He did complete two paintings in Rome – probably the last of his career. Both, now in the Louvre, depicted a young, somewhat androgynous John the Baptist. In one, usually called “St. John in the Desert,” he is sitting under a tree in a wild place, his right arm crossed over his chest with the forefinger extended. In details that may have been added to the painting long after Leonardo’s death, St. John is wearing a panther-skin loincloth and a crown of grape leaves, leading some critics to call the picture “St. John with the Attributes of Bacchus.” The other painting, more powerful but uneasily ambiguous, shows the naked torso of the saint against a dark background, again with his right arm crossed over his chest, but now with the forefinger pointed to the sky. The faces in both paintings show the same features, but the half-length St. John has a subtle smile as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s. This painting may well have been commissioned by Pope Leo; the pope did order a work by Leonardo. But when he heard that the artist was distilling oils for the varnish he would use on the painting, the pope complained, “Alas, this man will never do anything, because he starts to think of the end before he has even begun the work.”
The pose of the half-length “St. John” may have evolved from a sketch of an announcing angel – Gabriel – dating from about 1505, with the right arm pointing to the sky and the left touching the chest. The sketch may have been done by Salai, but the position of the pointing arm was corrected in Leonardo’s hand. But the evolution of the drawing was not filled out until 1991, when another sketch turned up in a private collection – the notorious drawing now known as the “Angelo Incarnato,” or angel made flesh.
In this version, the right arm is still upright, but the left hand, with feminine grace, holds a veil of filmy fabric against the chest, and below, a large erection clearly appears through the veil (though someone has smudged it slightly, apparently trying to erase it). The figure has the head and face given to St. John in both paintings, but the expression has been transformed: The cheeks are gaunter, suggesting illness; the eyes are large and pleading; the smile is a sly invitation. In this context, the arm is no longer announcing but beckoning. The drawing is disturbing, verging on pornography.
The finished painting of the half-length St. John has none of this lurid quality. The right arm has been crossed over the chest, half hiding the overly graceful fingers of the left hand; the face glows, softened and deepened by fine layers of the varnish that vexed the pope. But the androgyny and mystery of the painting remain – and the effect is highlighted by the uneasy knowledge of the Angelo Incarnato.
Leonardo was part of the pope’s entourage when Leo traveled to Bologna and Florence in October 1515 to meet the new French king. Only twenty-one years old, Francis had taken the throne when Louis XII, his cousin and father-in-law, died without a male heir, and Francis had recently proved himself by defeating the Sforzas’ Swiss mercenaries in the Battle of Marignano. The new king had long admired his father-in-law’s paintings by Leonardo and had seen “The Last Supper.” In addition, he had been presented with a mechanical lion constructed by Leonardo when Francis met Giuliano de’ Medici the previous July.
There is no record of their first meeting or any trace of a royal invitation to Leonardo. But in the late summer or early fall of 1516, about six months after his patron Giuliano de’ Medici died of consumption, Leonardo and his entourage left Rome on the long journey to Francis’ court at Amboise, in the valley of the Loire. They probably stopped over in Milan, where Salai stayed for a while in Leonardo’s garden; Salai would rejoin the household only from time to time after that. In Amboise, the king gave Leonardo a home, an elegant manor-house half a mile from the royal residence, together with a generous pension. From then on, Leonardo was to be formally titled the paintre du Roi. He was also to be the king’s friend.
Francis was a tall, vigorous man, with a wide-ranging curiosity and an enormous nose. He was also charming, with a reputation as a ladies’ man. The Italian traveler Antonio de Beatis wrote that Francis “is lascivious and enjoys entering the gardens of others to drink different waters.” Francis was overwhelmed by Leonardo, and not only for his artistic talents. Benvenuto Cellini, who worked for Francis years later, wrote that the king “was completely besotted” with Leonardo’s mind “and took such pleasure in hearing him discourse that there were few days in the year when he was parted from him, which was one of the reasons why Leonardo did not manage to pursue to the end his miraculous studies.” Cellini said Francis told him “he could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much as Leonardo, and not only of sculpture, painting and architecture, and that he was truly a great philosopher.”
Now sixty-five, Leonardo was looking and feeling older; the great self-portrait now in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin shows him white-haired and stooped, with a deeply lined face and a thousand-yard stare, but still alert and on the lookout for a new idea. He spent much of his time rearranging his papers and making geometrical studies and sketches of moving water. Occasionally, he would still draw a striking face or a floor plan. But in 1517, he told the visiting Antonio de Beatis that he had stopped painting. (It was Beatis, traveling with Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, who recorded Leonardo’s story of the “Mona Lisa” being commissioned by Giuliano de’ Medici.)
Leonardo did launch a major project for the king: plans for a huge new palace complex at Romorantin, some thirty miles to the east of Amboise, and a network of canals to be built between the Loire and the Saone. None of this got built, but Leonardo’s drawings of the palace resembled the “ideal city” he first visualized in Milan thirty years before.
He also had a fresh, enthusiastic audience for his talents as an impresario, and he provided a series of tableaus, masques, and pageants for Francis and his court. Back in Mantua, Isabella d’Este still kept tabs on Leonardo, and she got a lavish description of the triumphal arch he set up for a double feast marking the baptism of the king’s first son and the wedding of the royal niece to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, now Duke of Florence. For a pageant honoring Francis’ victory at the Battle of Marignano, Leonardo rigged huge mortars to fire inflated balloons that drifted down on the entranced audience and bounced merrily on the ground. In 1518, Leonardo threw a party of his own for the king in the gardens of his manor house, with a vast canopy of blue cloth spangled with golden stars hanging over the royal dais. The show repeated the Paradiso Leonardo had first conjured up in 1490, with actors representing the planets and hundreds of torches blazing.
We will leave him there, master of the revels, pleased with the impact of his pageant and the delight of his royal guest. Leonardo lived for another year, apparently in failing health; he drew up his will in April 1519, leaving his papers to the faithful Melzi, his Milanese garden to Salai, a fur-lined cloak to his housekeeper, and a remembrance for his half-brothers in Florence.
Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519, sixty-seven years old. According to Vasari, King Francis held his dying friend in his arms and propped up his head in the final moments, a scene portrayed in two romanticized nineteenth-century French paintings. But considering that a royal proclamation was issued in a town two days’ ride from Amboise at the time of Leonardo’s death, it is unlikely that the king was at his friend’s bedside in his final hours. Leonardo himself would have insisted on an unflinching examination to find the truth. Lesser mortals may decide that if the story wasn’t true, it should have been.
That’s a suitably enigmatic note to close out the life of a man who will be forever at least a little opaque to the rest of us. For all his achievements, he was a private man who never tried to explain the workings of his mind or his core beliefs. How do we reconcile the painter of all those saints, angels, and Madonnas with the flinty rationalist who sought only the truth, no matter what dogmas were shattered in the process? Vasari observed that Leonardo “had a very heretical state of mind. He could not be content with any sort of religion at all, considering himself in all things much more a philosopher than a Christian.” An
d, in fact, the defining feature of Leonardo’s religious paintings is not their spiritual quality, but their spontaneity and human appeal - from “The Benois Madonna” playing with her baby to the homoeroticism of “St. John.”
As a homosexual, Leonardo lived his whole life outside his society’s conventions of morality and religion and learned not to talk about it. But what he did say was heretical enough. The human soul, he once wrote, “desires to remain with its body,” and “takes its leave of the body very unwillingly . . . because without that body it can do nothing and feel nothing.” Death is “the supreme hurt, which kills the memory together with life.” These are not the musings of a man looking forward to an eternal afterlife.
Being gay was hardly a casual lifestyle choice. Homosexual acts were theoretically (and occasionally in practice) capital crimes, punishable by burning at the stake. The records show that more than 10,000 Florentines were charged with sodomy in the seventy-five years ending in 1505; some 2,000 were convicted. Only a few were executed, but the rest were exiled, branded, fined or publicly humiliated.
Vasari says that before his death Leonardo lamented that he had “offended God and mankind by not working harder at his art.” Vasari also tells of an unlikely deathbed conversion, in which Leonardo “earnestly resolved to learn the doctrines of the Catholic faith . . . and then, lamenting bitterly, he confessed and repented, and though he could not stand up, supported by his friends and servants he received the blessed sacrament from his bed.”
Perhaps it happened. Perhaps, like the rest of us, Leonardo sometimes doubted his own beliefs; perhaps he was afraid that, after all, he might be wrong. We will never know for sure, and he leaves us with that mystery along with all the others. But that also offers a morsel of reassurance for the rest of us, craving some common bond with him: Leonardo da Vinci may have been the smartest man who ever lived, but, like us, he was human.
The earliest known portrait of Leonardo is believed to be this statue of David by Verrocchio.
1833 engraving of Leonardo
Leonardo helped his master, Verrocchio, to finish “The Baptism of Christ.” His contribution, the angel at far left, and the background, is the first painting that can be assigned to him.
The small white dog trotting along with Verrocchio’s “Tobias and the Angel” is unmistakably Leonardo’s work.
“The Annunciation” is Leonardo’s first completed painting. It was probably finished over a period of years.
Leonardo’s first known portrait is of a prominent young Florentine woman, Ginevra de’ Benci.
Leonardo sketched the body of assassin Bernardo Bandino hanging from a window of the Bargello.
Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine,” a portrait of the Duke of Milan’s mistress
Leonardo’s famed Vitruvian Man.
Leonardo’s horse in Milan
Mona Lisa
Leonardo’s painting of Bianca Sforza
Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” adorns the back wall of this church in Italy
“The Last Supper”
Leonardo’s painting of Mary and her mother, St. Anne, with the infant Christ
Harbor in Cesenatico, Italy, designed by Leonardo
Statue of Leonardo in Milan
Statue of Leonardo in Florence
Statue of Leonardo in Vienna
The house where Leonardo died
Leonardo’s tomb in France
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Published by New Word City LLC, 2014
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© Anna Abraham
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Leonardo da Vinci Page 8