Leonardo da Vinci

by Abraham, Anna

  There is no record of how the dispute was resolved, but it was still dragging on in mid-1508, when Leonardo was back in Milan. But six years later, when his brother Giuliano was in Rome needing help to claim a benefice, Leonardo tried to provide it; and a cordial letter from Giuliano’s wife conveying greetings to Leonardo was among Leonardo’s papers when he died. Whatever the outcome, the bitter family feud ended in reconciliation.

  In the Milanese court of Charles d’Amboise, Leonardo resumed another role of the Sforza years: the showman-in-chief, stager of public celebrations, masques, and entertainments for the count and his retainers. He began with a grand welcome for Louis XII, with arches of greenery over the streets from the Duomo to the castle, a triumphal chariot carrying actors depicting the cardinal virtues, the arms of France and Brittany prominently displayed, and the god Mars “holding in one hand an arrow in the other a palm.”

  King Louis was welcomed again the next year when he returned to Milan after routing the Venetians at the Battle of Agnadello. This festa included an allegorical battle between a dragon, representing France, and the lion of Venice. Leonardo’s stage, set for a production of the operetta Orfeo, dramatizing Orpheus’ trip to the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice, had a mountain that opened (by means of pulleys and counterweights) to show Pluto at home in hell, complete with devils, furies, and in Leonardo’s notes, “many naked children weeping.” There were appropriate musical themes for the characters: trombones for Pluto, treble viols for Eurydice, contrabass viols for Orpheus, and guitars for Charon, ferryman on the River Styx.

  While he was in Florence battling his brothers, Leonardo picked up the anatomical studies he had begun there years earlier. He was staying with linguist and mathematician, Piero de Braccio Martelli, also an intellectual and patron of the arts, and Leonardo used the long intervals between formal court proceedings to hobnob with other artists, to reshuffle his notes en route to a final organization of his papers that never materialized, and to perform dissections, both on animals and human corpses.

  By this time, Leonardo wrote, he had dissected “more than ten human bodies.” But in late 1507 or early 1508, he witnessed a strangely peaceful death: “This old man, a few hours before his death, told me he had lived for more than a hundred years and that he was conscious of no deficiency in his person other than feebleness. And thus, sitting on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, without any movement or sign of distress, he passed from this life. And I made an anatomy to see the cause of a death so sweet.”

  He was especially interested in the vascular system, and he boasted about his skill in exposing its intricacies: He had stripped away “in the most minute particles all the flesh that lies around these veins, without causing any flow of blood save a scarcely perceptible bleeding of the capillary veins.” He discovered that the old man’s arteries were “very dry, thin and withered,” and “in addition to the thickening of their walls, these vessels grow in length and twist themselves in the manner of a snake.” The old man’s death, he concluded, came from “weakness caused by a lack of blood to the artery which feeds the heart and lower members.” He found that the liver was deprived of blood and “desiccated, like congealed bran in color and substance,” while “the skin is almost completely deprived of nourishment” and therefore “the color of wood, or dried chestnuts.” Leonardo followed that dissection with one of the body of a two-year-old boy, “in which I found everything to be the opposite to that of the old man.”

  Leonardo’s drawings from this period are wonderfully detailed and shaded, showing three-dimensional layerings of muscles, bones, and tendons. He drew male and female genitalia and a standing woman showing her uterus in early pregnancy. He left studies of the lungs and abdominal organs of a pig and the placenta and uterus of a cow, with a small fetus inside. And he described the grisly work of dissection without refrigeration, telling the reader: “You will perhaps be deterred by the rising of your stomach.” One body wouldn’t last long enough for a thorough exploration of the vascular system, he noted, so “it was necessary to use several bodies in succession . . . I repeated this process twice, in order to observe the variations.”

  Two years later, Leonardo traveled twenty miles south of Milan to Pavia, where he spent several months listening to Marcantonio della Torre’s lectures on anatomy. “Messer Marcantonio,” as Leonardo called him, was a young man, but an acknowledged master of the skill, and Leonardo made swift drawings as the professor lectured and his assistants carved the bodies in the anatomy theater of Pavia’s famous university.

  Della Torre and Leonardo were kindred spirits, both seeking the deepest possible knowledge of the body and all its works. They equally detested “abbreviators,” their term for ostensible scholars who simply rehashed the work of others in digested form. “The abbreviators of works insult both knowledge and love,” Leonardo wrote, “seeing that the love of something is the offspring of knowledge of it . . . Impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if we did not have a whole lifetime in which to acquire complete knowledge of a single subject, such as the human body.”

  Leonardo was working in his studio during his second Milan period with varying degrees of urgency. He was soon done with retouching the “Virgin of the Rocks” and went to work for Louis XII; in a letter Leonardo mentions “two Madonnas of different sizes done for our most Christian king,” which have been lost. He still had his “Mona Lisa” in the studio, and was probably reworking and retouching it whenever he felt moved to do so. In 1508, he drew several studies of lips, including the unmistakable half-smile that appears in the painting; it’s likely that this defining feature of “La Gioconda” first appeared then, too. Leonardo and his assistants were working on several versions of “Leda” during this period as well; one finished painting by Leonardo’s talented associate Giampetrino (Gianni Pietro Rizzoli) probably dates from 1510 or 1511 and shows Leda on one knee, surrounded by four babies and broken eggshells - but without the swan.

  In Milan, Leonardo’s concept of the “Virgin and Child with St. Anne” continued to evolve. The great cartoon now in London’s National Gallery dates from 1508, and in this version Mary, on her mother’s lap, is holding the infant Christ, who is blessing a slightly older John the Baptist. But this cartoon was apparently never used for a painting. An oil painting, now in the Louvre and generally regarded as less powerful than the cartoon, reverts to Leonardo’s original concept, showing Christ reaching for a lamb but without John the Baptist. The painting was probably done around 1510 and was still in Leonardo’s studio in 1517. Part of a study for this painting has been detected beneath the surface of the Giampetrino “Leda.”

  For a while, another great equestrian statue was in the works - for the tomb of the condottiere Gian Trivulzio, who had made himself Marshal of Milan. Trivulzio set aside 4,000 ducats for this grandiose monument, and Leonardo drew many studies for it and roughly estimated what it would cost to sculpt and cast. The horse and its armored rider were to be prancing atop a huge carved marble arch, adding considerably to the cost, but even so Leonardo’s estimate came in at less than 3,000 ducats, leaving a hefty profit margin. Leonardo’s sketches are magisterial: dynamic and lifelike chargers ready to burst into action. But the project never materialized - for Leonardo or any other sculptor. The tomb remained Trivulzio’s fantasy.

  There is evidence, albeit meager, that around age fifty-five, Leonardo had sex with a woman. In the early nineteenth century, artist, critic, and Leonardo aficionado Giuseppe Bossi baldly asserted that there had been such a relationship. Arguing that an artist must experience a passion in order to depict it, Bossi wrote: “That Leonardo . . . loved the pleasures of life is proved by a note of his concerning a courtesan called Cremona, a note which was communicated to me by an authoritative source. Nor would it have been possible for him to have understood human nature so deeply, in order to represent it, without becoming, through long practice in it, somewhat tinged with human weakness.”


  If Leonardo wrote a note about such a woman, it has been lost, and Bossi said nothing more about his “authoritative source.” The only other hint of La Cremona’s existence is a list, in Leonardo’s writing, of his companions on a journey, possibly the trip to Pavia in late 1509 to hear Marcantonio della Torre’s anatomical lectures. Besides identifiable associates including Salai, there is a “chermonese,” Leonardo’s spelling for Cremonese, a native of Cremona. At about the same time, a distinctive new face appears in Leonardo’s studies for the head of Leda and for a series of drawings, reminiscent of the “Mona Lisa,” known as the “Nude Gioconda.” The model for these drawings - in a pose similar to Lisa’s - is nude to the waist.

  As evidence, this is circumstantial at best. But it is plausible that Leonardo, with his passion for firsthand knowledge of everything from grinding pigments to dissecting corpses, would be curious about heterosexual love. In his notes, he muses about a spontaneous triggering of desire that appears to refer to a woman.

  Meanwhile, the tide of war was on the rise again in northern Italy. Pope Julius II had now turned against his French allies, decreeing that they must be driven out of the country. By the end of 1511, the pope’s Swiss mercenaries were threatening Milan. In April 1512, the French won a tenuous victory at Ravenna, but by year’s end, they had abandoned Milan to Ludovico Sforza’s son Massimiliano and the forces of the Hapsburg emperor Maximilian, who was in league with the pope.

  Still wary of how the returning Sforza might reward his apostasy to Ludovico, Leonardo made himself scarce. He was still on the French king’s payroll, but his patron Charles d’Amboise had died and his purse was a good deal thinner. Now, however, he was safe with friends at the comfortable country house of soldier and engineer Girolamo Melzi on a bend of the Adda River near the village of Vaprio. In truth, he was only twenty miles from Milan, but that was far enough.

  Melzi was the father of one of Leonardo’s pupils, Francesco Melzi, nicknamed Cecco, who had joined the studio in 1507 and quickly made himself indispensable. He was to become a fine draftsman and painter (he drew a lovely red chalk drawing of Leonardo at about sixty years old), but he functioned primarily as Leonardo’s secretary and scribe. His elegant handwriting appears throughout Leonardo’s notes, copying faded or illegible writing, providing captions and footnotes, and taking dictation from the master. Melzi, an educated aristocrat, had the manners and breeding that Salai so clearly lacked. Leonardo was fond of him, but the relationship was probably not homosexual; in later life, Melzi married one of the most beautiful women in Milan, who bore him eight children.

  After Leonardo’s death in 1519, Francesco Melzi became his literary executor, collecting and preserving Leonardo’s papers and generally preserving the flame. Melzi assembled and published the great Treatise on Painting that Leonardo promised during his lifetime but never got around to. As we have seen, a good many of Leonardo’s paintings and papers have not survived him, but without Melzi, much more would have been lost.

  In retreat at the Villa Melzi in 1512 and early 1513, Leonardo resumed his lifelong study of water, sketching eddies, currents, and complex swirls resembling braided hair. He did a series of anatomical studies, some apparently worked up from sketches made during the Pavia lectures and others from animal dissections done at the villa. There is a self-portrait of the artist at sixty, a drawing that critic Kenneth Clark called not so much a portrait as a self-caricature exaggerating the ruefulness and decrepitude that Leonardo felt on passing another decade. He drew himself sitting with crossed legs, chin resting on a long staff, his beard white, one hand to his forehead, with hooded eyes gazing wistfully into the distance. Cecco Melzi’s red chalk drawing, probably done about the same time, shows a man still handsome and vigorous with an unlined face, steady eyes and a firm mouth. Even allowing for Melzi’s affection for Leonardo, it is probably the better likeness.

  Leonardo was in dire need of a patron. French governor of Milan Charles d’Amboise, his friend and benefactor, was dead. King Louis XII was preoccupied with war. Leonardo had sounded out Sforza loyalists as to how the new duke, Massimiliano Sforza, might receive a painter who had served his father’s enemies, but the signs weren’t encouraging. So in the summer of 1513, when he received an invitation from Giuliano de’ Medici to come to Rome and live under his protection, it was a Godsend.

  Giuliano and his brother Giovanni, the surviving sons of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had lived in exile in Urbino and Mantua during the turbulent years of Savonarola’s reign and the subsequent Florentine republic. But in the summer of 1512, they staged a bloodless coup to overthrow the republic and regain their heritage. As Gonfalonier Soderini left town by one gate on his way to exile, Giuliano de’ Medici entered by another. His elder brother Giovanni followed with 1,500 soldiers, and Medici’s rule resumed with quiet efficiency. There were no executions; members of the Signoria kept their palazzi; no one went to jail.

  The corpulent, shrewd Giovanni was a natural leader and a talented administrator. He was also a powerful cardinal on his way to becoming pope, and when he became Pope Leo X in March 1513, he decided that his brother, a charming but hardly forceful man in frail health, wasn’t up to ruling Florence. So he gave that job to their cousin Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici and took Giuliano to Rome, where Giuliano - festooned with the titles Prince of Modena, Piacenza, and Parma - was given command of the papal armies. He made little impact on the troops, but he was universally liked and admired for his scholarship, courtesy, and taste. He also carried on the Medici heritage as a patron of the arts. Historian Benedetto Varchi wrote that Giuliano treated Leonardo “more like a brother than a friend.”

  It’s unclear when Leonardo met Giuliano de’ Medici or how well they knew each other. It is possible that they first met in Venice in 1500, and Giuliano had surely seen some of Leonardo’s work, including “The Last Supper” and perhaps the splendid central portion of the “Battle of Anghiari” and the unfinished portrait of Isabella d’Este. When Leonardo and his household arrived in Rome in October 1513, Giuliano assigned architects to alter a suite of apartments for the artist in the Villa Belvedere, the pope’s summer palace.

  Rome was then a city of 50,000, considerably smaller than Milan, but notorious for the corruption of the papal court and the licentiousness of the clergy. There were plenty of artists in residence, many of them well known to Leonardo, including Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo’s former pupil Atalante Migliorotti, but Leonardo’s notebooks contain no record of his friends or of his social life during his two years there.

  His notebooks do contain various other correspondence. There are drafts of letters Leonardo wrote trying to persuade papal officials to cough up the benefice owed to his half-brother Giuliano, with whom he was now reconciled. There is also a letter to Giuliano da Vinci from his wife, Alessandra, which Giuliano evidently gave Leonardo because of a line in it: “I forgot to ask you to remember me to your brother Leonardo, a most excellent and singular man.” And there is a grumpy letter from Leonardo to Giuliano de’ Medici, complaining of an ungrateful, unruly, and deceitful German assistant, Giorgio, who had been subverted by another German, Johann the mirror-maker. Leonardo wrote that Johann, jealous of Leonardo’s influence with Giuliano, had talked Giorgio into abandoning the workshop Leonardo had given him and had taken it over for his own mirror works.

  Leonardo was exploring what would now be called solar power, the use of parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays; he was struck by the fact that a mirror can reflect heat without absorbing it. He was also busy dissecting corpses again, probably at the hospital of Santo Spirito. Here again, he complained that the spiteful Johann had “hindered me in anatomy, denouncing it before the Pope and also at the Hospital.” Nonetheless, some of Leonardo’s most notable anatomical drawings – especially his studies of fetuses in the womb – date from this period.

  The notebooks record the ever-questing scope of Leonardo’s mind. He spent hours over geometric equations and drew long serie
s of “lunes,” figures containing variable spaces formed by intersecting arcs of circles. He experimented in acoustics and hunted for fossils; he recorded bits of his household expenses in the coinage of Rome: “Salai: 20 giuli; for the house: 12 giuli.” His obsession with water continued in half a dozen texts pondering “The Deluge,” which he may have meant to be part of the great treatise on painting that he never wrote or as preparation for actually painting a great flood. “Broken trees loaded with people,” he wrote. “Ships broken in pieces, smashed against rocks. Flocks of sheep; hailstones, thunderbolts, whirlwinds. . . . Hills covered with men, women and animals, and lightning from the clouds illuminating everything.”

  With these musings, he left a series of ten drawings in black chalk, depicting the grand sweep and ferocious details of a great flood of water – torrents, erupting waves, vortices and tunnels of water, giant waterspouts, devouring whirlpools, the shattering impact of monstrous waves. Together, the drawings are a tour de force, an effort both to understand and to depict the full fury of nature. Such a painting would have been an even more ambitious project than his attempt to show the horror of war in the Battle of Anghiari.

  But the aging Leonardo - his beard turning white and his eyes needing spectacles – didn’t paint it. In a letter to Giuliano de’ Medici, who was suffering from consumption, he mentioned an unspecified “malady” that may have been a minor stroke; a visitor in 1517 noted that Leonardo’s right hand was paralyzed. That wouldn’t have hindered the left-handed Leonardo in drawing and painting, but it might well have slowed him down and ruled out any major new projects.