12340r; K 14v), horses in extremis (RL 12326r), and the superb figure studies and head studies at Budapest (Szépmüvészeti Muzeum, inv. nos. 1174, 1175). See Zöllner 2003, nos. 42–55

  108. A 30v–31r, ‘Modo di figurare una battaglia’.

  109. Villata 1999, nos. 190–92. Leonardo had done drawings of Tovaglia’s country house in 1500. Salai hoped to take advantage of Leonardo’s resistance to Isabella’s requests: ‘A pupil of Leonardo Vinci called Salai, a young man but very proficient for his age… is very desirous to do something fine [galante] for Your Excellency’ (Luigi Ciocca to Isabella, 24 January 1505: ibid., no. 210).

  110. Amadori to Isabella, 3 May 1506: ibid., no. 227.

  111. For Michelangelo’s biography see DBI, s.v. Buonarroti; Bull 1996; Paul Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and its Maker (University Park, Pa., 1991). On the contemporary Life by Ascanio Condivi (1553), heavily influenced by Michelangelo himself, see Michelangelo 1987. On the rivalry with Leonardo, see Goffen 2002.

  112. Vasari 1987, 1.337–8; Goldscheider 1940, 9–10. A double-sided sheet of drawings by Leonardo which recently emerged in France (auctioned at Sotheby’s, 5 July 2000, reportedly purchased by a Swiss collector for £1.3 million) features a fine chalk-and-ink drawing of Hercules with a club. Pedretti suggests this may be related to Leonardo’s supposed efforts with the David block (Guardian, 18 September 2000), but the monumental style is probably an echo of David rather than an idea for the block in its pre-David state. It may be related to Leonardo’s memo about a sculpture of the ‘Labours of Hercules’ for Pierfrancesco Ginori, c. 1508 (see Part III n. 62).

  113. Anthony Burgess, ‘Michelangelo: the artist as miracle worker’, Sunday Times, 2 February 1975.

  114. Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo, Deliberazioni 1496–1507, 186; Villata 1999, no. 186.

  115. Landucci 1927, 213–14.

  116. A much later painting of Piazza Santa Trinità, by Giuseppe Zocchi (1711–67), shows the northern and western walls of the palazzo still loggia-free, and a small knot of people at the south-western corner, near the bridge, where the river-front loggia would begin. See the reproduction in Hibbert 1994, 209.

  117. Michelangelo to Giovanni Francesco Fattucci, 1523, in P. Barocchi and R. Ristori, eds., Il carteggio di Michelangelo (Florence, 1965–79), 3.7–9.

  118. Vasari 1987, 1.341–2. Documents in the Fondazione Herbert Horne, Florence, confirm Vasari’s statement about Michelangelo’s tenancy of Sant’Onofrio. See L. Morozzi, ‘La Battaglia di Cascina di Michelangelo: nuova ipotesi sulla data di commisssione’, Prospettiva 53 (1988–9), 320–24.

  119. Ma II 128r, PC 1.327; L 79r. Cf. E 19v-20r, a passage beginning ‘O anatomical painter’, warning against an over-emphasis on ‘bones, sinews and muscles’ making a painting ‘wooden’.

  120. RL 12591r.

  121. Ar 148r-v, 149v.

  122. CA 877r/319r-b, partially transcribed R 1534, addenda in PC 2.378.

  123. CA 196r/ 71v-b, R 1526.

  124. Ar 272r, R 1372; cf. Eissler 1962, app. C.

  125. CA 178r/62v-a, R 1373A. Pedretti thinks the script, though written left to right, is ‘the type of handwriting found in the studies for the Arno canal’, i.e. 1503–4 (PC 2.319). The mechanical wing on the recto is reproduced in RV 17 (1954), fig. 6.

  126. CA 541v/202v-a.

  127. Ar 271v. ‘Jacopo Tedesco’, charged at 1 carlino per day for board and lodging, paid 15 grossini on 9 August and 1 florin on 12 August.

  128. Ma II 2v–3r. See Reti 1968, pt 2; Maccagni 1974.

  129. RL 12676r On Il Botro see Part VII n. 26.

  130. CA 765v/282 v-b.

  131. At the castle: Ma II 24V, with a note beside it, ‘The ditch which I am straightening’. Demonstration: Ma II 25r (he actually writes ‘on the last day of November, All Saint’s Day’: another calendar mistake). Drying the marshland: CA 381r/139r-a. These draining and ditching projects seem to echo the recently aborted Arno diversion: expertise is not wasted.

  132. Ma II 125r, PC 2.189.

  133. RL 12665r; see introduction n. 10.

  134. Ma II 112r.

  135. Villata 1999, nos. 211–12.

  136. Tn 18r; Villata 1999, no. 218. Cf. Ma II 2r, ‘Saturday morning, 1 florin to Lorenzo’. In a memorandum of c. 1504–5 (CA 331r/120r-d, R1444) Leonardo writes, ‘Garzone che mi faccia il modello’ (‘An assistant who could be a model for me’). Villata suggests this is Lorenzo, and that he was the model for the announcing angel on RL 12328r and the Louvre St John (p. 469 above). See Villata 1999,184 n. 1, and RV 27 (1997).

  137. GDA 19.516–7, s.v. Llanos and Yañez. The identification of ‘Ferrando Spagnolo’ with Fernando Yañez is rendered less certain by the existence of a colleague confusingly called Fernando Llanos. They are recorded as working together in Valencia, c. 1506–10. Llanos is not documented after 1516; Yañez lived on until 1531. That both trained in Italy ‘seems likely’, says Isabel Mateo Gomez in GDA, ‘in the light of the innovations they brought to Renaissance Valencian painting’; Yañez was the more gifted, his work ‘more classical and serene, painted with greater clarity and breadth of composition than that of his colleague’. The ‘Ferando’ mentioned in H 94r–v may be him, in which case he was in Milan by the mid-1490s; the name appears alongside that of the architect Giacomo Andrea. For another reference to a ‘Ferrando’ painting in Milan in 1494 see Vecce 1998, 152. It is possible he was part of Leonardo’s Milanese bottega, though these references do not in themselves show this.

  138. Ma II 2r.

  139. Tavola Doria (private coll., Munich): Zöllner 2003, 242–3. Zacchia engraving: Vecce 1998, plate 40. On the Rubens engraving see Zöllner 1991; there are copies of it in the Royal Collection at The Hague and the Armand Hammer collection in Los Angeles, and an engraving of it by Gerard Edelink (British Museum).

  140. Villata 1999, no. 221.

  141. Letter to Alberto Lollio, 17 August 1549, in A. F. Doni, Disegno (Venice, 1549), 47v-48r.

  142. On the layout of the Council Hall, and difficulties of interpreting the evidence, see Rubinstein 1995, 73–5; Johannes Wilde (see n. 100), 75ff.

  143. Newton and Spencer 1982.

  144. Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2000.

  145. Melinda Henneburger,
‘The Leonardo cover-up’, New York Times, 21 April 2002.

  146. Tn inside cover, 18r

  147. Tn 18v. It has been suggested that the date of this entry (and hence of the ‘trial flight’) should be read as Florentine reckoning, i.e. March 1506 modern style. But the same page contains a note dated 14 April 1505, referring to the arrival of the apprentice Lorenzo (a date confirmed by the Anghiari records), and the notes are unlikely to have been written eleven months apart.

  148. Tn 13v.

  149. RL 12337.

  150. Raphael’s copy: RL 12759. Leoni’s cartoon: ASF, Archivio Mediceo de principiato, Miscellanea 109/54, 228; discovered by Renzo Cianchi (‘Un acquisto mancato’, La Nazione, 24 November 1967). The items in this inventory, then in the possession of Leoni’s son Giambattista, were being offered for sale to Cosimo II de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Among them was ‘a book of about 400 folios, and the folios are more than a braccio long’; the compiler thinks the Duke could have it for 100 scudi. This is an early sighting of the Codex Atlanticus.

  151. RL 1257or. On Antonio Segni, see Cecchi 2003, 131–3.

  152. Alfonso d’Este to G. Seregno, 1 April 1505 (Beltrami 1919, doc. 162); Vecce 1998, 295, 419.

  153. Tn 10v.