by Alex Parsons
Venice, December, 1499
We’re on the way home to Florence, at last. Just stopped off here briefly to check out the centennial celebrations, down a skinful of Chianti and fall in a canal or two. Luca the mathematician has come with us, so there’s a lot of calculating going on and not a great deal of drawing or painting.
Florence, 24th April, 1500
Well it’s great to be back. I have to say that I missed the old place. I missed strolling over the Ponte Vecchio on a balmy evening, looking in all the shops built on either side. What I did not miss quite so much was being anywhere near the bridge on a hot summer’s day, when all the leather workers hang out their hides and get to work soaking them in horse’s urine. And the river can look pretty disgusting after the butchers, who also have shops on the bridge, have chucked their grisly offcuts into the river.
Everyone’s been talking about Leonardo da Vinci, even though we’ve been away for seventeen years! A member of the City’s art establishment has said of him, “Leonardo’s mathematical experiments have so distracted him from painting that he cannot even bear to pick up a brush.” He doesn’t know the half of it, does he?
Florence, 1501
We have a painting! And I’m back to mixing paints! Well, at least we have the cartoon (that’s the technical term for a full-size drawing) for an altarpiece of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and a Lamb. A bit of a clumsy title, but a wonderful composition. Leonardo paints such beautiful women, it’s hard to believe he prefers scribbling in his notebooks and yattering about mathematics, but there you go. It takes all sorts.
You have to have a short memory in the art business. The painting was commissioned by Louis XII, King of France, the very man whose troops broke up our horse … GRRR … I mustn’t get over-excited.
Florence, December 1501
This artist Michelangelo’s making a big name for himself. Leonardo’s not taking it at all well, especially as Michelangelo’s done the curly-haired-young-man-with-no-clothes-on bit to perfection with his statue of David.
“Don’t let it get to you, boss,” I said. “He may be the sculpture king, but there’s nobody like you on the paintbrush.”
I hear from Michelangelo’s chisel-sharpener that he can be as arrogant and as difficult to work for as Leonardo. He’s never satisfied with anything he does either, and is another fan of the ‘unfinished’ look. He is known to have said, “With my mother’s milk I sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues.” What does that make his mother? A hardware store?
Rome, 1502
The ruler in Rome is cruel and ruthless, and he’s called Cesare Borgia. He makes the Devil himself seem like a pussycat. Borgia, who thinks Leonardo is the world’s greatest military engineer, has invited The Maestro to Rome to help build defences in the province of Romagna*. It is the kind of invitation one does not turn down.
Needless to say, Leonardo is thrilled. That’s because he’d rather be sketching machinery than painting beautiful women. I do not think Signore Borgia can have heard about Leonardo’s design for the armoured car, and I’m certainly not going to mention it. The truth about The Maestro’s works of engineering is that they look great in theory, but no one knows how to build them!
Leonardo gets quite worked up about death and destruction, and loves conjuring up battle scenes for the entertainment of his patrons. They love it too, of course. When he’s flipping through his sketchbooks and showing off his murderous inventions, he makes quite a performance of it.
Naturally, I have to go along and help. His instructions to me are to read, and I quote here: “in a frenzied or berserk manner as in mental lunacy.”
“My job is to mix paints,” I protest feebly.
Imola (near Bologna), 1503
We have made Signore Borgia a map. A wonderful map of Imola, which is apparently a very important town in his battle plans. I can’t tell you the amount of work involved. We had a surveying disc covered in lines and numbers to measure the height of all the buildings. And guess who had to pace out the distances between every house on every street? Then Leonardo put all the information together and coloured it all in. Imola now has the best map of any town in the world, and I have blisters on my feet.
My job is to mix paints.
Pisa, March 1503
Florence is at war with Pisa, and here we are building canals in the thick of battle. The drawings have been done of course, and on paper it looks dead simple: just change the course of the River Arno so that Pisa no longer has access to the sea. Digging has started, but neither the sea nor the river are being very cooperative. I have blisters on my hands now.
My job is to mix paints.
Florence, October 1503
A commission for a mural in the Palazzo Vecchio! This is more like it: this is art. They want a painting of the Battle of Anghiari for the Council Chamber. This is to celebrate the victorious Florentine Republic, and this is just the kind of painting that makes reputations.
More sketches. This time it is trees. But it’s never enough for him just to draw a tree. He’s now working on the ultimate theory of the proportion of branches to trunks, and writing pages and pages on How to Paint Trees. Guess who gets to climb up the tree with the tape measure?
Florence, November 1503
Before making a start on the mural, Leonardo has got involved in another canal scheme. This one is on behalf of the Wool Weavers’ Guild. Let me just explain how important they are, dear Diary, before you start thinking “Huh! What does a bunch of woolly-headed weavers want with a canal?”
All of Florence’s flourishing wealth is based on the Guild system. Guilds are rich and powerful groups set up to control trade and politics. The seven major Guilds that run the city of Florence are:
1. Cloth merchants
2. Wool weavers
3. Silk weavers and goldsmiths
4. Furriers
5. Lawyers
6. Bankers
7. Doctors, sellers of pigments and artists.
There are fourteen minor Guilds representing tradesmen, but poor old fishmongers and farm labourers have to struggle along without Guild backing.
The plan is to join Florence to the sea by a canal rather than the twisting, turning River Arno. The Wool Weavers’ Guild would then get even richer and more powerful by charging everyone to use their canal.
The only problema is that it won’t work. Leonardo knew it all along, so he handed over the drawings with a little warning to the engineers that “the river must be tempted from its course, and not treated harshly with violence.” The Wool Weavers’ Guild obviously thought better of this scheme and filed it away under ‘I’ for Impossible.
Florence, 1504
I don’t know which one of them is worse, I honestly don’t. I was having a tankard or two of Chianti with Michelangelo’s chisel-sharpener the other day, and he showed me some Madonnas they’d been working on. Dead spitting images of Leonardo’s lovely ladies, only in marble.
Typical.
Florence, June 1505
You may be wondering how the battle mural painting went. Don’t ask. He did all the roughs, all the sketches, and he was just starting work on the wall when … they announced that Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint another battle scene in the same room!
It was like putting two fighting cats in a basket. In one corner is Leonardo, refusing to be hurried and trying to find yet another way to stick paint to dry plaster (I have to report that The Last Supper is already looking a little flaky). And in the opposing corner is Michelangelo, painting efficiently and quickly on his section of wet plaster and showing off like mad. This project is doomed.
Leonardo’s battle scene is looking good. There are trampling horses and grimacing warriors and it’s hard to tell whose legs and arms and hooves are whose. I think the warriors are actually making faces at Michelangelo. It doesn’t help that Michelangelo is younger than Leonardo and has more of his career ahead of him.
Florence, August 1505
Leonardo thinks men can fly!! He calls it the Second World of Nature. I call it total madness.
He says that if we understand how insects and birds fly and apply the same principles to a human being, then men can fly.
“But birds are built in a different way to humans,” I pointed out. (Sometimes even geniuses need to be told the obvious.)
“Aha! But I can do something about that,” he replied, digging out his notebooks again.
He rides up into the hills on his horse, saddlebags bulging with notebooks, pens and inks, and he’s up there for hours – right through the heat of the day, when most sensible Florentine gentlemen are having a quiet snooze in the shade. That man can draw, draw, draw all day.
He first found inspiration for his flying machines in watching dragonflies. He drew a spiral air-screw with four giant wings, but that didn’t look right.
Now he’s working on birds. I can’t tell you how many dead birds we have lying around the studio. He spends his days out in the hills watching the birds soaring about in the heavens, and his nights in the studio cutting them up to find out how they work.
Now he’s drawing a pair of massive wings that are supposed to glide on air currents, and the poor guy strapped underneath this contraption is supposed to flap the wings by pushing rods with his arms and pedals with his feet.
“It’s going to weigh tons,” I said.
“You wouldn’t complain about the weight of your wings if you were an eagle,” replied my esteemed boss.
“But eagles’ wings aren’t made of thick wooden struts and pulleys, creaking leather joints and hefty metal springs,” I replied.
Leonardo huffed and puffed and went back to the drawing board. I think there’s some way to go, but it’s a great idea. I’d love to fly.
Florence, December 1505
I’ve cleared away all the feathers and bits of dead bird, and the studio looks almost like a painter’s studio again. Which is just as well, as we have a lady coming round to sit for a portrait. Her name is Signora Giacondo.
She has quite a twinkle in her eye. “Just call me Mona Lisa, dearie,” she smiled when I took her a glass of wine. She and Leonardo seem to get on quite well. This is a good thing, as I think we all know how long this portrait may take. I did have a quiet word in his ear, as I know a bit more about women than he does and I was quite sure she would want to be painted now, in the bloom of her youth, rather than in the blurring of her middle age.
Leonardo gave me one of his most withering looks and replied: “Painters do not paint as a gardener digs a garden, Luigi. Men of genius are doing most when they seem to be doing least.” And so saying he gazed out of the window for the rest of the afternoon and then went home.
Milan, May 1506
Leonardo has been invited back to Milan by the French governor, Charles d’Amboise. The French seem to be in a bit of a stew about an altarpiece commissioned about fourteen years ago by the Church of Santo Francesco Grande called The Virgin of the Rocks. It will, like all Leonardo’s works, be wonderful when it is finished.
Milan, June 1506
Drawings, drawings, drawings! He draws all day long. Then I’ve got to find some place to store all this stuff. Moan, moan. I’ll tell you why his paintings never get finished. He won’t make a start until he’s drawn everything from every possible angle.
Take Leda and the Swan for instance. This is a painting that the French King fancies hanging on the wall of his bathroom. Now Leonardo has drawn Leda’s head I don’t know how many times. You would expect that. What you might not expect is that he’s also drawn her head from the back.
This is typical Leonardo, so you see what I’m up against.
“Maybe the French King would rather have the painting this year,” I suggested feebly, “instead of waiting until he’s died of old age while you work out what the back of her head looks like, especially when it doesn’t even appear in the picture!”
Leonardo sighed patiently and proceeded to lecture me on the fact that as he’d given Leda a wig of coiled and plaited hair, it was obviously very important to know how the wig fitted at the back.
“Okay, okay,” I said as I re-filled his inkwell, “keep your hair on!”
Florence, 1508
Leonardo is trying to figure out how eyes work. He’s fiddling about with a black box with a little hole in it called a camera obscura, and is obsessed with a) the idea of images passing through darkness and b) capturing still frames of motion. He’ll be making moving pictures next.
Meanwhile, the portrait of Mona Lisa smiles at us in all its unfinished glory from the corner of the studio. That smile certainly gets you. While she was sitting for it, Leonardo told Signora Giaconda jokes and recited verses, and he would bring her bunches of flowers and other little surprises to keep her face lively and animated.
And there’s something else about that picture too. It’s that coming-at-you-out-of-the-shadows thing. It’s as if he’s painted with light and shade instead of a paintbrush. Everyone who sees it is gobsmacked.
Milan, 1508
We have to keep travelling back and forth from Florence to Milan in order to finish various paintings. Leonardo has been talent-spotted by that horse vandal, the French King Louis XII.
He wants lots of Leonardo’s paintings, but seems just as interested in his other activities in the fields of mechanical engineering. The king called him “our dear and beloved Leonardo, our painter and engineer,” and Leonardo couldn’t have been more pleased. Especially as he hasn’t been asked to go to Rome and paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – that job has gone to young Michelangelo, about whom the least said in front of Leonardo the better.
Florence, September 1508
All this praise from the French Court has gone to Leonardo’s head. He is now determined to become the world’s greatest anatomist, or cutter-up and recorder of dead bodies.
He was hanging around the Santa Maria Nova hospital when an old man of 100 breathed his last the other day. Leonardo decided it would be a good idea to cut up the old man’s body to find out what happens as the human body ages.
Dead bodies smell terrible. Why can’t he draw flowers and fruit like everybody else?
Old men, young men, pregnant women, babies. Show Leonardo a dead body and he’s in there with his pen and ink faster than you can say yeeeucchhh! He’s worked out the way muscles attach to bone and the way blood whooshes round in our veins.
“Sight and insight, that’s what you need, Luigi,” he said to me on the way to the mortuary.
“I’ll settle for a clothes peg,” said I.
He knows so much about the way the human body works that he’d make a great doctor. In fact, I’d rather have him tend to me if I got sick than some of the so-called doctors you see practising on patients in the marketplace. You see them doing unmentionable things with red-hot pokers, rubbing their patients with crushed chickpeas and prescribing liberal applications of pigeon dung for bad cases of dandruff.
Florence, 1509
Drapes, drapes, drapes! He’s obsessed with drapery now. I sat there all day Monday swathed in silk while he drew the layers and folds. Tuesday I thought I might nip up into the hills and snare a few rabbits for tea, but oh no! Forget Luigi’s day off. It was velvet on Tuesday, fine linen on Wednesday, coarse linen on Thursday and he’s got a full week planned for cottons.
And why? I’ll tell you why in his own words: “By nature everything has a desire to remain as it is. Drapery strives to lie flat. When it is forced into pleats or folds, observe the effect of the strain on that part which is most bunched up.”
“You could drape a bit of sacking over a chair and observe it straining away all day long,” I grumbled.
“Ah Luigi!” replied The Maestro. “Cloths of different kinds display different fold patterns, and the folds respond to the motion of the figures.”
I am only writing this down so that if anyone is peeking through the window of our studio and sees me flitting from side to side
wearing nothing but a wisp of muslin, they will know that a) it wasn’t my idea and b) it is all in the cause of art.
Milan, 1510
Back in Milan now. I get the odd letter from Mona Lisa wondering what’s happened to her portrait. I sent her back a note saying not to fret, one day it would be completed and hers would be the most famous face in the history of painting. That might keep her quiet for another couple of years. Meanwhile he’s knocked up a fabuloso picture of St John the Baptist for the French King.
Milan, 1511
Rocks, rocks, rocks! It’s out with the red chalk and he’s drawing rock formations all day.
When I suggested it might be an idea to finish off Mona Lisa, he said he was working on it the way all geniuses do. “I think I might put some rocks in the background of her portrait,” he said. “On the other hand, I might not.”