Leonardo da Vinci

by Abraham, Anna

  Another early notebook, now in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, features a series of drawings of Archimedean screws for lifting water, with a long spiral turning inside a snugly fitted tube to force the water upward. There are also notes on grammar and vocabulary, lists of books he owns, drafts of letters, abstruse riddles, architectural notes and drawings, satiric stories written to entertain his friends, and jokes. The jokes were dense with puns, which was sometimes their only point – for example, his tongue-in-cheek substitution of lauro, the bay-tree, for Laura, to whom the poet Petrarch addressed his love poems: “If Petrarch was so madly in love with bay-leaves, it’s because they taste so good with sausage and thrush.”

  But the early success in Milan seemed hollow. After five years as one of Ludovico’s courtiers, Leonardo had little to show for it. There’s no record of any ducal commissions, stipends, or even handouts. One of Leonardo’s drawings involves remodeling a pavilion in the Sforza castle garden, but it’s unknown if the plan was carried out or whether Leonardo was paid for it. But then, in 1489 or 1490, Leonardo was chosen to paint Ludovico’s young mistress, Cecilia Gallerani.

  Cecilia was in her mid-teens, the daughter of a good but not wealthy Milanese family, and her affair with Ludovico has been underway for some two years. By all accounts, he was so besotted with Cecilia that he was delaying his arranged marriage to Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara.

  The wedding did occur, in January 1491, if only because it was part of a triple alliance that would cement a new political order in northern Italy. As Ludovico married Beatrice, her sister Isabella married Francesco Gonzaga II, Marquis of Mantua, and her brother Alfonso d’Este, who would become the Duke of Ferrara, was being wed to Ludovico’s niece, Anna Sforza. The Gonzaga had feuded with the Visconti while they ran Milan, but the three marriages linked to the d’Este clan, one of the oldest in Italy, now gave Mantua Milan as an ally. And the parvenu Sforza now had both Ferrara and Mantua on his side.

  Even after Ludovico’s wedding, however, the Ferraran ambassador to Milan reported that the duke had confided to him that he wanted to be with Cecilia and that Beatrice was refusing to consummate the marriage until he gave up his mistress. Soon, nature took a hand: Cecilia was heavily pregnant and was sent from Ludovico’s private rooms to an apartment in the city. Her son was born in May.

  It was probably early in the pregnancy when Leonardo painted Cecilia’s portrait, “Lady with an Ermine.” Slim and graceful, fashionably but not richly coiffed and dressed, she is cradling an ermine – a kind of weasel whose coat turns white in winter. (In the portrait, the ermine’s pelt has been yellowed by layers of varnish.) Since the animal’s name in Greek is galè, it is a visual pun on her name, Gallerani. Perhaps more significant, Ludovico himself had recently been invested in the Order of the Ermine by the King of Naples and was using the title, L’Erminello. In Leonardo’s painting, the ermine is vigilant and muscular, with its claws clutching Cecilia’s sleeve, an obvious invocation of the duke guarding his treasure.

  Like many of Leonardo’s works, the portrait has a twisting, pyramidal composition. Cecilia sits facing diagonally to her right, but her head turns back to her left; her expression is expectant, and her eyes focus on something or someone outside the frame, where the ermine seems to look as well. Cecilia’s skin is luminous, almost translucent, and her hand caressing the animal is so finely modeled that a close viewer can see each wrinkle around the knuckles and the flexing of the tendon in her bent forefinger.

  The painting was an immediate success. Ludovico’s court poet, Bernardo Bellincioni, wrote in a sonnet: “O Nature how envious you are / of Vinci who has painted one of your stars, / The beautiful Cecilia, whose lovely eyes / Make the sunlight seem dark shadow.” Cecilia kept the portrait after her liaison with Ludovico ended.

  The modeling of Cecilia Gallerani’s hand was no accident. By the late 1480s, Leonardo had begun the systematic anatomical studies that he would pursue for the rest of his life, underpinning his painting with scientific knowledge that gave his works lifelike energy and realism. He had studied anatomy under Verrocchio, which was reflected in the arm and neck of “St. Jerome.”

  But Leonardo’s intellectual interest in anatomy led him far deeper into the subject than other painters considered necessary. Some of his contemporaries and early biographers deplored his scientific work as a waste of time. In the course of his life, Leonardo would dissect some thirty human cadavers, working without the benefit of refrigeration and in spite of the taboos and doctrinal bans of church and state alike. From the beginning, he probed well beyond the joints, tendons, and muscles visible in a painting; in 1489, he drew eight studies of a human skull in finely shaded detail from multiple angles, showing hidden features that no painting could ever reflect.

  Leonardo’s interest was partly metaphysical: His notes show him searching for the “confluence of the senses,” a physical spot where common sense and the “vital spirits” postulated by medieval medical theorists might be found. In later life, his language would be simpler and more bluntly descriptive, but he would never give up his formidable task of learning how human bodies work. Among the endless topics he posed for himself: “Which tendon causes the motion of the eye, so that the motion of one eye moves the other”; “What sneezing is”; “shivering with cold”; “Describe the beginning of man, and what causes it within the womb, and why a child of eight months cannot survive.”

  More pertinent to a painter – and more useful in teaching apprentices – were Leonardo’s studies of the proportions of the human body and the mathematical ratios of one part to another. His study of Vitruvius, the Roman engineer and architect, led to Leonardo’s most famous anatomical drawing, the “Vitruvian Man.”

  The drawing shows a man, in two simultaneous poses, standing inside a circle and a superimposed square. The mirror-written text above the drawing quotes Vitruvius: “The measurements of man are distributed as follows: that four fingers make one palm, and four palms make one foot; six palms make a cubit [forearm];” and so on, down to the distance from the hairline to the eyebrows being identical to the distance from the tip of the chin to the mouth.

  In the drawing, the man - with his feet together and his arms outstretched horizontally - stands within the square, illustrating that his reach is equal to his height. The second figure, with legs akimbo and arms raised higher inside the circle, makes a different point: “If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height by 1/14th, and raise your outspread arms until the tips of your middle fingers are level with the top of your head, you will find that the center of your outspread limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.”

  By the late 1480s, Leonardo had set up his own studio in Milan, where he was an instant hit for his talent, among others, for playing a lyre of his own creation, described as a kind of violin – in the shape of a horse’s skull – with a silver soundbox. A talented musician, Leonardo “gave some time to the study of music and learnt to play on the lute, improvising songs most divinely,” according to Vasari.

  The location of his Milan studio is unknown, but evidence indicates it included at least eight artists and apprentices, including the two De Predis brothers and the faithful Zoroastro. Two wealthy amateurs, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco d’Oggiono, joined the studio not as apprentices but as associate painters, and under Leonardo’s eye both of them became notable artists. An early apprentice was Francesco Galli or Napoletano, who went on to his own degree of fame; his “Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and St. Sebastian” can be seen in the Zurich Kunsthaus. Another was a German called Giulio, like Zoroastro a metalworker rather than a painter.

  Other newcomers to the studio would come and go, but one became part of Leonardo’s life for the next twenty-eight years. In one of his notes, he records, “Giacomo came to live with me on St. Mary Magdalen’s day [July 22] 1490.” Ten-year-old Giacomo’s father, an obscure villager named Pietro Caprott
i, was willing to pay for his upkeep while the boy served as Leonardo’s servant, errand-boy, and studio model - and eventually one of his apprentices.

  How soon Giacomo slept with Leonardo is a matter of conjecture, but there’s not much room for doubt that he did. As Vasari describes him, he “was extraordinarily graceful and attractive. He had beautiful hair, curled and ringletted, in which Leonardo delighted.” Another of Leonardo’s commentators, the artist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, was the first to assert Leonardo’s homosexuality, if only indirectly. In an imagined exchange between Leonardo and the long-dead Greek sculptor Phidias, Lomazzo has Phidias refer to Giacomo as one of Leonardo’s favorite pupils, to which Leonardo says, “. . . he was a very fair young man, especially around the age of fifteen.”

  Giacomo was a special case – an unruly, mischievous, unmannered scamp who soon earned the lifelong nickname of “Salai,” an Arabic-rooted word meaning “little devil.” The list of Salai’s misdemeanors in his first year of service is impressive, as recorded by Leonardo, in what was presumably a draft of a letter to the boy’s father:

  “On the second day [July 23] I had two shirts cut for him, a pair of stockings and a jerkin, and when I put aside the money to pay for these things he stole the money out of my purse, and I could never make him confess, though I was quite certain of it.

  4 lire

  “The day after this I went to supper with Giacomo Andrea, and the aforesaid Giacomo ate for two, and did mischief for four, insofar as he broke three table-flasks, and knocked over the wine . . .

  “Item. On 7 September he stole a pen worth twenty-two soldi from Marco [d’Oggiono] who was living with me. It was a silverpoint pen, and he took it from his studio, and after Marco had searched all over for it, he found it hidden in the said Giacomo’s chest.

  1 lira

  Leonardo’s accounting to Salai’s father ends with a list of the boy’s clothing costs, and in the margin are four words: thief, liar, obstinate, greedy. But there is an unmistakable tone of rueful amusement in this indictment, and no hint at all that Leonardo wants to be rid of his imp.

  Indeed, Salai stayed on - as model, servant, companion, and, in time, apprentice. But the relationship between the head of the studio and his student was never entirely smooth. On one sheet of notes are the words, “Salai, I want to rest, so no wars, no more war, because I surrender.” This was written in someone else’s handwriting almost as part of a shopping list, as if overheard. Whoever wrote it, Leonardo let it remain in his official notes.

  Over the years, Leonardo spent heavily on luxuries for Salai, along with loans for expenses such as a dowry for Salai’s sister. Eventually, Salai took possession a house outside Milan that Ludovico had given Leonardo, renting it out and keeping the proceeds. And for the “good and kind services” Salai had provided, Leonardo left him the house in his will.

  In the summer of 1493, a woman he referred to only as Caterina also joined Leonardo’s household. She could have been a servant, but is more likely to have been Leonardo’s mother. She would have been in her mid-sixties then, and her husband had died three years earlier. He made no further note of her until about two years later, when he listed the costs of her modest funeral.

  Like the studios of other Quattrocento artists, Leonardo’s bottega turned out several kinds of works. Some were almost entirely his own doing, as in the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani. Paintings by his associates Boltraffio and d’Oggiono would benefit from his tutelage, criticism, suggestions, and perhaps even a touch of paint here and there. Such works wouldn’t command Leonardo’s price, but would be seen as from his studio. His apprentices might contribute varying amounts of work on drapery, backgrounds, or even a figure in a large scene, which would be priced accordingly.

  In 1489, about the same time Ludovico hired Leonardo to paint his mistress, the duke gave him a far more important commission: to create a giant statue of Francesco Sforza, the duke’s father, in full armor, mounted on a horse. At the time, there were four notable equestrian statues in Italy, two of them dating from classical times, and Ludovico wanted his father’s monument to be bigger and grander than any of them.

  Leonardo had been angling for this job since his first letter to Ludovico, in which he offered “to begin work on the bronze horse which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the Prince your father’s happy memory and of the famous house of Sforza.” But even after giving him the commission, Ludovico seems to have had doubts that Leonardo could fulfill his vision; he had the Florentine ambassador to Milan write to Lorenzo the Magnificent asking if he could engage experts in bronze casting to assist with the job.

  The duke’s misgivings were understandable. Casting bronze on such a scale would be a formidable task for anyone, and while Leonardo had probably helped Verrocchio with the planning of the great equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, he had left the studio before Verrocchio did the actual casting. To make the job even more complex, Leonardo had conceived of something never before tried. The other four horses were sculpted in a trotting pose, with three feet on solid ground. Leonardo’s first sketches for the Sforza horse show it rearing on its hind legs – a dramatic but precariously unstable pose.

  The horse was clearly the most formidable part of the commission, and Leonardo began with it, leaving the design of the armored rider aside for the moment. He explored at least two possible solutions to the technical problem of a rearing horse. In one, a fallen soldier connects one of the horse’s front feet to the ground; in another, the soldier has been replaced with a tree stump. But when Leonardo traveled to Pavia, some twenty miles south of Milan, to see the classical equestrian statue in the trotting pose known as Il Regisole, he was stunned by the realism of its arrested movement. It was probably there that he gave up the idea of a rearing horse. His field notes contain the line, “It is more praiseworthy to imitate antiquities than modern things”; all his subsequent studies of horses show variations of the trot.

  Leonardo needed a huge studio to build the clay model around which the bronze would ultimately be cast, and Ludovico furnished one. Leonardo was installed in the Corte Vecchia, the dilapidated castle that had been the seat of the Visconti family until Francesco Sforza took over and began building his own Castello Sforzesca. Leonardo’s workshop was the former grand ballroom. Adjacent rooms served as his study, laboratory, and living quarters for the maestro and his helpers.

  The model for the great horse was colossal: tons of clay packed around a supporting metal armature. It stood some twenty-four feet high. It was exhibited in November 1493 at the proxy marriage of Ludovico’s niece Bianca to Emperor Maximilian, and viewers were awed not just by its size but with its fine detail and spirited pose. “See how beautiful this horse is: Leonardo da Vinci alone has created it,” wrote the poet Baldassare Taccone, and Vasari noted, “Those who saw the great clay model that Leonardo made considered that they had never seen a finer or more magnificent piece of work.”

  Ludovico had set aside approximately seventy-five tons of bronze for the casting, and as soon as the model was finished, Leonardo began planning the details of the casting process. He intended to cast the horse in a single piece, a challenge that some considered impossible. It involved making an outer mold of kiln-baked material, preserving every detail of the surface of the clay model, and supporting it with an armature of iron. The mold would then be coated with a layer of wax as thick as the intended bronze casting, and an inner mold would cover the wax. The united mold, upside down, would then be placed in a huge pit, with sand packed around it to support the weight and heated until all the wax melted and drained away. Then, molten bronze would be poured into the empty cavity where the wax had been and allowed to cool. When the outer mold was peeled away, the horse would be finished.

  The pitfalls were tremendous. Channels had to be created to ensure all the wax drained and that no air bubbles kept the mold from filling with liquid bronze. If the mold wasn’t hot enough when the bronze was poured in, the temper
ature difference would crack it. In December 1493, Leonardo wrote, “I have decided that the horse should be cast without its tail, on its side.” But that meant another delay to redesign the network of channels needed for the casting. Leonardo’s notebooks are filled with drawings of molds for the horse, cranes, pulleys, and other mechanisms for hoisting the mold and its seventy-five tons of bronze.

  In the end, the delays were fatal. Ludovico was under pressure; his father-in-law Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, was angry about Ludovico’s friendship with French King Charles VIII and worried about defending Ferrara in case of a French invasion. Ludovico owed D’Este 3,000 ducats, and to pacify the duke, he offered him the bronze meant for the horse, to be cast into cannon.

  The only record of Leonardo’s reaction is a half-page draft of an angry letter to Ludovico, torn vertically so that only fragments of sentences remain. Among them: “And if any other commission is to be given to me by some . . . Of the reward for my service, because I am not in a position to . . . My Lord, I know your Excellency’s mind is much occupied . . . my life in your service, holding myself always in readiness to obey . . . Of the horse I will say nothing, because I know the times . . . .”

  By some accounts, five years later, the clay model was moved to a garden. Ludovico had been overthrown by his onetime French allies, and French archers occupying Milan used the horse for target practice. No trace remains.