Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  105. Beltrami 1919, doc. 206.

  106. G 1r. Further observations on the Brianza lakes: CA 740r/275r-a.

  107. Mountains on red paper: RL 12410–16. ‘Gravel stones are whiter than the water’: RL 12412.

  108. RL 12416.

  109. RL 19092v, R 1436.

  110. RL 12400. Kemp (1989, 73) has a photograph of the same stretch of the Adda today.

  111. CA 173r/61r-b; Embolden 1987, fig. 36. Cupolas: CA 414b/153r–e; Embolden 1987, fig. 37. See also RL 19107V, with architectural studies of Villa Melzi, and a bird’s wing related to flight studies in MS E. An engraving of Villa Melzi by Telemaco Signorini, c. 1885, is in Nanni and Testaferrata 2004, fig. 38.

  112. RL 19077V. On the siege of Trezzo, see Clark and Pedretti 1968, 3.32; L. Beltrami, Miscellanea Vinciana 1 (Milan, 1923).

  113. RL 12579.

  114. Clark 1988, 237–8; see also Clayton 2002, 68–71, on two other portraits of aged men (RL 12499, 12500): ‘An old bearded man drawing an old bearded man cannot have been oblivious to an element of self-portraiture.’

  115. RL 12726; Clayton 2002, 110. On the copy at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, see L. Beltrami, ‘Il volto di Leonardo’, Emporium 49 (1919), 5. As well as the woodcut portraits in Vasari’s Lives (1568 edn) and Giovio’s Imagines clarorum virorum (1589), there are painted portraits in the Museo Giovio, Como (1536); in the Uffizi (late sixteenth century: see Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 85); and in a private collection (triple portrait showing Dürer, Leonardo and Titian, attributed to the workshop of Angelo Bronzino, c. 1560–65; see Vezzosi 1997, 128.) A fresco of the Last Supper at San Rocco, Inzago, was widely publicized after its restoration as being by Leonardo in c. 1500, and as containing a self-portrait in a bearded disciple (Times, 24 April 2000). These claims are self-cancelling: the disciple in question is too old to be a self-portrait of c. 1500, when Leonardo was forty-eight (and when he looked, as I have argued, like Bramante’s Heraclitus in the Casa Panigarola fresco). However, the disciple has some similarities with the bearded, elderly portraits of Leonardo; if the fresco could be re-dated to c. 1512 or after, the disciple might conceivably be a portrait of him, though not a very good one. This dating would also raise the possibility that the fresco was painted by the Leonardesco artist Bernazzano, who was a native of Inzago (b. 1492).

  116. RL 12300v, tentatively accepted as a portrait of Leonardo by Clark (Clark and Pedretti 1.17) and more enthusiastically by Clayton (2002, 110–12).

  117. See, for example, reverse images found on the versos of one of the Madonna and Child with a Cat drawings (BM 1826–6–21–1v); of a sketch for the Trivulzio monument (RL 12356v); of the template for the Burlington House cartoon (BM 1875–6–12–17V); and many others.

  118. Church of San Pietro e San Paolo (including the former abbey of the Gerolamini or Jeromites), Ospedaletto Lodigiano. The village lies 13 miles south of Lodi. The abbey was constructed in the fifteenth century, under the patronage of the Balbi family of Milan; the site was formerly a piligrims’ hospice, the Ospedale di Senna, from which comes the name of the village. It is briefly described by Antonio de Beatis, who spent the night of 1 January 1518 there (Beatis 1979, 184–5). Giampietrino’s contacts with the Jeromites of Ospedaletto date from August 1515 (C. Geddo, ‘La Madonna di Castel Vitoni’, ALV 7 (1994), 67–8; Marani 1998c, 282–3). The altarpiece (a polyptych, now dismembered but all parts in situ) was restored in 1996. St Jerome, revered by the Jeromites, is fittingly given the features of Leonardo, revered by Giampietrino.

  PART EIGHT: Last Years, 1513–1519

  1. Beltrami 1919, doc. 215. The name is probably a misreading of Prevostino Piola or Piora, to whom Piattino Piatti dedicated an epigram (Elegiae, 1508, viir); his sister was the stepmother of the Sforza chronicler Bernardino Corio (Villata 1999, no. 285 n. 2).

  2. Barbara Stampa: CA 2r/1r-c; Vecce 1998, 301. Mrs Crivelli and the capon: RL 19101r. The query appears, curiously enclosed in a frame that makes it look like an inscription, above a picture of female genitalia. The sheet, which the Crivelli reference dates to 1513 or earlier, contains the beautiful drawing of a foetus (see Plate 30).

  3. Stages of the journey: CA 26ov/95r-f. Carriage fee to Rome: CA 1113r/400r-b. The latter sheet has a note of distances: ‘Milan–Florence, 180 miles; Florence-Rome, 120 miles’. The date of his arrival in Florence is not certain. Beltrami transcribed a document from Santa Maria Nuova as showing that Leonardo deposited 300 florins there on 10 October 1513, but Laurenza (2004, 21–2) shows that this is a misreading.

  4. CA 225r/83r-a, PC 2.351. The list is sometimes dated 1515 (when Leonardo was once again in Florence).

  5. Letter to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513 (Machiavelli 1961, 19): ‘It should be welcome to a prince, especially a new prince, and so I dedicate it to his Magnificence Giuliano.’ In the event the book was dedicated to Giuliano’s nephew Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino.

  6. C. Pedretti, ALV 6 (1993), 182.

  7. ‘GLOVIS’: Vecce 1998, 309. ‘Thoughts turn to hope’: CA 190v/68v-b, with a sketch of a bird in a cage, probably a calandrino or meadow-lark, popularly supposed (as explained in Leonardo’s bestiary, H 5r) to offer a prognosis to the sick – hopeful unless the bird refused to look at you, in which case you were going to die.

  8. Beltrami 1919, doc. 218. Giuliano’s Roman residence was the Palazzo degli Orsini (today Palazzo Taverna) at Montegiordano, near the Castel Sant’Angelo; perhaps Leonardo was accommodated there while his studio and living quarters were made ready at the Belvedere.

  9. ‘Sewer of iniquity’: letter to Giovanni de’ Medici (Hibbert 1979, 204–5), written in early 1492, when Giovanni was elected cardinal. Syphilis among priests: Cellini 2002, 44, calling it the ‘French disease’. The word ‘syphilis’ was not yet in use: it derives from a poem by Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis (1530), whose protagonist is a shepherd punished by Apollo with a dose of the pox.

  10. Embolden 1987, 57–62.

  11. See Part III n. 23.

  12. CA 244v/90v-a.

  13. De Ludo geometrico: CA 124v/45v-a. Geometric lunes or lunulae: CA 266r/ 97r-a, 272v/99v-b, 316/114r-b, v-b. Cf. Pedretti 1965, 161–2.

  14. Raphael, who painted Giuliano de’ Medici’s portrait (see illustration on p. 458), is possibly the ‘Rafaello da Urbino’ named in two rosters of Giuliano’s household employees, April 1515 (ASF, Carte Strozziane I/10, 178–9; Laurenza 2004, app. 3). But his appearance among tailors and gatekeepers seems odd, and this may be an unknown namesake. On an artistic echo of Leonardo in Raphael’s Roman work, see n. 23. Castiglione probably met Leonardo in Milan in the 1490s; he was then a student at the university, and had contacts at the Sforza court (cf. Part V n. 89). Passages in The Courtier, which he was working on in Rome, suggest his familiarity with Leonardo’s paragone or comparison between painting and sculpture, presented to Ludovico before 1498 (Castiglione 1967, 96–102). He names Leonardo (with Mantegna, Raphael, Giorgione and Michelangelo) as one of the ‘eccellentissimi’ painters of the day (ibid., 82), and is doubtless referring to him when he writes, ‘One of the world’s finest painters despises the art for which he has so rare a talent, and has set himself to study philosophy; and in this he has strange notions and fanciful revelations that, if he tried to paint them, for all his skill he couldn’t’ (ibid., 149). Atalante: a fragment of a letter addressed to ‘Talante’ (CA 890r/325r-b) probably dates from this time.

  15. Fossils on Monte Mario: CA 253v/92v-c (‘Get them to show you where the shells are on Monte Mario’), a fragmentary page containing geometrical lunes. Monte Mario lies to the north of the Vatican City. Accounts: CA 109b/39r–b, 259r/94r-b. The giulio (minted by Pope Julius II) was worth about a lira.

  16. E 80r, 96r.

  17. CA 819r/299r-a, in the hand of Melzi. It seems Ser Giuliano had artistic pretensions: a notarial book preserved in ASF has some doodled sketches which Pedretti calls ‘Leonardesque’ (PC 1.400). According to Milanesi (Vasari 1878–85, 6.25), he was commissioned to design al
legorical figures for the Florence carnival in 1516, and later that year he was in Bologna on a diplomatic mission for the Signoria (ASF, Signore Responsive 35, 214).

  18. Vasari apparently saw these paintings (one a Madonna and Child, the other of a ‘little boy’) at the house of Turini’s son Giulio in Pescia, but nothing else is known of them.

  19. CA 780v/287v-a, PC 2.388–90.

  20. E 4v. Other notes on vocal acoustics, with detailed studies on the internal structure of the mouth, throat and trachea, are in RL 19002, 19044–5, 19050, 19055, 19068 etc.

  21. G, cover. On the same date the Pope ratified a gift to Giuliano of a large tract of the unsalubrious Paludi Pontine, or Pontine Marshes, south of Rome. Leonardo’s coloured map RL 12684 is probably the result of a survey of the area he undertook in the spring or early summer of 1515.

  22. Lomazzo cited in Rosheim 2000, 6–7. Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger (Michelangelo’s nephew) describes Leonardo’s device as ‘set to work for the Florentine nation’: Descrizione delle nozze di Maria Medici (Florence, 1600), 10. See C. Pedretti, ‘Leonardo at Lyon’, RV 19 (1962).

  23. RL 12328r. For arguments about the dating of the half-length St John, see Zöllner 2003, 248, Laurenza 2004, 33–4, and sources given there. An angel which appears in two Raphael drawings of c. 1514 (Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, 1707; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 538) has strong similarities to Leonardo’s St John, which may strengthen the Roman date for the painting, but which could also refer back to this earlier Florentine prototype of the announcing angel.

  24. Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basle; Clark 1988, plate 118, dated by him c. 1505–7. Bandinelli drawing: current whereabouts unknown, see photograph in Pedretti 2001, 44. The former may be the painting owned by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, as described by Vasari: ‘a head of an angel who lifts one arm in the air, foreshortened from the shoulder to the elbow, coming forwards [venendo innanzi, i.e. towards the viewer], and the other arm touching his chest with one hand’ (Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 110).

  25. CA 395ar/146r-b; Accademia, Venice, no. 138.

  26. There is a theory that it was stolen from Windsor in the nineteenth century. According to Brian Sewell (Sunday Telegraph, 5 April 1992), ‘It was well known that the Royal Collection had once contained a number of pornographic drawings by Leonardo. I remember being fascinated by the story when I worked for a while in the Royal Library. The whole episode had passed into the mythology of the place. According to the version I heard, a large man in a Sherlock Holmes cape had arrived one day to have a look at the drawings. He was reputed to be a very eminent German scholar. It was not until some time later that the drawings were found to be stolen… There is no doubt that the drawings were a considerable embarrassment, and I think everyone was very relieved to find that they’d gone.’ Sewell adds that both Kenneth Clark and Anthony Blunt deliberately chose not to mention this in their studies of the Queen’s collections.

  27. A. Green, ‘Angel or demon?’ (1996), in Pedretti 2001, 91–4.

  28. From the concluding address by Dr Laurie Wilson at ‘Renaissance and Antiquity: Vision and Revision: A Psychoanalytical Perspective’, New York, 23 March 1991: the congress at which the Angelo was first exhibited.

  29. A. Pucci, La reina d’oriente (Bologna, 1862), canto 3, 42. On Leonardo’s knowledge of this poem, see Part IV n. 52.

  30. British Library, Cotton MS Titus C6, 7; Harley MS 6848, 185–6. See C. Nicholl, The Reckoning (London, 2nd edn, 2002), 321–7, 389.

  31. On Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus (Gallería Borghese, Rome, c. 1593) and other Bacchus paintings, see Maurizio Calvesi, ‘Caravaggio, o la recerca della salva-zione’, in José Frèches, Caravaggio: pittore e ‘assassino’, trans. Claudia Matthiae (Milan, 1995), 148–51.

  32. First described by Cassiano dal Pozzo (Vatican, Barberiniano Latino 5688), with the comment ‘It is a very delicate work but it does not greatly please because it does not encourage devotion, nor does it have decorum.’ It is ‘St Jean au desert’ in the Fontainebleau catalogues of Père Dan (1642) and Le Brun (1683), and ‘Baccus’ in that of Paillet (1695). ‘Desert’ merely means a deserted place or wilderness. See Marani 2000a, no. 25; Zöllner 2003, 249.

  33. See H 22v, R 1252: ‘The panther is all white and spotted with black marks like rosettes.’ Cf. Dante, Inferno, canto 1, 32: ‘a panther [lonza], light and nimble and covered with a speckled skin’. The name is now generally applied to American cats (pumas, jaguars, cougars, etc.) which are unspotted. Leonardo also says, ‘The panther in Africa has the form of a lioness,’ following a traditional notion that panthers were female and leopards male.

  34. Private collection, Ottino della Chiesa 1967, 109. Clark thought it possible that Cesare had painted the Louvre St John in the Desert as well, from a Leonardo drawing (Clark 1988, 251); the soft, poetic landscape is reminiscent of Bernazzano, who supplied landscapes for some of Cesare’s paintings. A red-chalk study, formerly at the Museo del Sacro Monte, Varese, but now lost, may be a copy of an original Leonardo cartoon (ibid., plate 119).

  35. The three Greek words are transliterated in Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis (Bk 36, ch. 29), a book mentioned in all Leonardo’s book-lists.

  36. BN 2038 19v, R 654.

  37. BN 2038 21r, R 606.

  38. Leic 22v, cf. 30V; F 37V, from a text headed ‘Book 43: Of the movement of the air shut in beneath water’.

  39. RL 12665 (R 608–9). Cf. CA 215r/79r-c, 419r/155r-a (R 610–11), 302r/108v-b, all of c. 1515.

  40. G 6v.

  41. RL 12377–86 (Zöllner 2003, nos. 451–60) are a unified series; two others, RL 12376 (which relates to the note on G 6v) and RL 12387, are probably earlier. Popham calls the series an ‘experiment in abstract design hardly repeated in Europe till modern times… The scientist has in these drawings been totally submerged: it is some inner rhythmic sense which dictates to Leonardo the abstract forms of these vision’ (Popham 1946, 95–6).

  42. CA 671r/247v-b. The drafts of this letter are scattered among various folios, sometimes repetitious: see also CA 768r/283r-a, 500r/182v-c, 252r/92r-b, 1079v/ 389v-d (R 1351–1353A).

  43. CA 213v/78v-b, R 855.

  44. See Part I n. 43.

  45. CA 429r/159r-c, R 1368A.

  46. ASF, Carte Strozziane I/io, 160r; Laurenza 2004, app. 2. This is a schedule of monthly payments (‘provisione’) to Giuliano’s retainers, datable to April–July 1515, not as previously thought a payment connected with the papal progress to Bologna at the end of the year. Leonardo receives 40 ducats, of which 33 are for his own provisione and 7 for ‘Giorgio Tedesco’. Gian Niccolò ‘of the wardrobe’, mentioned in Leonardo’s letter, receives 11 ducats; Giuliano’s secretary, Piero Ardingerli, 6.

  47. Giovanni was not an assistant, as is often said: the letter makes it clear he is an independent master with a separate studio in the Belvedere; no documentation of him has yet been found.

  48. G34r, R 885.

  49. CA 534v/199v-a. This beautiful catchphrase is part of a polemic against imitators; the passage begins with the recommendation to study and sketch ‘in the streets, and in the piazza, and in the fields’ quoted on pp. 5–6.

  50. Ar 88r. Cf. Ar 73, 78, 84ff., all dated by Pedretti c. 1506–8.

  51. G 84V (see p. 95), in the context of parabolic mirrors for solar power. Calculations of the power produced are on the following page (G 85r).

  52. Pyramidical power-point: CA 1036av/371v-a; cf. CA 750r/277r-a, which gives dimensions of the pyramid (base with sides of 4 braccia = 8 feet or 2.4 metres). Astronomical use: Ar 279v, PC 2.135.

  53. G 75v: ‘ignea’ written backwards. A similar tic of secrecy is in Ar 279–80, where material on the solar mirrors is misleadingly headed ‘perspectiva’. These relate to the alleged snooping activities of Giovanni degli Specchi.

  54. RL 19102r, cf. 19101v, 19128r, etc.; on the later date of the notes see Laurenza 2004, 12–14. ‘The’ hospital (CA 671r/247r-b) suggests Santo Spirito, but an alternative possibility for the location of his
Roman dissections is Santa Maria della Consolazione, on the Campidoglio.

  55. The papal bull Apostolici regiminis, promulgated in December 1513, condemned those who questioned the immortality of the soul as ‘detestable and abominable heretics’. Pomponazzi’s suppressed work was De immortalitate animae (Rome, 1516). See G. di Napoli, L’immortalità dell’anima nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1963).

  56. C. Frommel, ‘Leonardo fratello della Confraternità della Pietà dei Fiorentini a Roma’, RV 20 (1964), 369–73.

  57.CA 179v/63v-a, R 769A.

  58. Landucci 1927, 205.

  59. CA 15r/3r-b.

  60. CA 865r/315r-b. Another folio (CA 264v/96v-a) has plans for ‘the Magnifico’s stables’. Unlike the others, this was a project which became a reality: work began on the Medici stables the following year.

  61. Vasari 1878–85, 8.159.

  62. Vasari saw the Melzi portrait-drawing in Milan in 1566; he was then still at work on the Palazzo Vecchio frescos (completed January 1572). He may also have known the portrait of Leonardo owned by Paolo Giovio (Museo Giovio, Como), also derived from the Melzi drawing: see Part VII n. 115.

  63. Pedretti 1953, 117–20. Leonardo’s presence in Bologna on 14 December 1515 adds to doubts about the genuineness of a letter, now lost, purportedly written by him from Milan on 9 December. The letter (Uzielli 1872, no. 23; PC 2.304) is addressed to ‘Zanobi Boni, mio castaldo [i.e. my steward or major domo]’, and reproves him for the poor quality of ‘the last four flagons of wine’, which had disappointed him because ‘the vines of Fiesole, if they were better managed, should produce the best wine in our part of Italy.’ There is no other evidence of this Zanobi, nor of any vineyards in Fiesole owned by Leonardo (though some might argue this strengthens the letter’s claims, as forgers tend to exploit known connections rather than invent unknown ones). In 1822 the letter was owned by a collector named Bourdillon, who had purchased it from ‘a lady residing near Florence’. It has some interesting viticultural advice, but it seems unlikely that the advice is Leonardo’s.