Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  PART SEVEN: Return to Milan, 1506–1513

  1. Beltrami 1919, doc. 176. According to the Anonimo he left ‘desegni… con altre masseritie’ (‘drawings and other goods’) at the Ospedale when he left for Milan.

  2. Supplica of 1503: Beltrami 1919, doc. 120. Arbitrato of 1506: ibid., doc. 170. Cf. docs. 121–2, 167–9, for further paperwork.

  3. Bramly 1992, 354.

  4. D’Amboise to Gonfalonier Soderini, 16 December 1506, Beltrami 1919, doc. 180.

  5. Draft letter to Charles d’Amboise, early 1508, CA 872r/317r–b.

  6. Notes and sketches on CA 732bv/271v-a, 629b/231r-b, v-a. Cf. PC 2.28–31; RV 18 (1960), 65–96.

  7. Ma II 55r, referring back to the Rimini fountain noted in L 78r; Vitruvius, De architectura, Bk 10, ch. 8.

  8. RL 12951r, R 1104.

  9. A long description of the ‘garden of Venus’ in Francesco Colonna’s strange Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) may also be a source.

  10. Villata 1999, nos. 233–5. The two subsequent letters between d’Amboise and the Signoria (October-December 1506), and the three further to Louis XII’s intervention (January 1507): ibid., nos. 236–7, 240–43.

  11. CA 117r/41v-b.

  12. Uzielli 1872, no. 13. The decree of restitution was issued on 27 April: the owner of the property before this was one Leonino Bilia (Vecce 1998, 269). Salai’s father was renting it in 1501, and is again referred to as its tenant in 1510 (Shell and Sironi 1992, no. 26); he probably resided there throughout these changes of ownership.

  13. Jean d’Auton, Chroniques de Louis XII, in Bramly 1992, 462.

  14. Leonardo refers to this grant in letters to Geoffroi Carles and Charles d’Amboise, early 1508, of which drafts remain (CA 872r/317r–b, 1037r/372r-a). He had not then enjoyed any revenues from it due to a dearth of water, ‘partly because of the great drought and partly because the sluices have not been regulated’. San Cristofano is presumably the stretch of the Naviglio around San Cristoforo Barona, south-west of the city. A note of 3 May 1509 (CA 1097r/395r-a) records his presence there. A later draft letter (CA 254r/93r-a, R 1350A) suggests that the revenue (entrata) for ‘taking this water at San Cristofano’ was worth about 72 ducats per annum. In his will (R 1566) the grant is referred to as ‘the right of water which King Louis XII of pious memory gave [him]’.

  15. Sironi 1981, 21–3; Beltrami 1919, doc. 192.

  16. His full name is inscribed (‘Joannes Franciscus Meltius hic scripsit’) on a manuscript in the Biblioteca Trivulziana, Milan, and is possibly used by Leonardo in a note of 1513 (E iv, see pp. 458–9). On Melzi, see Marani 1998a; Shell 1995; F. Calvi, Famiglie notabili milanesi (Milan, 1879), s.v. Melzi.

  17. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, F274 inf. 8; see Marinoni 1982,136. However, another marginal note, also apparently in Melzi’s hand but in a different ink, reads ‘anno 19 fr. melzo’: this perhaps dates some retouching of the drawing.

  18. The painting is in a private collection in Milan: see Marani 1998a, 382–3.

  19. CA 1037v/372 v-a, R 1350.

  20. RL 12280r, CA 65v/20v-b.

  21. Shell and Sironi 1992, no. 38.

  22. On Uncle Francesco’s lost will, see Cianchi 1953, 77–8, 98–100; Cianchi 1984. Properties registered as Francesco’s in the 1498 catasto included a small house ‘nel castello’ (i.e. within the walls of Vinci), a house and vineyard at La Colombaia, a grain-field at Mercatale, and a farm with olive-grove at Croce a Tignano (Smiraglia 1900, doc. 21; Vecce 1998, 251). These may have formed the disputed bequest. A draft letter, in the hand of Melzi (CA 939v/342v-a), refers specifically to the dispute as ‘the matter pending between myself and my brother Ser Giuliano, the head of the other brothers’.

  23. CA 364r/132 r-a.

  24. Villata 1999, nos. 247, 249. The King’s letter is countersigned by Florimond Robertet, commissioner of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder.

  25. Archivio di Stato, Modena, Cancellaria Estense B4. Ippolito was Archbishop of Milan from 1497; in October 1498 he ratified the transfer of property to Mariolo de’ Guiscardi, probably the house and garden which Leonardo redesigned (see Part V n. 136). The connection Leonardo is exploiting is thus Milanese rather than Estense.

  26. CA 571av/214v-a. The reading ‘botro’ is Pedretti’s (PC 2.298–9); previous transcribers saw ‘vostro’ (i.e. ‘your [sc. property]’) as does Vecce 1998, 271. Value of Il Botro: Ar 190v-191r. The pit: ‘Test at your pit what is the course taken by the object’, Leic 9v.

  27. CA 872r/317 r-b.

  28. Piero Martelli (1468–1525), a member of a ‘perpetually pro-Medici family’, was later a prominent member of Rucellai’s Platonic salon, the Orti Oricellari (Cecchi 2003, 133).

  29. Vasari 1878–85, 6.604. We also hear of the ‘Company of the Cauldron’, a mock confraternity frequented by Rustici, del Sarto, Aristotile da Sangallo et al., where the painters created fantastical portraits and figures out of food, anticipating the Mannerist master of culinary portraits Arcimboldo.

  30. Ar ir.

  31. CA 571ar/214r-d, PC 1.103, a sheet with notes on water and flight.

  32. The codex consists of eighteen sheets of linen paper, folded to make 36 folios. By the late seventeenth century it was in the hands of the Roman painter Giuseppe Ghezzi. He claimed to have found it, in Rome, in a chest of manuscripts and drawings formerly belonging to the Lombard sculptor Guglielmo della Porta. The latter (d. 1577) can be linked almost back to Leonardo himself, for in his youth Guglielmo had been a pupil of his uncle, Giovanni della Porta, a sculptor and architect who was working in Milan cathedral in the 1520s; and this older della Porta had in turn been a pupil of the architect Cristoforo Solario, whom Leonardo knew personally in Milan (Beltrami 1919, doc. 205). Purchased from Ghezzi by Thomas Coke sometime between 1713 and 1717, the codex resided at the family seat, Holkham Hall in Norfolk, in the library created by Coke’s ancestor, the Elizabethan lawyer Sir Edward Coke. It was sold at auction in 1980 to the oil-magnate Armand Hammer, and was for a while known as the Codex Hammer. Bill Gates bought it in 1994 for $30 million; it is housed in his mansion at Seattle – the furthest flung of all Leonardo’s works. He has modestly declined to rechristen it the Codex Gates, so it is now once again the Codex Leicester.

  33. Leic 1r–v, cf. Pedretti 2000, 11. On a blank outer leaf Ghezzi gave the codex the following title: ‘Libro originale / Della Natura peso e moto delle Acque / Composto scritto e figurato di proprio / Carattere alla mancina /Dell’ Insigne / Pittore e Geometra / Leonardo da Vinci’ (‘Original manuscript concerning the nature, force and motion of waters, composed, written and illustrated in the genuine left-handed writing of the renowned painter and geometrician Leonardo da Vinci’), but an earlier hand (perhaps one of the della Porta) gave a better summary of its contents: ‘Book written by Leonardo Vincio which treats of the sun, the moon, the course of waters, of bridges and motions’.

  34. Leic 34r; cf. A 54v–56r.

  35. Leic 13r, 16v; CA 571ar/214r-d.

  36. Leic 2r.

  37. Nicodemi, ‘Life and Works of Leonardo’, in Leonardo da Vinci (New York, 1938), cited White 2000, 6–7.

  38. RL 19027r, v.

  39. RL 19028.

  40. RL 19054v.

  41. RL 19095.

  42. See, for example, Antonio Cammelli’s sonnet ‘Quando di Vener fu l’alma superba’ (Lubrici no. 4; Cammelli 1884, 200), where the ‘proud captain’ breaks through the ‘stockade’ (steccata) after a ‘bitter battle’.

  43. RL 19055, formerly bound next to RL 19095. The embryological interest foreshadows the famous studies of the human foetus, RL 19101–2, etc.

  44. RL 19070v, R 796.

  45. Landucci 1927, 217: ‘On 24 January [1506] a young man was condemned and hanged, and the doctors and scholars of the Studio, all learned and upstanding men, sought permission from the Otto to anatomize him.’ The dissection was performed over a week, with two sessions a day, and had the status of a theatrical event: ‘My Master Antonio went every day to watch.’ Perhaps Leon
ardo did too.

  46. Sironi 1981, 23–6.

  47. Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 94. Hamilton purchased it in July 1785 from Count Cicogna, administrative director of Santa Caterina alla Ruota, which owned the goods and titles of the suppressed Confraternity; he paid 1582 lire. From Hamilton’s descendants it passed to Lord Lansdowne, and then to the Duke of Suffolk, who sold it to the National Gallery in 1880 for 9,000 guineas.

  48. The Swiss Virgin of the Rocks was exhibited at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, in 2000. See F. Caroli, Il Cinquecento Lombardo: Da Leonardo a Caravaggio (Milan 2000), cat. no. II.2.

  49. Cu 25v, McM 57.

  50. BM 1875–6–12–17r; Zöllner 2003, no. 27; Pedretti 1968, 27–8.

  51. Daily Telegraph, 16 January 1996.

  52. J. McEwen, ‘Leonardo restored’, Independent Magazine, 20 May 1989, 53–7.

  53. Dalli Regoli 2001, 116–19. It is the only known painted version of the kneeling Leda. Four paintings of the standing Leda, generally ascribed to c. 1509–10 or later, are in the Uffizi (called the ‘Spirodon Leda’, after its former owner Ludovico Spirodon; attributed to Fernando Yañez by Marani, and to the studio of Lorenzo di Credi by Natali: see Dalli Regoli 2001, 140); in the Galleria Borghese, Rome, attributed to Il Sodoma; at Wilton House, Salisbury (see plate 29), attributed to Cesare da Sesto; and in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia. The Spirodon Leda was briefly owned by Hermann Goering, to whom the Contessa Gallotti Spirodon sold it in 1941.

  54. Leda’s face: RL 12515–8. Her features are closely echoed in Giampietrino’s Nymph Hegeria (Coll. Brivio Sforza, Milan), Venus and Cupid (Coll. Nembini, Milan) and Cleopatra (Louvre), and to a lesser extent in his Dido (Coll. Borromeo, Isola Bella) and Salome (National Gallery, London). The stance of his Venus is demonstrably based on the standing Leda. Cf. L. Keith and A. Roy, ‘Giampietrino, Boltraffio and the influence of Leonardo’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 17 (1996), 4–19.

  55. Technical report by Hans Brammer (Kassell, 1990), summarized by Jürgen Lehrmann in Dalli Regoli 2001, 116–18. A further connection of Giampietrino with Leonardo’s studio in c. 1509 is the polyhedron painted on the back of his Madonna and Child (Poldi Pezzoli, Milan), which derives from one of Leonardo’s illustrations for Pacioli’s Divina proportione (Venice, 1509); a copy of the painting by Giovan Battista Belmonte bears the date 1509.

  56. On Bernazzano, see J. Shell and G. Sironi, ‘Bernardinus dictus Bernazanus de Marchixelis’, Arte Cristiana 78 (1990), 363ff. The record of a debt of 30 scudi owed to him by Francesco Melzi’s father and uncle (Shell and Sironi 1992, 116) gives a hint of complex human interweavings within Leonardo’s ‘circle’ of which we are mostly ignorant. He was a native of Inzago, near Milan: on his possible connection with a Last Supper fresco at Inzago, see n. 115.

  57. RL 12343r, 123 54r, 12356r (illustrated), 12360r, etc.; Zöllner 2003, nos. 74–86. These were first systematically distinguished from Sforza Horse studies by Clark: see Clark and Pedretti 1968, 1.xxvi–xli.

  58. CA 492r/179v-a, R 725.

  59. F 87r.

  60. F 15r; Pedretti 1995, 26. Cf. notes on the canalization of the Adda, c. 1508, CA 949r/345r-b.

  61. F 41V, R1123A; cf. two sketches of bats in flight on F 48V.

  62. Membranes of the bat’s wings: Tn 16r. Bats fly upside down: G 63v, c. 1510–11.

  63. F 59r, R 1148C.

  64. F 4v.

  65. RL 12689r, PC 2.127–8. Cf. F 41r, c. 1508: ‘The earth is not the centre of the sun’s orbit, nor the centre of the universe,’ which is relativist but not specifically Copernican.

  66. F 12r.

  67. The lungs of a pig: cf. RL 19054V. Avicenna: i.e. the eleventh-century Arab scientist Ibn Sina. ‘Map of Elefan’: possibly referring to the Siva temple at Ele-phanta, cf. the description of a temple in CA 775v/285r-c. ‘Maestro Mafeo’: perhaps Rafaello Maffei, whose encyclopaediac Anthropologia (1506) mentions the Last Supper, or the Veronese anatomist Girolamo Maffei, probably known to Leonardo via Marcantonio della Torre, also from Verona. The rising of the Adige: cf. Leic 20r, 23r.

  68. MS D is a ‘meditated version’ of earlier notes and a testing by ‘isperienza’, or experiment, of established authorities (Avicenna, Alhazen) on the subject (Pedretti and Cianchi 1995, 25).

  69. RL 19007V.

  70. Pedretti 1965, 140.

  71. See Pedretti 1965 for a detailed reconstruction of Libro A.

  72. Ar 224r, 231v; Pedretti 1957, 90–98. A folio formerly in the Codex Atlanticus (fol. 50), now in a private collection in Switzerland, has further details of the mise-en-scène and the backstage machinery (C. Pedretti, RV 28 (1999), 186–97). Pedretti compares the system of counterweights to those of excavation machines in MS F. On the verso of the sheet is a brief note on water which can be related to material in Leic 18r–19v and Ar 136r–137v (the latter in draft, crossed through when incorporated into Codex Leicester). The same Arundel folios have musical instruments and figure studies in black chalk (the latter by a pupil) which may also be connected with Orfeo.

  73. RL 12282r; the profile is similar to one on Ar 137r.

  74. Corriere della sera, 13 September 2001; Guardian, 14 September 2001: ‘When restorers treated the work with alcohol and water to loosen it from its backing, the ink began to disappear.’ As well as in the Trivulzio estimate (see n. 58), the yellow-green ink is found in a study for the monument (RL 12356r), and in plans for the d’Amboise summer villa (see n. 6). A page with a sketch of the Trivulzio horse (CA 786v/29ov-b) has some heads gone over in the same ink by a pupil. See PC 2.15–17.

  75. Archivio storico italiano 3 (1842), 207; Lomazzo 1973, 2.156.

  76. CA 584r/218r-a.

  77. S. Daniel, The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius (London, 1585), translated from Giovio’s Dialogo dell’imprese (written shortly before his death in Florence in 1552, and published in 1555); devices based on this and other works appear in Shakespeare’s Pericles (c. 1608) 2.ii. See H. Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London, 1885).

  78. On Renaissance emblems, see M. Corbett and R. Lightbown, The Comely Frontispece (London, 1979), 9–34; F. Yates, ‘The emblematic conceit in Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943), 180–209. Other important collections are Gabriello Symeoni, Imprese eroiche e morali (Lyons, 1559), Scipione Ammirato, Il Roto (Naples, 1562) and Girolamo Ruscelli, Le imprese illustri (Venice, 1566).

  79. RL 12701, cf. rough sketches on RL 12282. Reti attempts to relate them to Leonardo’s service of Cesare Borgia in 1502 (Reti 1959), but they are almost certainly c. 1508–9.

  80. Clark notes that the word ‘tale’ is missing from the motto in the earlier sketch on RL 12282: in other words the final form refers to a specific protector (‘such a star’), presumably King Louis. See Clark and Pedretti 1968,1.179.

  81. M 4r. Cf. the purely scientific observation in CA728r/270r-a, c. 1510: ‘The strong wind kills the flame, the temperate wind feeds it.’ A similar emblem in G. Ruscelli, Emblemata (1583), bears the motto ‘Frustra’ (‘Frustration’ or ‘Delay’).

  82. RL 12700. Another aside is, ‘ “Non mi stanco nel giovare” [“I am not tired of being useful”] is a motto for carnival.’ The iris (Embolden 1987,126) also appears on Ar 251v, of about the same date.

  83. A side-note reads, ‘The fire destroys all sophistication, which is deceit; it only maintains truth, which is gold.’ The terminology is chemical, or alchemical: ‘sophistication’ = adulteration or impurity.

  84. CA 522r/192r-a. There follows another payment of ‘200 francs at 48 soldi per franc’ (= approx. 500 lire or 125 scudi). These payments were effected by treasury official Etienne Grolier (father of the author Jean Grolier), whose death in September 1509 is noted on the same folio, in the hand of a pupil, probably Lorenzo.

  85. F, inside cover. The marrying sister was either Lorenziola (married Tommaso da Mapello; widowed by 1536) or Angelina (married Battista da Bergamo; widowed in 1524).

  86. RL 12280. The recto
which contains the list has geometric studies; the verso has a large anatomical drawing transferred from RL 12281. On the date of these sheets, see Clark and Pedretti 1968, 1.78.

  87. CA 669/247a.

  88. On Bossi, see DBI; Bossi 1982. Advice of Goethe: Pedretti 1998c, 122 n.6.

  89. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, SP6/13E/B1.f.100, 196.

  90. M. Armellini, Un censimento della città di Roma sotto il pontificato di Leone X (Rome, 1887), 79, 90; Pedretti 1998c, 128.

  91. A note beside the head on RL 12515 (‘This can be removed without damaging it’) suggests that the braiding worn by the model was a hairpiece.

  92. RL 12281. On the Fabbri gate, see L. Beltrami, La pusterla dei Fabbri (Milan, 1900); it is marked (as ‘fabbri’) on Leonardo’s sketch-map of Milan, RL 19115V. On Alfei and Bellincioni, see Bellincioni 1876, 241–2. A Cremonese woman mentioned by Leonardo in H 62v, c. 1493–4 (‘A nun lives at La Colomba in Cremona, who does good work with straw plait’), seems unlikely to be La Cremona.

  93. RL 12609.

  94. Paolo Maria Terzago, Museum Septalianum (Tortona, 1664), no. 33. In the Bergamo painting the bare-breasted woman is surrounded by flowers. McMullen (1975, 156–7) calls her a ‘cousin’ of the Flora or Columbine: the latter, also at the Hermitage, is attributed to Melzi, though she is not in the Mona Lisa pose. Another well-known ‘Nude Gioconda’ is the frizzy-haired siren at Chantilly, done in black chalk and pricked for transfer (McMullen 1975, 66–7). In his guide to the paintings at Fontainebleau (Paris, 1642), perhaps with these racy variations in mind, Père Dan defended Mona Lisa as ‘a virtuous Italian lady and not a courtesan as some believe’.

  95. Ar 205v, PC 2.248–9.

  96. RL 19009r.

  97. RL 19016.

  98. K 48v.

  99. RL 19017r, R 1494 (text concerning muscles of the feet, beginning ‘Mondino says that…’) and RL 12281.

  100. RL 19063, R 1210.

  101. RL 19071r.

  102. RL 19000v, PC 2.114.

  103. Edward Lucie Smith, ‘Leonardo’s anatomical drawings’, Illustrated London News, November 1979, 94–5.

  104. Kemp 1981, 270–77; RL 19099V; Embolden 1987, 93–4.