by Ross King
This subtle but ingenious play of light is one of the most tragic casualties of the mural’s deterioration. Giampietrino’s copy shows that Leonardo made his painted scene look like part of the refectory by having the fall of light in the painting—coming from an unseen source at the left—correspond to the actual windows opposite the entrance. This interplay of light and shade even extended to the floor, where the legs of the table (as Giampietrino shows) cast their oblique shadows from left to right. The illusion is further enhanced by the fact that the three deeply embrasured windows in the background of the painting make the north wall of the refectory look like it has been pierced. The view through these windows, a luminous expanse of distant hills, mirrors the Italian countryside, while the church glimpsed beyond the head of Christ faithfully reflects, with its square bell tower with the steeply pitched roof, the Lombard architecture in the countryside around Milan.
But this illusionism had its limits. There were a number of disjunctions between the painting and the actual scene in the refectory. For one thing, the figures in Leonardo’s mural are larger than life-size, exceeding by a half the size of the friars, with Christ the largest of all. For another, they were not on the same level: Leonardo’s mural begins some eight feet above the ground, which means Christ and the apostles were elevated well above the heads of the seated friars.
Leonardo included other subtle visual feints. Although he was a master of perspective, he declined to do what might have been expected of him: that is, to make the painted architectural space of his mural look, from the floor, like a smooth continuation of the real architectural space of the refectory. Painters were becoming adept at offering viewers convincing three-dimensional illusions in which the painted architecture of a fresco looked like an extension of the actual room or vault. One of the best examples of this kind of hocus-focus was the choir at the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro in Milan, built by Bramante in the 1480s to house a miracle-working image of the Virgin. A main road behind the church meant there was not enough room to build a full choir, so Bramante frescoed the (flat) back wall to give the appearance of a barrel-vaulted choir with a coffered ceiling—one of the first and most astonishing instances of trompe l’oeil in the history of art.
This technique of mixing reality and illusion would be exploited to great effect over the next two centuries. Artists often offered an ideal spot from which to view their painted illusions. The full effect of one famous example, Andrea Pozzo’s imaginary architecture on the ceiling of the church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome, with its putti, angels, and cloud-borne saints, is best appreciated from the middle of the nave, from a spot helpfully marked by a disk of yellow marble.
The friars on the floor of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie were given no such ideal viewing point.28 The relation between the painting and the actual space of the refectory is ambiguous, with the lateral walls of the refectory failing to extend (as might be expected) into the tapestry-hung walls of Leonardo’s mural. If one stands to the left or right of center, one of the side walls in the refectory appears more or less continuous with those in the painting—but the link between refectory and painting on the other side is then thrown out of kilter. Scholars have only recently discovered that the ideal viewing point (the point at which the perspective is corrected and the illusion perfect) is some thirty feet away from the painted wall and roughly fifteen feet in the air, a spot impossible for the friars to occupy.
Leonardo wrote at some length about how to control and maximize a spectator’s view of a work of art. The problem with single-point perspective, he realized, was that while it made the painting appear to good effect from one single spot in a room, a change of viewpoint distorted the effect. “As the plane on which you paint is to be seen by several persons,” he wrote, “you would need several points of sight, which would make it look discordant and wrong.” What looked good for one friar, in other words, would appear distorted to another seated a few yards away. To compensate for this problem, Leonardo advised painters to have their ideal viewpoint at a far remove from the wall, “at a distance of at least 10 times the size of the objects.” Elsewhere he advised a remove of twenty times the height and width of the objects, a distance that would avoid “every false relation and disagreement of proportion” and “satisfy any spectator placed anywhere opposite to the picture.”29
Leonardo did not quite practice in Santa Maria delle Grazie what he preached in his treatise. Rather than situating the ideal viewing point at a great distance from the wall, he elevated it to an impossible height and then concealed the inconsistencies with some painterly sleight of hand. The perspective, therefore, does not look perfect from any one position on the floor, but nor, thanks to his optical trickery, does it appear especially distorted from any other.
Martin Kemp has shown that the painting’s apparent realism masks what he calls “a series of visual paradoxes.”30 For example, the tapestries on the walls are not uniform in size, since they widen as they get closer to the rear of the chamber. Nor are they in perspective: the flowers are painted flat on the wall rather than being foreshortened along the diagonal. The coffered ceiling in the painting does not meet the horizontal cornice at a ninety-degree angle; instead, it tilts more steeply upward, seeming to continue to the level of the central lunette. Likewise, the space of the table is not clearly defined. It looks too wide for the room, yet at the same time it is too small for the number of figures grouped about it: there are no visible seats from which Peter and Thomas have scrambled. Finally, as we have seen, Leonardo used hieratic rather than linear perspective to make Christ significantly larger than the other apostles. He is a giant compared to John, who sits next to him, and as tall as Bartholomew and Philip, even though he is seated and they are standing.
The end result is not quite an Escher-like visual paradox, but for those who look closely enough there is much hocus-focus, albeit so cleverly concealed that most people fail to notice.
Lodovico Sforza was not yet finished with Leonardo. There was still time, as Il Moro’s enemies gathered their strength, for a few final projects. In the spring of 1498 Leonardo was sent to inspect the ruined defenses in the harbor at Genoa, an ancient French possession ruled for the past two decades by Milan. The mole had been damaged by a storm the previous month, and the duke was anxious to have it repaired before the French—who had tried to retake Genoa a year earlier—attacked from the sea. Around this time Leonardo also investigated how to breach walls by hurling missiles at them.31 No doubt his dreams of designing cannons, catapults, and giant crossbows, dormant these past few years, quickly revived as the swords began rattling on Milanese borders.
If Leonardo hoped his talent and ingenuity were to be used for the defense of the realm, he must have been, as always, sorely disappointed: soon he was back at work on interior decorations. Besides painting the portraits of Lodovico and his late wife into Montorfano’s Crucifixion, he was completing the decoration of a room in the Castello known as the Sala delle Asse (Room of the Wooden Boards). He was also preparing to resume his work—apparently begun at the end of 1495—in the Saletta Negra (Little Black Room), one of the private rooms in the Ponticella, the covered bridge spanning the moat.
Nothing has survived of Leonardo’s work in the Saletta Negra, but its name suggests that somber decorations were in order. A visitor to Milan a year earlier, following the duchess’s death, remarked that Lodovico had hung the walls of the Castello in black, and the rituals of mourning evidently extended to the Ponticella, the suite of rooms to which Lodovico retreated with Beatrice, in their private moments of leisure, to escape the demands of court.
Leonardo’s other decoration for the duke, in the Sala delle Asse, a room in the Castello’s northeast tower, was more exuberant but also, inevitably, extremely poignant. Here Leonardo and his helpers created a beautiful painted forest. Sixteen trees (probably meant to represent mulberries) spread their branches in complex intertwining patterns across the walls, over the windows and d
oors, and onto the lush canopy of the vault. Tablets on the vault commemorate various of Lodovico’s recent triumphs, such as his investiture as duke of Milan, the politically advantageous marriage of his niece Bianca, and his trip to Germany with Beatrice to cement his alliance with Maximilian. Woven into the design and running throughout the entire decoration is a continuous golden rope.
These beautiful decorations, especially the golden rope, would have been redolent of the late duchess. Beatrice made knot patterns popular on Milanese clothing in the 1490s, as exemplified in Leonardo’s portrait La Bella Principessa. They were referred to as fantasie dei vinci, a reference to the dolci vinci—the sweet bonds of love—mentioned in Canto XIV of Dante’s Paradiso. The golden rope twisting its way through the mulberry trees was probably an allusion to the bonds of love in which Beatrice held Lodovico.32
Leonardo need not have painted the Sala delle Asse by himself: large parts would have been given to his assistants. But the ingenious design was unquestionably all his own. He, like Beatrice, loved knots, and vinci is even Italian for knots. They had the same aesthetic appeal for Leonardo as curly hair and Platonic solids. When he inventoried his drawings and other works soon after he arrived in Milan he included on the list “many designs for knots” and “a head of a girl with her hair gathered in a knot.”33 His portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, Lady with an Ermine, shows the sitter wearing a gown with knots on the neckline, and the subject of La Belle Ferronière has knot patterns on her sleeves and in her hair. It may be that the Milanese vogue for knot patterns in clothing and hair in the 1490s owed something to Leonardo’s own tastes and designs. One of his notes, alluding to his work as a dress and costume designer, describes how to make “a beautiful dress” cut from thin cloth and stenciled with “a pattern of knots.”34
Lodovico may have had one more project in mind for Leonardo. In 1497, as we have seen, he wanted the painter to “attend to the other wall of the refectory.” This reference is usually taken to mean that Leonardo was to paint the portraits of Milan’s first family into Montorfano’s Crucifixion. This commission was indeed carried out, possibly by Leonardo in 1497 or 1498. However, the portraits have survived in such a poor condition (all of the paint has flaked off) that determining the extent of Leonardo’s involvement is impossible. One Leonardo scholar has put forward another intriguing theory: he suggests that Lodovico may have wished Leonardo to remove Montorfano’s fresco—which paled in comparison to The Last Supper—and paint an entirely new mural on the south wall of the refectory.35 It is a scenario that, if true, makes what was to follow even more tragic.
The end for Lodovico came swiftly and mercilessly. Early in 1499 the French and the Venetians signed the Treaty of Blois, which provided for them to split the duchy between them once they ousted Lodovico from power. The Venetians immediately stationed twelve thousand soldiers on Milan’s eastern frontier.
These two hostile powers invited the pope to join their anti-Sforza league. Alexander initially rebuffed their advances, urging Louis XII not to attack Milan. However, Alexander and Louis soon saw eye to eye over a pair of marriages. Louis wanted the pope to allow him to divorce his wife, Jeanne, a pious woman whose mouthwatering dowry had once persuaded him to overlook her cruel bodily deformities (“I did not believe she was so ugly!” exclaimed Jeanne’s own father, King Louis XI, after seeing her for the first time when she was eleven).36 He now wished to replace her with his niece, Charles VIII’s widow, Anne of Brittany, who would give him the duchy of Brittany (and also, he hoped, an heir: his marriage to Jeanne had been childless).
The pope, meanwhile, was hoping to arrange a politically advantageous marriage for his son Cesare. The prospect of marrying Cesare to a French princess (Louis was offering a choice of two) and thereby getting him a dukedom changed his way of thinking about both the king’s divorce and the contest between France and Milan. “The Pope is quite French since the Most Christian King has offered a duchy to his son,” Ascanio Sforza glumly reported to his brother.37 Ascanio protested to the pope that Cesare’s voyage to France would mark the ruin of Italy; the pope reminded him that Il Moro had been the one who invited the French into Italy in the first place. Ascanio soon found it prudent to slip out of Rome and return to Milan. Lodovico, meanwhile, composed his will, stating that he wished to be entombed next to Beatrice in Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Lodovico had few friends left in Italy. Even many of his own people, burdened with heavy taxes, secretly supported a French invasion: a chronicler reported that “the greater part of the Milanese desired the coming of the King.”38 Lodovico could count on little help from Maximilian. Already busy fighting the Swiss, the emperor had little wish to venture back onto Italian soil, the scene of his earlier disgrace. Never one to scruple about inviting dangerous enemies into Italy in order to save his skin, Lodovico turned for help to the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II. In July, despite his depleted coffers, he was rumored to have sent two hundred thousand ducats to the “Gran Turco” for his assistance in fighting the Venetians. “The Turk will reach Venice,” one diplomatic report quoted him saying, “as soon as the French do Milan.”39
The Turks did indeed begin raiding Venetian territory in the summer of 1499, burning villages and taking thousands of prisoners; at one point they came within twenty miles of Venice’s lagoon. But even the Gran Turco’s intervention came too late for Lodovico. At the beginning of August a French army of some thirty thousand men, commanded by Trivulzio, mustered at Asti. On the thirteenth they attacked, taking fortress after fortress, and (in a brutal reprisal of the “terror of Mordano”) massacring the garrison at Annone. On the other side of the duchy, a Venetian army crossed the eastern frontier singing, “Ora il Moro fa la danza!” (Now the Moor will do a dance!). Panic and disorder broke out in Milan. The homes of Sforza loyalists were attacked. Galeazzo Sanseverino’s palazzo and stables were sacked, and Lodovico’s treasurer was beaten to death in the street by a mob. A Milanese chronicler described the destruction of another nearby home, “recently built and not yet completed”: that of Il Moro’s chamberlain Mariolo de’ Guiscardi.40 Leonardo’s sole architecture commission, it seems, went up in smoke even before it was completed.
The combination of mob violence and French steel were too much for Lodovico. On the second of September, ill with gout and asthma, he fled the city with Sanseverino and an armed escort, riding north for a refuge in Germany. First, however, he mounted his black charger and, donning a black cape, went to Santa Maria delle Grazie to kneel at the tomb of his wife.
A Venetian diarist was awed by the duke’s sudden downfall. “Only think, reader,” he wrote, “what grief and shame so great and glorious a lord, who had been held to be the wisest of monarchs and ablest of rulers, must have felt at losing so splendid a state in these few days, without a single stroke of the sword.”41
Leonardo, like the Venetian diarist, was chastened by Lodovico’s downfall. He was also angry. His observation, scrawled on the back cover of one of his notebooks, reads bitterly: “The Duke has lost the state, property and liberty, and none of his enterprises was carried out by him.”42 The judgment is a harsh one, but Leonardo’s bitterness is understandable. He may have witnessed the destruction of the villa he was building for Mariolo de’ Guiscardi, while an even more precious enterprise—the equestrian monument—also came to final ruin with the invasion of the French.
Leonardo seems to have spent the weeks before the fall of Il Moro in his usual way, avidly pursuing his own studies in the Corte dell’Arengo. “On the 1st of August 1499,” reads one of his notes, “I wrote here of motion and of weight.”43 He also seems to have resumed or continued work on the equestrian monument, since another note from this period suggests that his experiments on how to cast the gigantic bronze statue were ongoing. Next to the drawing of the statue of a man in a casting mold (presumably Francesco Sforza) he wrote, “After you have finished it and let it dry, set it in a case.”44 Leonardo may have been planning to turn part of his new property beside Sa
nta Maria delle Grazie into a foundry where he would cast the statue and its rider. It seems likely that at some point in 1498 or 1499 he transported the giant clay model from the Corte dell’Arengo to this vineyard, a distance, as the crow flies, of almost exactly a mile.
The model for the clay horse was probably sitting in the vineyard when, on 9 September, a week after Lodovico’s flight from Milan, a vanguard of French troops entered the city through the Porta Vercellina, the gate nearest Santa Maria delle Grazie. Many years later, in 1554, a Knight Hospitaller named Sabba da Castiglione described the ensuing events. Castiglione was born in Milan about 1480 and was probably in the city to witness the invasion. More than fifty years later, he could not speak of what happened without “grief and indignation.” The equestrian model was “shamefully ruined,” he lamented, when Gascon crossbowmen used it for target practice.45 Although Castiglione did not identify the location of the model at the time of the incident, the horse would have been especially vulnerable to the archers if it sat in the vineyard outside the Porta Vercellina.
Leonardo likewise had reason to fear for his work in Santa Maria delle Grazie. One reason why the equestrian monument provided such an irresistible target to the crossbowmen was that it was, of course, a symbol of the Sforza regime. Lodovico had wanted The Last Supper, like the bronze horse, to celebrate the Sforza name. Its family crests and the portraits of prominent courtiers gave it unmistakable and perilous associations with the ousted duke. There was also the danger, as ever with the French, of casual despoliation. Their occupations of Florence in 1494 and Naples in 1495 had witnessed widespread looting. Five years later, the plundering resumed. From Pavia, twenty-seven portraits of members of the Visconti and Sforza families were stolen. In Milan, gems and marbles were looted from the Castello, and Trivulzio helped himself to Lodovico’s tapestries. The homes of Lodovico’s supporters in the quarter outside the Porta Vercellina—Leonardo’s new neighbors—were occupied by the French. The invaders also took control of the Castello, which Lodovico’s castellan treacherously surrendered in exchange for money. “In the Castello there is nothing but foulness and dirt, such as Signor Lodovico would not have allowed for the whole world!” complained a Venetian witness to the occupation. “The French captains spit upon the floor of the rooms, and the soldiers outrage women in the streets.”46 In the Sala delle Asse, one of the four tablets celebrating Lodovico’s achievements was defaced so thoroughly it is impossible to know what it once said.