The Lost Diary of Leonardo's Paint Mixer
Page 4
Milan, June 1512
Little bit of a change of plan in Milan. It no longer belongs to the French, but to the combined forces of Spain, the Pope and Venice. Time to pack the bags again – we’ve been invited to go to Rome and meet Pope Leo X, who turns out to be Giovanni de Medici, so we know the family well.
Have I mentioned Francesco Melzi? He’s a very nice boy. Lives just outside Milan in the Villa Melzi, and he’s been studying with Leonardo for a while as his pupil. Francesco has invited Leonardo to stay for a bit. Apparently there are a lot of rocks around the Villa Melzi so Leonardo didn’t wait to be asked twice.
Rome, December 1513
Well here we are in Rome (Melzi has come too), installed in a very nice apartment in the Vatican Palace courtesy of the Pope’s brother Giuliano, who is conveniently also the head of the Florentine State.
Leonardo was summoned to see the Pope the other day. I think he was expecting at the very least a commission for an altarpiece, and at the most, a brief to design a revolutionary new cathedral, but all he got was a lecture on using corpses for his anatomical studies.
I think even Leonardo knows better than to argue with the Pope.
Rome, 1513
I have to say that Leonardo does look older than he is. I mean, he’s in his sixties, but some unkind soul remarked that he looks well over seventy. This is something that Leonardo encourages, I think. Now that his vigorous youth and his productive middle years are past, he likes to think of himself as a venerable old man who could perhaps be compared in wisdom and creativity to God the Father. This is certainly the way he draws himself.
He’s drawing all kinds of swirling lines that look like a great flood swamping the earth at the moment. Has he been having visions of the end of the world? Is it a reaction to the violent storms in the Alps that everyone’s talking about? Has he been eating too much cheese before bedtime?
I’m calling them the Deluge Drawings. And I think I’ve worked out what they’re all about. He’s trying to make the forces of Nature into patterns he can understand. That and the fact that he’s been studying the movement of water for so long (don’t mention the canals) means he wants to show off what’s he learned.
Rome, 1514
There’s not much for Leonardo to do here. His notebooks are full of mirrors, mechanics, geometry puzzles and a few drawings of cathedrals (just in case anyone should call round wanting one). He’s got the architecture bug quite seriously now that architecture has become an art in its own right with rules and geometry and mathematics. (There was a time when all you had to do to be an architect was draw a pretty picture and hope some builder would come up with a clever way of making it stand up.)
But no one is going to pull down the Vatican and start again, and the result is that Mona Lisa is finally finished. And yes, there are some rocks in the background.
Rome, 1515
Now there’s something to do. The Medici Pope is visiting his home town of Florence as the most powerful ruler of all Italy, and every Florentine artist imaginable is involved in the festivities.
Leonardo has done some costume designs for the pageant, so the studio is once again full of curly-haired young men in feathered caps and fetching tights.
Rome, March 1516
Our host, the Pope’s brother, is dead, so we’re moving again. Leonardo is quite pleased about this, because there’s nothing he’d like better than to get back under the patronage of the French King François I.
François came to the throne last year and, like his predecessor Louis XII, thinks Leonardo is just magnifique. Apparently François told another member of the Colourful Set that he (and I quote, so don’t blame me for his sentence construction): “did not believe that a man had been born who knew as much as Leonardo, not only in the spheres of painting, sculpture and architecture, but also that he was a very great philosopher.”
Everyone worships Leonardo now. All the other painters like Titian and Raphael agree that he changed things. He was the first (and the best) at painting people with subtle expressions on their faces so you could almost tell what they were thinking.
Château de Cloux, Amboise, Northern France, April 1516
François I, the King of France, knows how to treat a court painter. And what’s more, he knows how to treat Leonardo. He’s not asking for altarpieces or frescoes. He just wants old Leonardo to work away at his geometry, live in this very pretty Château in the Loire valley with his friend Francesco Melzi, design the odd theatrical costume and work out ways to force the River Loire into canals. Leonardo has a smile from ear to ear. It is a great way to end his career.
Amboise, October 1517
We’ve just had a visit from the Cardinal of Aragon. He’s a bit of an unobservant old prune. He told his secretary that, impressed as he was by Leonardo’s magnificent paintings: “Nothing more that is fine can be expected of him, owing to the paralysis which has attacked his right hand.”
What he doesn’t know is that numero uno, Leonardo is left-handed, and numero due, Leonardo would much rather draw and write and design drainage systems than paint an altarpiece.
Amboise, May 2, 1519
Leonardo died today, at the age of sixty-seven. He died in the arms of the French King, François I. That’s pretty good for the illegitimate son of a peasant girl from Vinci.
Before everyone else gets their tributes in, I want to put in mine. The man was a genius who always wanted to find out more. He wanted to know how the world worked, and that is what kept him going. He was not a man to mess with, he was always the boss, he always knew better than anyone else, and I think he would rather be remembered as a philosopher of great intellect than a painter of beautiful pictures. And yet, I bet you anything you like that Mona Lisa’s little smile will be the thing that people will remember him by, hundreds of years from now.
Leonardo has left everything to Francesco Melzi. Melzi is going to have an enormous job on his hands, cataloguing and sorting through all those drawings and sketchbooks, the writings and the zillion and one half-finished projects.
As it is, we are left with thirteen finished paintings, a flaking mural in the monastery at Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the drawings and manuscripts of a man who had so many ideas that it would take twenty lifetimes to complete them all.
Publisher’s Addendum
Alex Parsons’ story about finding this diary in an Italian restaurant is a little hard to believe. Lengthy researches have failed to track down evidence for the existence of Leonardo’s paint mixer, and forensic analysis of the ‘age spots’ on the pages of the diary have been found to contain traces of tomato purée.
However, there are some things we can be sure of. Leonardo’s character and the details of his life and works do actually check out. In fact, they were checked out by Casey Parsons (thank you Casey), who is no slouch himself when it comes to making a good spaghetti sauce.
P.S.
In 1990, one hundred and fifty art historians and engineers got together to see if it might be possible to build the Sforza horse after all, following Leonardo’s very detailed drawings and instructions. What they found was not encouraging. Even if all four legs were on the ground, they couldn’t possibly hold the weight, and a casting that large would never cool evenly so the metal would crack. It is impossible to know how Leonardo planned to overcome these problems, given the technology available to him at the time.
Japanese engineers have built a full-scale Sforza horse, but out of fibreglass, which is cheating really. American engineers are now creating an authentic Sforza horse by casting a thin bronze skin in ten pieces and assembling it over a stainless steel skeleton. America will then give the completed Horse to Italy in recognition of all that Italian culture has given to America. It will be unveiled in Milan on September 10, 1999, exactly 500 years after Milan was invaded and Leonardo’s clay model of the horse was destroyed.
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The Verrocchio Workshop, Florence, 1470
* an order for work.
Florence, 1471
* money.
** palace.
* ears.
Florence, 1472
* wall painting done on wet plaster and left to dry.
Florence, Winter 1475
* tight-fitting jackets.
Florence, 1476
* people who sponsor artists.
Florence, January 1477
* internal frames which support sculptures.
Florence, 30th December 1479
* type of Italian bread.
Florence, 1481
* Wise Men.
** three dimensional.
Florence, 1482
* Let’s go!
Milan, 1483
* goodbye.
** someone who knows everything about the arts and the sciences.
Milan, 1489
* drawings which explain ideas, e.g. a skull meaning death, or a dog meaning faithfulness.
Milan, 1492
* essay.
Milan, December, 1493
* pouring molten metal into a mould to make a statue.
Milan, 1495
* communal dining room.
** the art of painting distance and size accurately.
Milan, Spring, 1497
* deputy head of a monastery.
Rome, 1502
* principal city Bologna, the home of Spaghetti Bolognese.