by Ross King
Andrea del Verrocchio’s The Baptism of Christ
Leonardo appears to have been, in all things, unregimented and independent, willing to disregard fashion, tradition, and precedent. Something else that made him unique was his enthusiasm for depicting the world of nature beyond the bounds of human activity. His first known drawing, done in the summer of 1473, when he was twenty-one, showed an elevated view of the Arno Valley outside Florence: sharp promontories of hill and rock rearing above a plain. The sketch was probably done as a study for the background to a painting, since he seems to have been entrusted with the landscape backdrop in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, which features a mass of sheer cliff thrusting upward from a valley floor. The drawing is celebrated as the first landscape in Western art: the first time that someone regarded the features of the natural world, devoid of human presence, worthy of reproduction. Leonardo carefully dated his sketch: “The day of Our Lady of the Snows, 2 August 1473.” On the reverse of the paper he wrote: “Sono chontento” (I am happy). In the Tuscan hills, studying rock formations and watching birds of prey rising on thermals, Leonardo may indeed have been the happiest.27
Leonardo’s first known drawing, of the Arno River Valley
Rocks, like ringlets, fascinated Leonardo. He spent much time tramping around the hills—the hobby mocked by the poet Guidotto Prestinari. This interest in topography was scientific as well as aesthetic. His notes record observations on the layers of soil and rock in the Arno Valley, such as the deposits of gravel near Montelupo, a conglomerate of tufa near Castelfiorentino, and layers of shells at Colle Gonzoli.28 His rambles were so famous by the time he lived in Milan that he once received a sack full of geological samples from mountain men: “There is to be seen, in the mountains of Parma and Piacenza,” he wrote, “a multitude of shells and corals full of holes, still sticking to the rocks, and when I was at work on the great horse for Milan, a large sackful of them, which were found thereabout, was brought to me into my workshop by certain peasants.”29 Such was Leonardo’s reputation, his eccentric pursuits known by the peasants as far away as Parma and Piacenza.
Leonardo was living and presumably still working with Verrocchio in 1476, when he was in his midtwenties. Why he should have lodged with Verrocchio rather than in his father’s more ample accommodation is a mystery, since also sharing Verrocchio’s house were the goldsmith’s scapegrace younger brother, Tommaso, a cloth weaver, and his sister, Margherita, and her three daughters.30 Had Leonardo fallen out with his father, who following the death of his second wife had recently married for a third time? Ser Piero’s latest bride, Marguerita, was, at the tender age of fifteen, almost a decade younger than Leonardo. In 1476 she gave birth to a boy, Antonio: Ser Piero’s first legitimate child. She would produce five more (including a daughter who died in infancy) before dying in the late 1480s—at which point Ser Piero married for a fourth time and resumed his tally.
Italian literature of the day is full of stories of disputes between fathers and sons. These disputes were a consequence, in part, of a legal system that did not require fathers to emancipate their sons and give them legal rights until they were well into their twenties. The poet and storyteller Franco Sacchetti wrote that “a good many sons desire their father’s death in order to gain their freedom.”31 Leonardo mentioned this intergenerational battle in a surprisingly churlish letter written many years later to his stepbrother Domenico following the birth of Domenico’s first child—“an event,” wrote Leonardo, pen dripping with condescension, “which I understand has given you great pleasure.” He put something of a dampener on the celebrations with the observation that Domenico was imprudently congratulating himself “on having engendered a vigilant enemy, all of whose energy will be directed toward achieving a freedom he will acquire only on your death.”32 It is impossible to know how much Leonardo’s sentiments were formed by writers like Sacchetti—a copy of whose famous collection of stories was in Verrocchio’s workshop—and how much by his own experiences with Ser Piero.
Leonardo probably lived with Verrocchio because he enjoyed the older man’s company. Verrocchio was an intelligent and literate man with sophisticated and wide-ranging interests. Vasari claimed that he studied geometry and the sciences—subjects that appealed to Leonardo—and that he was also a musician. Leonardo, too, was a musician, playing the lyre “with rare execution” and even giving music lessons to pupils.33 He may even have learned his musical skills from Verrocchio: a lute appears on a list of possessions in the master’s workshop. This list also mentions a Bible, a globe, works by Petrarch and Ovid, and Sacchetti’s book of humorous short stories.34
All of these sorts of items would later appear in Leonardo’s own studio in Milan, and these possessions are a testament to, among other things, his sustained interest in the intellectual milieu first discovered in Verrocchio’s house and workshop. Indeed, they suggest that the older man, with his manifold pursuits, was Leonardo’s mentor in matters more than just how to grind pigments or hold a stylus. Leonardo arrived in Florence as a country boy from Vinci with only the rudiments of an education. Verrocchio probably smoothed off some of the young man’s rough edges with—perhaps—evenings of recitals on the lute or discussions of Ovid’s poetry.
But the influence no doubt also went deeper. Verrocchio must have been the one who first awakened Leonardo’s interest in things such as geometry, knots, and musical proportions—and their application to artistic design. His tomb slab for Cosimo de’ Medici is a labyrinth of geometrical symbols whose dominant image, a circle within a square, would reappear in Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. Meanwhile the two interlocking rectovals in Verrocchio’s design for the tomb are repeated in one of Leonardo’s ground plans for a church. Verrocchio designed the slab between 1465 and 1467: around the time when Leonardo entered his workshop. It is easy to imagine the young apprentice studying the intricate design and realizing that mathematics was not merely (as he had learned in his abacus school) a tool for commercial transactions but rather a visible expression of the world’s beauty and truth.
Leonardo also seems to have had another home in Florence. Verrocchio’s Medici connections, coupled with Leonardo’s obvious talents, opened the door on a rare opportunity. The fact that Leonardo lived with and worked for Lorenzo de’ Medici is affirmed by one of Leonardo’s earliest biographers, an anonymous Florentine known (after the Biblioteca Gaddiana, where his manuscript was once kept) as the Anonimo Gaddiano. This manuscript, written in the 1540s, claimed that as a young man Leonardo stayed with Lorenzo the Magnificent, “and with his support he worked in the gardens of his palace in San Marco in Florence.”35
Lorenzo’s sculpture garden was a kind of informal open-air museum through which he hoped to foster the talents of young artists (the adolescent Michelangelo would be admitted in 1489). Besides ancient statues and bronzes, Lorenzo and his curator, a sculptor named Bertoldo, assembled paintings and drawings by artists such as Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico. What work Leonardo did for Lorenzo in return for his salary is unclear, but he would have been able to make a close study of both ancient statuary and modern works of fame.
Equally important, the sculpture garden gave Leonardo access to Lorenzo the Magnificent, the most powerful man in Florence and a wealthy and astute patron of the arts. Lorenzo was probably at least partly responsible for one of Leonardo’s first independent commissions. Early in 1478 he was chosen by the Signoria, Florence’s ruling council, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo della Signoria (now the Palazzo Vecchio). Meanwhile he began several other projects. Toward the end of that year he made a note that he was starting “two Madonna pictures.”36 The patrons for these Madonnas are unknown, but for another work he had a very important client: he was hired to design a tapestry for King John II of Portugal. Again, Lorenzo or someone in his circle may have helped secure this commission, since King John had connections at the Medici court.37 Taking as his subject Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
, Leonardo produced a design that later impressed Vasari: “For diligence and faithfulness to nature,” he wrote, “nothing could be more inspired or perfect.”38
At some point in the 1470s, Leonardo found work with the affluent Benci family, executing a portrait of a young woman, Ginevra de’ Benci. Ser Piero served as the Benci clan’s legal trustee, but Leonardo’s Medici connections no doubt also helped secure this portrait commission, since Ginevra’s father and grandfather both had been managers of the Medici bank, and Lorenzo himself composed sonnets in Ginevra’s honor.39 The man who probably commissioned the work, though, was the Venetian diplomat Bernardo Bembo, who during two embassies in Florence in the 1470s established a close relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici and an even closer one, apparently, with Ginevra.
Another commission came Leonardo’s way in July 1481 when he was hired to paint an Adoration of the Magi for the Augustinian church of San Donato a Scopeto, outside the gates of Florence. Ser Piero no doubt played a vital role in securing the commission since he was the notary for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto. However, the contract for the altarpiece was a strange and complex one for which Leonardo may not have thanked his father. It stipulated that Leonardo should complete the altarpiece within two years, or at most in thirty months; if he failed to deliver, the monks reserved the right to terminate the contract without compensation and take possession of the work, such as it might be. His remuneration was a one-third share in a small property outside Florence originally owned by a saddle maker, the father of one of the monks. Oddly, he was also obliged to provide from his share of the property a dowry for the saddle maker’s granddaughter, a seamstress named Lisabetta.40
Leonardo’s The Adoration of the Magi
Success in Florence, then, seemed to beckon. On the verge of his thirties, Leonardo looked to be establishing himself as a successful workshop master in the stamp of Verrocchio, securing numerous commissions—and very prestigious ones at that—through both his talent and his connections with powerful friends. He probably hired apprentices of his own at this point.
But his work did not proceed auspiciously. Most of these commissions met with unhappy fates. The seamstress Lisabetta did not get her dowry, or at least not from Leonardo. Nor did the monks receive their Adoration of the Magi. Despite further incentives (the monks sent him a bushel of wheat and then a cask of red wine) he failed to complete the work, which remained in a state of frantic and mesmerizing incompletion. Leonardo did, however, finish for the monks another, lesser task. They engaged him to paint one of their sundials, for which he received in return a load of firewood.
Other of Leonardo’s works also went unfinished or undelivered. For some reason, the tapestry design for the king of Portugal was never sent to Flanders, where it was to have been woven in gold and silk. Nor did Leonardo bring to completion his altarpiece for the chapel in the Palazzo Vecchio. His failure to deliver this latter work to the Signoria, the men who employed his father, may have involved Ser Piero in some awkwardness and embarrassment, as did, no doubt, his inability to furnish the dowry and complete the Adoration for the monks of San Donato. His tardiness and delinquency—caused by a combination of distractions, experimentation, a quest for perfection, and a general intellectual restlessness—appear to have been well developed at this early stage of his career. A Florentine poet named Ugolino Verino, surveying Leonardo’s career from the vantage point of the mid-1480s, tut-tutted that he “barely managed to complete a painting in ten years.”41
However bad it may have looked to his disappointed patrons, Leonardo’s failure to complete his work was not the result of incompetence or a lack of resources. Rather, he was frustrated by the extremely high standard he set for himself in his quest for a new visual language. He looked much more closely at the world than his contemporaries, wishing to integrate its features more naturalistically into his art.
A good example of how Leonardo worked can be seen in the painting of a Virgin and Child with a cat that he planned in about 1480. The painting itself was never done, or else has long since been lost, but his scattered sketches show that he repeatedly—and almost obsessively—rehearsed the pose of a toddler holding a cat. Verrocchio used terra-cotta statuettes as models for the Christ Child in his paintings. Leonardo, however, was determined to capture life more accurately and realistically. Since his drawings of the child with the cat date from the late 1470s or early 1480s, it is tempting to see in these vignettes one of Leonardo’s infant half brothers, Antonio (born in 1476) or Giuliano (born in 1479), wrestling with the family cat. Antonio and Giuliano were almost certainly the models for two Madonna and Child paintings that he did finish, Madonna of the Carnation, done between about 1476 and 1478, and the Benois Madonna, painted a year or two later. In each case Leonardo depicts a Christ Child whose unfocused eyes and clumsy grasp were surely based on his actual observation of babies.42
Leonardo believed the painter required a vast store of resources, especially deep powers of observation, since he was to reproduce in his works “all that the eye can see”43—such things as the effect of the wind on trees, or shadows on clouds, or how objects looked underwater. The sight of sun and shadow playing across people and objects obsessed him. He planned to write a treatise on light and shade that would account scientifically for subtle atmospheric effects such as mist and reflected light. The motions of the human body also absorbed him. A sixteenth-century biographer reported that in order to be able to paint joints and muscles realistically Leonardo dissected corpses, “indifferent to this inhuman and nauseating work.”44 No artist had ever peered so deeply into the physical features of men and their world, or struggled so intensively to capture them in paint.
Leonardo was relentlessly inquisitive, seeking answers to a wide variety of phenomena. His notebooks are filled with reminders to ask questions of friends and acquaintances: how a tower in Ferrara was constructed, how the people in Flanders “go on the ice” in winter, how the capon hatches the eggs of the hen.45 He also made his own firsthand investigations, occasionally ones requiring vigor and courage. From the Po Valley near Milan the giant hulk of the 15,203-foot Monte Rosa can be seen rising in the distance, and at some point Leonardo climbed toward one of the summits of this great massif, thereby becoming one of history’s first mountaineers.46 Ascending the jagged slopes to understand, among other things, why the sky was blue, he marveled at how the world looked different at high altitude, with the thin atmosphere making the sun look brighter and the sky darker.47
Leonardo was not content, therefore, to work according to the tried-and-trusted styles of the day, looking at the world with the same eyes as everyone else and churning out altarpieces little different from what painters had been doing for the previous fifty years. Instead, he continually experimented, setting himself almost impossible tasks. He wanted to create entirely unique and different visual forms: ones inspired not by earlier paintings but by the world around him. Many of his contemporaries were highly competent technicians who could create elegant and pleasing works of art to satisfy their patrons. But they did not climb up mountains or study the muscles of corpses. Leonardo had a deeper and more exhilarating vision of the world, and a more ambitious and exacting conception of how art might capture and interpret it.
In about 1482—the precise date, and even the exact year, is uncertain—Leonardo left Florence, armed with his silver horse-head lyre and his letter of credentials. The unfinished commissions smoldered behind him, but in Milan, despite the fresh start, he did little to mend his ways.
Leonardo’s long letter of credentials to Lodovico Sforza reveals a certain amount of reinvention. He failed to mention that he was Verrocchio’s pupil, nor did he describe any of his paintings (completed or otherwise) or the fact that he had done work for such important patrons as the king of Portugal, Bernardo Bembo, the Florentine Signoria, and Lorenzo de’ Medici. He clearly hoped for a career change in Milan: he wanted to work as an architect and military engineer rather than as a painter. He the
refore boasted of his abilities to execute projects (bridges across rivers, tunnels under moats) for which, in reality, he had at best limited experience and, at worst, none whatsoever.
No evidence indicates that Leonardo actively participated in any of these sorts of engineering schemes in Florence. One early source claimed that his expertise in hydraulic engineering was what originally brought him to Milan. Impressed by certain dams constructed by Leonardo along the Renello River, Lodovico supposedly hired him to combine two canals and look after the city’s sewers and floodgates.48 This early experience cannot be verified—and the identity of the “Renello River” is impossible to ascertain—but Leonardo would hardly have made audacious claims for engineering skills if he had no competence or ability. In fact, the design for one of his war machines may have predated his departure for Milan: a wheeled gun carriage that allowed a cannon to adjust its aim through both a vertical calibration and a horizontal pivot. Furthermore, his notebooks reveal that while still living in Florence he drew designs for (but probably did not actually construct) a crossbow, waterwheels, and numerous gears, cranks, and screws, all of which could have had a wide application. These designs testify to his striking ability to visualize solutions to complex technical problems; all that was wanting was the opportunity to implement them.49
Leonardo once wrote that “mechanical science” was the “noblest and the most useful” of all the disciplines.50 His fascination with mechanics and the kind of breathtaking engineering projects to which he aspired possibly dated from—or at least was spurred by—one particular experience in Verrocchio’s workshop. In May 1471, when Leonardo was nineteen, Verrocchio and his team hoisted a two-ton copper ball some three hundred feet into the air to the top of the lantern crowning the dome of the cathedral in Florence. This marvelous feat of engineering clearly enthralled Leonardo, who made drawings of the gears in the Brunelleschian hoists used to perform the task. Painting altarpieces for local politicians or obscure bands of monks must have paled in comparison to such a spectacular undertaking.