Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  The art scene in Florence was a fraternity of sorts, and Leonardo associated with other prominent men – Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino, Andrea della Robbia, and the Pollaiolo brothers, Antonio and Piero. He had patrons who gave him commissions and paved the way to commissions from others.

  Leonardo’s first commission in his own studio, an altarpiece for the Chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo Vecchio, came in 1478. He received an advance on his fee, but the subject he chose is not known, and he never completed it. The job was given five years later to Ghirlandaio, who was displaced in 1485 for a new painting by Filippino Lippi.

  Why did Leonardo forsake his first major commission? No one knows, but it was an omen: Leonardo was to abandon many projects, while much of his completed work deteriorated and crumbled because his quest for innovation kept him experimenting with new materials and techniques. However brilliant such work may have been, it couldn’t stand the test of time. In the end, Leonardo’s reputation rests on only fifteen paintings that scholars agree are his. His Florentine contemporary, the satirist Pietro Aretino, wrote, “I say to you that Leonardo was equal to the greatest. His limitation was that he had so elevated a genius that he was never satisfied with what was done.” In the case of the altarpiece, perhaps he was simply a perfectionist who couldn’t produce the vision he saw in his mind’s eye. Or perhaps, as with many later projects, he was sidetracked while studying his subject and jumped into a new one. His restless curiosity often stood in the way of earning a living.

  The constant political turmoil in Florence was an endless distraction. Never a tranquil city, it was again being dragged into war. Throughout the early 1400s, the city had been sucked into clashes between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors and also caught up in conflicts with the rival city-states of Italy. In 1440, Cosimo de’ Medici triumphed for Florence over the Viscontis of Milan in the Battle of Anghiari. The Medicis were also bankers for Pope Sixtus IV. But when Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo broke with Sixtus, the pope turned over his finances to the Pazzis, a rival family of Florentine bankers.

  In 1478, just as Leonardo was striking out on his own, the Medicis’ quarrel with the Pazzis erupted into a spectacular assassination in Florence’s cathedral. As Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano knelt in prayer, two men – Francesco de’ Pazzi, one of the heads of the family, and Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli, a banker for the Pazzis – ran up with daggers drawn and stabbed Giuliano nineteen times. Two other assassins, dissident priests, attacked Lorenzo. Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor; the wounded Lorenzo was hurried to safety.

  The attack was part of an attempt to overthrow the Medicis, but it failed. The conspirators were hunted down by infuriated mobs, and some twenty of them were killed. The Medicis hailed their triumph by commissioning Verrocchio to produce three life-size wax figures of Lorenzo with a scarf around his wounded neck, just as he appeared at a window of the Palazzo Medici; Botticelli was paid forty florins for a painting of the hanged assassins.

  The Pazzi plot provided a telling sidelight on Leonardo’s relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici. Assassin Bernardo Bandino hid in the bell tower of the cathedral and escaped the mobs, but a year later was tracked down in Constantinople, bought back to Florence in chains, and hanged from a window of the Bargello. Leonardo sketched his dangling body, with notes on the colors and style of his garments, indicating that he meant to do a full painting. But if he hoped for a reward like the ones Verrocchio and Botticelli had won for providing Medici propaganda a year earlier, he was disappointed.

  In the following years, the Medicis’ feud with the pope escalated into a war that divided most of Italy. Inevitably, Leonardo was drawn to the conflict. While he had no experience in warfare, Verrocchio had taught him that an artist could design anything. Later, he would call war “beastly madness,” but at the time, he draw war machines, including armored cars, a machine gun, and even a submarine, complete with a conning tower and screw propeller.

  Some were practical; others were not, because they relied on faulty theories or because they couldn’t have been built by fifteenth-century artisans. But all were ingenious.

  The war raged for two years until Lorenzo de’ Medici brought it to a close by a daring stroke of diplomacy: With only a small retinue, he traveled to the enemy city of Naples, whose king, Ferrante, had sent his armies to reinforce the pope. The king might well have captured or killed Lorenzo, but the Magnificent used his charm to persuade Ferrante to desert the pope’s cause and back Florence instead. Without Naples, the papal assault collapsed. Lorenzo made a truce with Pope Alexander VI and with the pope’s former allies, the Sforza of Milan. With the return of an uneasy peace, Florentines again focused on the arts.

  Leonardo was still trying to establish his studio. He won some minor commissions for small religious works and portraits, but lacked major projects.

  One of his interests in the late 1470s and early 1480s was poetry. While Leonardo himself produced little verse, his Florentine circle included a group of burchiellesco poets – wry, slangy, rough-edged, and often bawdy writers. He was especially friendly with Antonio Camelli, known as “Il Pistoia,” a satirist whose style was summed up by a contemporary as “jokes, salt, and honey.” Leonardo’s notes and papers during those years also contain frequent references to prominent scholars, physicians, scientists, and mathematicians; he knew Leon Batista Alberti, sometimes called the “first Renaissance man,” and he had contacts within the intellectual circle of philosopher Marsilio Ficino.

  Leonardo was also nurturing his lifelong passion for technology, further developing the hoists and cranes originally designed by Brunelleschi that lifted the great ball atop Florence’s cathedral when Leonardo was Verrocchio’s apprentice. According to Vasari, Leonardo offered the Signoria a plan to raise the entire Baptistery several feet and place a set of steps beneath it. “His arguments were so powerful that many people were persuaded it could be done,” Vasari wrote, “until they left his company and thought it over and realized it was impossible.” Leonardo’s drawings included a device for ripping the bars from a prison window, machines for pumping water to elevated tanks, and water-powered machines.

  His studio included at least one apprentice, Tommaso Massini. Massini - who was to become a longtime friend, assistant, and general factotum for Leonardo over the next twenty-five years – was a flamboyant, talented, and likable man who was given a series of nicknames but was buried under a tombstone inscribed with the best-known one: Zoroastro.

  The son of a gardener in a village near Florence, Zoroastro claimed to be the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, brother-in-law of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Rucellai, also a patron of Leonardo, took an interest in Zoroastro and may have helped place him in the studio. Zoroastro became a metalworker and a magician, an expert in casting bronze, and something of a court jester, but was also trusted with the household money and purchases. A vegetarian like Leonardo, he “would not kill a flea for any reason,” wrote one biographer, and “preferred to dress in linen so as not to wear something dead.” Later in life, Zoroastro took up alchemy. He seems to have been universally liked and respected – in the words of his epitaph, “a man outstanding for his probity, his innocence, and his liberality.”

  During this period, Leonardo produced three notable works. The first, the “Benois Madonna,” is a small gem: Flawed in detail, seemingly unfinished, and showing signs of later repainting, it is nonetheless an unforgettable depiction of Mary as an unsophisticated young mother, delighting in the baby on her lap as he takes in the beauty of a small flower. It is the essence of the Renaissance painters’ newfound ability to show spontaneous, informal human moments. As he would do in later paintings, most notably the “Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” Leonardo introduced a note of foreboding: The flower that fascinates the child is the bitter cress, a four-petaled member of the Crucifera family and a portent of his death.

  The second, more powerful, striking wor
k of Leonardo’s first Florentine period is “St. Jerome in the Wilderness.” Produced for an unknown patron and never finished, it shows the saint as a hermit in the Syrian Desert, anguished and emaciated, striking himself with a stone as he gazes at a crucifix. In the foreground is a huge lion, the saint’s symbol, posed in a sweeping curve with its tail in a counter-curve. The lion is lightly and powerfully sketched, but every muscle and tendon in the saint’s arm and neck stands out as if in an anatomical drawing.

  In 1481, Leonardo received his first important postwar commission, an altarpiece for the monks of the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, just outside Florence. Leonardo’s father had been handling the monastery’s business affairs and may have had a hand in obtaining the commission, but since the monks knew about the unfinished altarpiece in the Chapel of San Bernardo, the contract required Leonardo to finish the job in two and a half years at most.

  Leonardo was paying a heavy price for his independence and lack of dependability. The monks gave him no cash in advance, and his payment was to be only about 150 florins in the form of a property in the Val d’Elsa, south of Florence. In debt to the monastery for sums advanced to buy pigments for the painting, he was buying food and wine on credit and decorating the monastery clock in return for firewood.

  Leonardo chose the Adoration of the Magi as his subject, and he planned an ambitious tableau of the Nativity. In a series of detailed drawings, he worked out the painting’s perspective, changing it repeatedly and switching the sixty-seven figures around in intricately composed groups. Yet once again, after working on it for seven months, he gave up on his painting.

  Leaving his altarpiece unfinished, he closed his studio and packed his goods and went to Milan. Along with hundreds of drawings and many notebooks, he made an inventory of his recent work, including: “. . . certain figures of St. Jerome . . . drawings of knots . . . some machines for ships [and] for water . . . many heads of old men . . . a Madonna, finished . . . another almost, which is in profile.” Zoroastro went with him, and so did Atalante Migliorotti, a model who would become a singer and maker of musical instruments. Leonardo also took a letter of introduction to Ludovico Sforza, his prospective new patron, describing the marvels of engineering that he could perform – and mentioning almost in passing that he could paint, too.

  It was a major gamble. Leonardo wasn’t a boy with the world before him; he was a man of thirty, competing on unfamiliar turf with new and talented rivals for the favor of a patron he had never met. He knew how capricious any patron’s favor could be and how even a major talent could be spurned or ignored. But he had the certainty of a genius: He would prevail.

  Ludovico wasn’t yet the actual Duke of Milan; he was acting as regent for his ten-year-old nephew, who was too young to take over when his father, Ludovico’s brother, was assassinated in 1476. But Ludovico kept the heir isolated and powerless. Burly, ruthless, and unscrupulous, he was called “Il Moro,” the Moor, because of his dark complexion and as a pun on one of his names, Mauro. (Quattrocento Italians were obsessed by puns, and Leonardo was no exception; several times he paired his name with leone, lion.) Ludovico liked his nickname and used a moor’s head as part of his coat of arms.

  Ludovico wanted to reinforce the fortress of Casalmaggiore on the Po River, and Leonardo’s offer of military expertise probably caught his attention. Leonardo’s drawings in Milan include both an armored car and a portable cannon that “fires out small stones, almost as if it were a hailstorm” – an early version of the grapeshot widely used in naval and land battles of the eighteenth century.

  Because he was a Florentine, Leonardo had a certain edge in Milan. The two cities had a relationship rather like New York and Chicago or London and Paris; Milan both recognized and resented the cultural superiority of Florence. There was a prominent Florentine faction at the court of Ludovico, including the Medici banker Benedetto Portinari, the diplomat Benedetto Dei, and the Hellenist scholar Bartolomeo Calco, Ludovico’s secretary, who had been hired to help “purify the coarse speech of the Milanese.” All were in the inner circle and could be of help to Leonardo.

  The painter and architect Donato Bramante, regarded as the foremost artist in Milan at the time, soon became a good friend. But it was Leonardo’s friendship with two local painters - Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis - that resulted in his first Milanese commission. The three were hired by a religious group, the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, to paint an altarpiece that became the dark, elusive, haunting “Virgin of the Rocks.” It was to hang in the Confraternity’s chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande, then the biggest church in Milan except for the Duomo.

  Ambrogio de Predis was already established as a “painter to Ludovico,” but Leonardo’s reputation preceded him: The contract called Leonardo magister and assigned him to paint the central panel of the altarpiece, with Ambrogio de Predis responsible for the two smaller side panels and his brother Evangelista to decorate the frame. They were promised 800 florins and given a deadline of eight months. The content of the painting was stipulated in almost comic detail: The Madonna and Child would be grouped with a band of angels and two prophets, and each side panel would feature four angels singing or playing instruments. Perhaps needless to say, hardly any of this materialized.

  The painting shows the meeting of the infant Christ with the infant John the Baptist during the Holy Family’s flight from Egypt. They are in a grotto in the wilderness. With Mary’s hand on his shoulder, John is worshiping the Christ child, who blesses the Baptist in return, while an angel, seated beside Jesus, points to John. The Virgin’s left hand hovers over her son with its own sign of blessing.

  There are two versions of the “Virgin of the Rocks” - one at the Louvre in Paris and the other in London’s National Gallery. The painting in the Louvre is thought to be the original and entirely the work of Leonardo; the London painting was probably painted later and by both Leonardo and Ambrogio de Predis. The Louvre version better reflects Leonardo’s early Florentine style, with the Virgin’s lovely face, graceful pose, and long ringlets. The London version is darker and more austere, and the figures are equipped with haloes, which Leonardo usually shunned.

  One theory that explains the two paintings holds that after the artists finished the first version, Ludovico himself bought it and sent it to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian in 1493 when Maximilian married Ludovico’s niece. Antonio Billi, a sixteenth-century merchant who wrote extensively about Quattrocento artists, has a note supporting this account, and it is a matter of record that Ambrogio de Predis was at the imperial court in Innsbruck for the wedding. If it happened this way, the Confraternity could have used part of the payment from Ludovico to hire Leonardo and Ambrogio to paint the second version for their altarpiece.

  The painters delivered an altarpiece in 1485, but a legal dispute over the payment followed. In 1492, still squabbling, Leonardo and the brothers asked the court again for a fair payment or for permission to take back the painting, saying they had another offer. Litigation with the Confraternity erupted again in 1503 and lasted for five years, again over payment for “Virgin of the Rocks.” It seems likely that this dispute involved the second painting.

  Leonardo’s obsession with flying machines - a dream that would stay with him all his life – showed up again in Milan. He had drawn his first such machine in Florence in a doodle probably done between 1478 and 1480; it showed a bat-like wing over a pod for the pilot, with a control mechanism that allowed only limited movement of the wings, suggesting a glider rather than a machine designed for self-propelled flight. In his early Milan notes, he conveys the idea of air having substance: “See how the beating of its wings supports a heavy eagle in the highly rarefied air . . . Observe also how the air in motion over the sea fills the swelling sails and drives heavily laden ships . . . So a man with wings large enough, and duly attached, might learn to overcome the resistance of the air, and conquer and subjugate it, and raise himself upon it.” He even envisioned a helicop
ter, with a giant linen screw for a propeller, noting that if it were turned rapidly, “the screw will find its female in the air and will climb upward.”

  It took Leonardo several more years to design the more complex ornithopter, a flying machine with wings that mimicked an eagle’s. Ever the pragmatist, he was already imagining what could go wrong in the air and what to do about it, and around 1485, he sketched a working parachute. In the shape of a pyramid, twenty-four feet square with pine poles bracing the open bottom, the design was eminently practical – as proved in the year 2000 when an English sky-diver built one and jumped from a hot-air balloon 10,000 feet above the Kruger National Park in South Africa. He floated down gently, taking five minutes to descend 7,000 feet. Then, because Leonardo’s parachute weighed nearly 200 pounds and might crush him on landing, the skydiver cut himself loose and made the final drop with a modern parachute. He reported “a feeling of gentle elation and celebration,” adding: “It took one of the greatest minds who ever lived to design it, but it took 500 years to find a man with a brain small enough to actually go and fly it.”

  Leonardo’s notes show his mind ranging incessantly, with allegorical drawings of pain entwined with pleasure and virtue with envy. Perhaps because Milan was enduring a three-year bout of the bubonic plague, he was also musing about designs for the “ideal city.” Leonardo’s city would be built on two levels. The upper one was designed for pedestrian traffic, with shops, public buildings, palazzos, piazzas, gardens, sculpture, and loggias. The lower level, with tunnels and canals as well as streets, would be for warehouses, animals, carts transporting goods, and the dwellings of “ordinary” people. Leonardo recommended spiral staircases between the levels, noting that people tended to urinate in the dark corners of square staircases.

  To this point, Leonardo’s notes were a jumble of loose sheets, which he would rearrange from time to time; over the centuries, they floated from hand to hand and can be roughly dated only by changes in his mirror-script handwriting and drawing style. But in the mid-1480s, he began keeping proper notebooks. The earliest of these, which scholars now call Paris MS B, is in the Institut de France in Paris; besides the ideal city and the ornithopter, it contains designs that include churches, submarines, a steam-powered cannon, and a helicopter.