by Ross King
Two years later, when it had become widespread across both Italy and France, a physician from Ferrara described this “disease of an unusual nature” in a treatise insistently entitled De morbo Gallico (On the French Disease). He noted how the contagion had either been imported by the French into Italy, or else “Italy had become infested by this disease and by the French arms at the same time.”10 Philosophers and physicians would argue how exactly the disease was contracted, and whether or not it had come to Europe on board Columbus’s galleons. But virtually all were agreed that this dreadful pox (eventually christened syphilis) was a punishment inflicted by God on a wayward society. As the court physician in Ferrara despaired, “We also see that the Supreme Creator, now full of wrath against us for our dreadful sins, punishes us with the cruellest of ills.”11
Leonardo was not the only artist preparing to begin work in Santa Maria delle Grazie in 1495. A local painter named Giovanni Donato da Montorfano was hired—probably by Lodovico Sforza—to paint a Crucifixion scene on the wall opposite the one where Leonardo was to work. Two teams of painters would therefore be at work in the refectory at the same time.12
A Crucifixion scene was almost as common in a convent refectory as a Last Supper—so common, in fact, that in the 1580s a painter marveled at how artists and patrons found the subject an appropriate accompaniment to meals.13 In the refectories of Florence, Last Suppers were often specifically paired with Crucifixion scenes. Taddeo Gaddi’s Last Supper in Santa Croce was painted beneath a massive Crucifixion, also by Gaddi, featuring St. Francis clasping the foot of the cross. In Sant’Apollonia, Andrea del Castagno frescoed an image of Christ on the cross (along with an Entombment and a Resurrection) directly above his Last Supper. These scenes allowed the monks and nuns to identify with Christ’s sufferings and, as they were exhorted, to contemplate the mysteries of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. As one text stressed, the true disciple of Christ must “seek to carry Jesus Christ’s cross in his mind and in his flesh, so that he may truly say and feel within himself the word of Paul the Apostle... Christo confixus sum cruci, that is, I am nailed to the cross with Christ.”14
There may have been another reason why Montorfano was given the commission to fresco a wall in the same room as Leonardo. Patrons were beginning to pair artists off against each other, arranging competitions between or among artists in an attempt to inspire them to greater glories. In 1408, the wardens of Florence’s cathedral commissioned three sculptors, Donatello among them, to carve marble statues of the Evangelists to adorn the facade, with the understanding that the fourth block of marble, and the commission for the fourth Evangelist, would go to the victor. (The competition fizzled when the sculptors lingered so long over their work that the wardens ran short of patience and gave the block of marble to a fourth sculptor.) Later, when Pope Sixtus IV arranged to have a team of painters fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel in the early 1480s, he turned the commission into a contest by offering a prize to the artist whose work he judged the best. According to Vasari, the winner was Cosimo Rosselli, whose gaudy display of gold and ultramarine, though ridiculed by the other painters, impressed the pontiff, a man with unsophisticated artistic tastes.15
Lodovico may well have hoped to prompt Leonardo, notorious for his slow progress, into completing his work in a more timely manner. Yet if the two commissions were planned as part of an informal contest, the competitors were unevenly matched. Little is known of Montorfano’s life other than that he came from a family of Milanese painters long patronized by the Sforza family. A relative named Baptista, probably an uncle, did decorations for Galeazzo Maria in the Castello di Porta Giovia in the early 1470s.16 Giovanni himself probably trained with his father, Alberto, after which he appears to have worked with his brother Vincenzo. His commissions included frescoes in several Milanese churches.
Although a capable craftsman, the thirty-five-year-old Montorfano was certainly not a painter of the caliber of Leonardo. He worked in a more antiquated style, blissfully unconcerned with the Florentine’s attention to naturalistic details or his innovations in movement and expression. However, Montorfano possessed one significant advantage over the man working at the opposite end of the refectory. As his commissions in various of Milan’s churches reveal, by 1495 he had extensive experience in fresco, while Leonardo had never before attempted the difficult task of painting on a plaster wall.
“We must act at once,” Lodovico Sforza had urged the Venetian Senate, and within weeks he had laid plans to drive the French invaders from Italy. Late in the evening on the last day of March 1495, after engaging in what a French ambassador deplored as “artifice and deception,”17 Lodovico compacted a powerful confederacy—a “Holy League”—against the French.
The other members of the Holy League were Pope Alexander VI, the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I, and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. These powers pledged to defend Christendom against the Turks, to preserve the dignity of the church and the rights of the Holy Roman Empire, to respect and protect one another’s territories, and to evict the foreign invaders—to wit, the French—from the Italian peninsula. To this final end, the signatories engaged Francesco II Gonzaga, the Marquess of Mantua, to lead a forty-thousand-strong army against the French. The French ambassador to Venice, learning the terms of the Holy League, trembled for the safety of his king: “I was extremely troubled and concerned for my master’s person,” he wrote, “as I feared that he and his whole army were in great danger.”18
No such concerns clouded the placid horizons of Charles and his army, still enjoying their blissful sojourn in Naples, where the French king (as his ambassador to Venice noted disapprovingly) “minded nothing but his pleasures and his ministers attended to nothing but their own advantage.”19 Charles was effusive about the many delights of his new kingdom. One of the treasures that Alfonso took with him on his escape to Sicily was a collection of seeds from the royal gardens. It would have been small consolation for him to know that Charles truly appreciated these horticultural delights. “My brother,” he wrote to the duke of Bourbon, “this is the divinest land and the fairest city that I have ever seen. You would never believe what beautiful gardens I have here. So delicious are they, and so full of rare and lovely flowers and fruits, that nothing, by my faith, is wanting, except Adam and Eve, to make this place another Eden.”20
Eventually, realizing he needed to retreat from Italy before the Holy League could collect their forces for an assault, Charles was forced to quit his Neapolitan Eden. On 20 May, after helping himself to some of Naples’ historic treasures, including the bronze gates of the castle, he and half his army quit the city. The remainder, some thirteen thousand men, he left behind in an attempt to hold the conquered kingdom in his name. He began marching north toward Rome, which he reached on the first of June, claiming to be coming “as a good son of the Holy Church” and requesting an audience with Pope Alexander VI.21 He had been crowned with much pomp in Naples a fortnight earlier, but without the consent of the pope, the suzerain of Naples, the ceremony had no real meaning. He therefore wanted papal sanction and an official investiture as king of Naples.
Alexander, however, had already headed for the Tuscan hills with twenty of his cardinals, leaving Charles little choice but to depart from Rome after three days. He continued north, and at Poggibonsi, near Siena, he was met by one of his few friends left in Italy, Girolamo Savonarola. The friar berated him for having disappointed God by failing to reform the church, “which, by my mouth, He had charged you to undertake, and to which He had called you by so many unmistakeable signs.” Ever willing to foretell doom, Savonarola gave Charles an urgent warning. Failure to heed God’s commands would bring down on his head “far more terrible misfortunes.”22
Lodovico Sforza was suffering his own misfortunes as Charles and his army entered the Apennine passes on their dangerous journey homeward. The summer had begun hopefully for Lodovico after he compacted the Holy League in the spring. He still appeared to be th
e man who (as the insignia on his harnesses boasted) held the fate of the world in his hands. On 26 May, a huge celebration was staged for him in Milan. Mass was celebrated in the cathedral, after which he emerged through its doors to appear beneath a crimson awning embroidered with mulberry leaves—one of his personal symbols—and raised for the occasion on the piazza outside. After more than a dozen years of plotting and maneuvering, the day had finally arrived for Lodovico to receive his official sanction from the Holy Roman emperor as the duke of Milan.
Lodovico’s diploma from the emperor had arrived, conveniently and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, a few days after the Holy League was signed. Now, in Milan, Lodovico staged a magnificent ceremony for himself. A German bishop and Maximilian’s chancellor took turns reading out the imperial privileges granted by their master, after which they conferred on Lodovico the ducal cap and mantle, and placed into his hands a scepter and the sword of state. Lodovico then moved in procession with his duchess, Beatrice, to the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio to give thanks for his accession to the ducal throne. Beatrice, who had recently given birth to their second son, Francesco, described the occasion to her sister as “the grandest spectacle and noblest solemnity that our eyes have ever beheld.”23 Following the ceremony in Sant’Ambrogio, she and Lodovico returned to the Castello for a punishing round of feasting.
Leonardo was probably involved in these celebrations. At Lodovico’s court he was “the arbiter of all questions relating to beauty and elegance, especially in pageantry.”24 In 1490 he had enjoyed a great triumph with his elaborate stage set for a pageant, The Feast of Paradise, produced by Lodovico in honor of the wedding of his nephew Giangaleazzo to Isabella. Leonardo was selected for such projects not only for his dedication to “beauty and elegance” but also for his talent for achieving spectacular and surprising visual effects through virtuoso engineering. “His genius for invention was astounding,” marveled one writer.25 No plans or drawings for The Feast of Paradise survive, but an eyewitness described how Leonardo designed a complex scenography depicting Paradise in the form of an elevated golden orb surrounded by seven planets, the twelve signs of the zodiac, and “a great number of lights representing stars.” At the climax of the performance, the planets descended—evidently by means of some sort of high-wire trickery—to present Isabella with the play’s libretto.26
Leonardo must have worked on many such productions if Beatrice’s secretary was correct in his claim that new spectacles were staged every month at Lodovico’s court.27 One year after The Feast of Paradise, Leonardo assisted in the decoration of the ballroom in the Castello for Lodovico’s own nuptials, and in designing the “wild man” costumes for actors—the men whose purses young Salai stole—participating in an accompanying festival. Leonardo enjoyed creating spectacles that shocked, especially through the presentation of darker themes. For one pageant he engineered an intricate mechanism by which the side of a mountain swung open to reveal Pluto and his demonic minions frolicking in their fearsome underworld. “When Pluto’s paradise is opened,” reads one of his notes, “then there will be devils, who play on pots to make infernal noises. Here will be death, the furies, Cerberus, many cherubs who weep. Here fires will be made of various colours.”28
Leonardo’s interest in the monstrous and the incendiary was evident from a young age. One of his earliest artistic productions, according to legend, was a wooden buckler—a small shield—given to him by his father to decorate for a local peasant. Young Leonardo assembled in his bedroom “a fearsome and horrible monster” composed of dead lizards, snakes, crickets, locusts, and bats. As this heap of scales and wings rotted and stank, he meticulously painted his monster on the shield, showing it emerging from a cave and shooting smoke from its nostrils and fire from its eyes. When he was finished, he darkened his room and summoned his father. At first terrified by the sight of the ferocious monster, Ser Piero ultimately found the creation “indescribably marvellous and he was loud in his praise of Leonardo’s ingenuity.”29
Leonardo is known, of course, for the “beauty and elegance” of his work. “Leonardo is the one artist,” swooned the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, “about whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty.”30 Yet Leonardo also dwelt on the fantastical and the grotesque, on what might be called infernal beauty. At times he even seems to have believed such things were more powerful and seductive than beauty, science, and reason.
This compulsion for the mysterious and infernal appears in one of his earliest known writings, an intriguing passage composed sometime in the late 1470s. The story he related was probably based on a personal experience of wandering the hills near Vinci, but it quickly takes on symbolic dimensions. He began with a description of how, filled with “eager desire,” he explored a terrain of “gloomy rocks” in search of “various and strange shapes” in the landscape. Before long he came to the mouth of a great cavern, before which he stood astonished. He then had a decision to make. “Bending my back into an arch,” he wrote, “I rested my left hand on my knee and held my right hand over my down-cast and contracted eye brows: often bending first one way and then the other, to see whether I could discover anything inside, and this being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having remained there some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire—fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvellous thing within it.”31
The bottom of the page is reached, but the story—what could be called “The Cave of Fear and Desire”—apparently continued. Leonardo inscribed at the foot of the page the symbol, a loop shaped like the number 6, that he employed to indicate that a passage continued overleaf or on another page. However, the back of the sheet merely deals with scientific problems. The conclusion of the story has never been found, leaving us ignorant of whether his desire overcame his fear, and of what marvelous things he might have glimpsed in the dark and rocky deeps of the grotto.
The allure of fear and danger is explored in one of Leonardo’s other writings, composed in the late 1480s.32 Written in the form of a letter to a friend named Benedetto, it gives a long account of a population terrorized by a giant: a creature with a “black visage,” “swollen and bloodshot eyes,” and a nose “turned up in a snout with wide nostrils” from which thick bristles protrude. Leonardo speaks as a survivor of the horrific tragedy in which this “raging fiend,” to whom every desperate human onslaught “was as nothing,” cut a deadly swath through his helpless Lilliputian attackers. He stresses the vanity and uselessness of human defenses: rational efforts at protection prove hopeless against the malevolent terrors of the frenzied giant. “O wretched folk,” he wrote, “for you there avail not the impregnable fortresses, nor the lofty walls of your cities, nor the being together in great numbers, nor your houses or palaces!”
The moral of the story seems to be the futility of keeping chaos and catastrophe at bay through the kind of engineering in which—ironically—Leonardo himself specialized. No human ingenuity, he stressed, could master the unstoppable energy of the giant. The only hope was to abandon civilization and escape to “tiny holes and subterranean caves.” Here the lucky few survivors, relinquishing their humanity, would live “after the manner of crabs and crickets.”
This story may have been the outline for one of Lodovico’s masques or pageants, or else simply an amusing literary exercise to read aloud to Milanese courtiers or close friends. Leonardo made clear, however, that his story was a tragedy: mothers and fathers are deprived of their children, women of their companions, and never “since the world was created” has such weeping and lamentation been heard. He concluded on a disturbing personal note that sends the story veering into an even darker realm. The narrator, it turns out, has not escaped or survived after all. “I do not know what to say or do,” Leonardo wrote, “for everywhere I seem to find myself swimming head down within the mighty throat and remaining disfigured in death, buried within the h
uge belly.”
“The Cave of Fear and Desire” reappears here as the mouth of the ravening giant into which Leonardo has peered too closely. He identifies so intensely with his fearsome monster that he imagines himself dead and disfigured inside its belly. Leonardo had become a victim of what Joseph Conrad called the “fascination of the abomination”: the hypnotic power of dangerous, mysterious, and destructive forces that operate beyond the reach of human knowledge.33 The fantastical and grotesque, in Leonardo’s story, have comprehensively trampled the rational and scientific.
Leonardo’s productions in Milan functioned, behind their stunning visual effects, as Sforza propaganda. The set for The Feast of Paradise, for example, had included none-too-subtle details such as portraits of Lodovico’s ancestors suspended in a frieze and entwined with garlands. Leonardo also involved himself in another branch of Sforza propaganda by designing emblems for Lodovico. All aristocratic families adopted heraldic symbols and then zealously applied them at every conceivable opportunity. For the Medici in Florence it was the palle, the crimson balls that were the principal components of their coat of arms. For the Visconti, it was a coiled serpent devouring a man, an image adopted by the Sforza when Francesco married into the family.