Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  Despite the disappointment, 1493 marked a year in which Leonardo’s studio was thrumming as he embarked on new works. His notes suggest that he had built a full-scale working model of his ornithopter on the roof of the Corte Vecchia, and he may have even tried to fly it. He was taking on a number of assignments from Ludovico - from interior decoration to creating emblems and allegorical drawings that served as a kind of propaganda for the duke, portraying him as the benevolent protector of his people.

  Ludovico was still officially the regent for his nephew, Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Ludovico had married him off advantageously in 1490 to Gian Galeazzo’s cousin, Isabella of Aragon, whose father Alfonso stood to inherit the kingdom of Naples and was thus a prime ally for Ludovico.

  For the wedding, Leonardo created the first of his elaborate pageants, an extravaganza depicting Il Paradiso, a representation of heaven, dramatically unveiled near midnight after a night of music, dancing, masques, and elaborate tributes to the young duke and his new duchess. As the diplomat Jacopo Trotti described it, “Il Paradiso was made in the shape of a half egg, which on the inner part was all covered with gold, with a very great number of lights, as many as stars, and with certain niches where stood all the seven planets [men dressed in appropriate costumes] . . . Around the top edge of this hemisphere were the twelve signs [of the Zodiac], with certain lights behind glass, which made a gallant and beautiful spectacle. In this Paradiso were heard many songs and many sweet and graceful sounds.”

  Accounts of the event suggest that the actual pageant, with lyrics by the court poet Bellincioni, were less impressive than Leonardo’s stage setting and costumes. A year later, for the wedding of Ludovico himself to Beatrice d’Este, Leonardo created an even more dramatic show to be put on by Ludovico’s son-in-law, Captain Galeazzo Sanseverino. With a splendid golden helmet and matching shield, Sanseverino led a large band of “wild men” on horseback, dressed in animal skins and carrying clubs, accompanied by, one observer noted, “huge drums and raucous trumpets.”

  Leonardo appeared to enjoy these theatrical events; he had a taste for fantasy and drama. On the street, when Leonardo saw someone interested him, he would follow that person until he knew his or her face well enough to go back to his studio and draw it – sometimes as a rough portrait, but often as a caricature or grotesque. As he once noted, he was fascinated with the “buffoonish, ridiculous, and really pitiable.”

  During his years in Milan, Leonardo began his painstaking studies of light and shade, discerning seven distinct kinds of shadows and proposing to write a treatise on each one. Another manuscript from the time discusses different sources and qualities of light, with drawings showing how to depict them.

  The Milan notebooks also offer practical advice to painters. To succeed, Leonardo wrote, you must “quit your home in town, and leave your family and friends, and go over the mountains and valleys into the country.” Also, portraits are best done “in dull weather, or as evening falls . . . See in the street toward evening, or when the weather is bad, how much grace and sweetness can be seen in the faces of the men and women. Therefore, O painter, use a courtyard where the walls are colored black, or with some kind of overlapping roof . . . and when it is sunny it should be covered with an awning. Alternatively work on the painting toward evening, or when it is cloudy or misty, and this will be the perfect atmosphere.”

  Leonardo’s own studio was busily turning out work shot through with his influence, whether actually painted by the maestro or done by his associates and apprentices under his guidance and in his characteristic Leonardesco style. Besides the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, there are three paintings of this period that critics attribute entirely or mostly to Leonardo.

  The earliest, dating from about the same time as Cecilia’s portrait, shows a young man holding a musical score, the reason the painting is usually called “The Musician.” It is the only known Leonardo portrait of a man. His face is striking and lively under a bright red cap, standing out against the velvety dark background Leonardo advised and uniformly used in these years. In contrast, the musician’s tunic and hand seem almost sketched in; the painting is sometimes called unfinished – like the portrait of Cecilia, with her left hand shading into darkness rather than fully modeled. It seems probable that Leonardo did this deliberately to sharpen the composition and focus attention on the faces of his subjects.

  The second portrait was of another lovely woman, with a bold gaze and a sensual mouth. The subject was almost surely Lucrezia Crivelli, Ludovico’s next mistress after Cecilia, who bore him another acknowledged son in 1497.

  Other paintings from the Milan studio are obviously Leonardesco (strongly influenced by Leonardo’s style), with or without the maestro’s actual intervention: Boltraffio’s “Madonna and Child,” Ambrogio de Predis’ “Lady with a Pearl Necklace” (perhaps a portrait of Ludovico’s wife, Beatrice d’Este), d’Oggione’s copy of “Virgin of the Rocks.” And the fees for all these works would have followed Leonardo’s ordering, ranging from expensive to “quite cheap” depending on how much he was involved. When Boltraffio and d’Oggioni collaborated on an altarpiece of the Resurrection in the church of Milan’s San Giovanni sul Muro, the contract awarded them fifty ducats, just a quarter of what Leonardo and the de Predis brothers were promised for “Virgin of the Rocks.”

  As a monument to the Sforza dynasty and a kind of family mausoleum, Ludovico was expanding and modernizing the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and soon after the great horse project failed, he commissioned Leonardo to paint a mural on the north wall of the monks’ refectory. The subject was the Cenacolo – Christ’s last supper with his disciples.

  Traditionally, paintings of the last supper had shown the initiation of the covenant embodied in communion: “Eat this in remembrance of me.” But Leonardo chose the more dramatic moment when Christ announced, “Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.” “The Last Supper” shows the savior, sorrowful and resigned, at the center of the long table, with his disciples flanking him, electrified in shock and dismay. In Leonardo’s preliminary notes, he describes the painting:

  “One who was drinking and has left the glass in its position and turned his head toward the speaker.

  “Another twisting the fingers of his hand together, turns with stern brow to his companion, and he with his hands spread shows the palms and shrugs up his shoulders to his ears, and makes a mouth of astonishment.

  “Another who has turned, holding a knife in his hand, knocks over a glass on the table . . .”

  In the finished work, the details have changed. The white-bearded James is the disciple holding up his hands and shrugging; the man knocking over a glass has become Judas the betrayer, spilling a salt cellar in nervous anxiety. Philip, rising from his seat, is asking, “Master, is it I?” But the mural is precisely what Leonardo meant it to be, a stop-action point in a vivid narrative.

  Both in Leonardo’s notebooks and on the monastery wall, “The Last Supper” evolved. He did it in oil and tempera rather than as a fresco, which would have required him to paint segments of the mural quickly on a fresh coat of plaster before it dried. Oil paint let him work more slowly and rethink later; subsequent restorations have revealed the way Christ’s fingers grew shorter, a dish changed position, and each of the four groupings of three disciples was subtly rebalanced.

  The novelist Matteo Bandello, who as a boy watched Leonardo at work on the painting, recalled that sometimes he would paint from dawn to dusk, not even stopping to eat; at other times, he stood in front of the picture for as long as four days without touching a brush. This infuriated Bandello’s uncle, the prior, who urged Leonardo to hurry up and complained to the duke that the artist was loafing. But once, Bandello wrote, the painter was “driven by some sudden urge, at midday, when the sun was at its height, leaving the Corte Vecchia . . . to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie, without seeking shade, and clamber up onto the scaffolding, pick up a brush, put in one or two touc
hes, and then go away again.”

  The prior’s criticism echoes in an account of Leonardo searching through the seamiest district of Milan for a model with a face wicked enough to do justice to Judas and telling the duke, “If I cannot find one I will have to use the face of this reverend father, the prior.” Ludovico laughed loudly, Vasari wrote, and “the unfortunate prior retired in confusion to harass the laborers working in his garden.”

  Sadly, the great painting was another victim of Leonardo’s restless innovation. Because of his use of oil and tempera rather than fresco technique, and perhaps because of lingering dampness in the refectory, the mural began to deteriorate and flake off the wall within a few years. By the time Vasari saw it in 1556, he described it as no more than “a muddle of blots.” Repeated efforts to restore it ruined many of Leonardo’s subtleties and hid details under layers of varnish. Then in 1796, anti-clerical French soldiers threw stones at the painting and climbed ladders to scratch out the apostles’ eyes. At one point, a door was cut through the painting, and later bricked up; it appears as the blank arch in the lower front of the mural, cutting off the view of Christ’s feet. And in 1943, Allied bombs came close to destroying the refectory and the painting with it.

  Starting in 1978, a major restoration lasting twenty-one years dramatically changed the painting. Previous repaintings were peeled away, bit by microscopic bit, to try to uncover the original pigments, and many of the faces (including Judas’) became much more like Leonardo’s sketches. Only a fifth of the original paint was left. The parts of the painting that could not be saved were repainted in less vivid watercolors, giving a sense of the full composition but not hiding what wasn’t original.

  The restoration was guided by a full-scale copy of “The Last Supper” painted by Gianni Pietro Rizzoli, known as Giampetrino, one of the apprentices who worked on the mural with Leonardo.

  Perhaps inevitably, even this scrupulous work has been criticized as too intrusive and having lost the soul of Leonardo’s painting. But most critics say what is left reflects what he intended – and at least will not continue to deteriorate.

  By this time Ludovico was Duke of Milan by title as well as force. His nephew Gian Galeazzo had died in 1494 - amid widespread suspicion that Ludovico had poisoned him - and Ludovico was proclaimed duke the next day. But Italy was in turmoil. The French king, Charles VIII, was capitalizing on rivalry among the city-states to claim weak territories. With French troops camped outside Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son and successor, Piero, had signed a treaty granting the French control of Pisa and several other towns. The outraged Florentines had overthrown the Medicis, opening the way for the charismatic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola to set up a puritanical theocracy featuring “bonfires of the vanities,” which were fueled by paintings, books, and anything else deemed corrupt or heretical.

  Charles VIII was obviously eager to expand his realm; nevertheless, Ludovico kept up his alliance with the French king, ignoring the fact that one of the French generals, the Duc d’Orleans, was the grandson of a Visconti and thus had a claim to the dukedom of Milan.

  Political machinations aside, Leonardo was established as Ludovico’s favorite artist and enjoyed his patronage; estimates of Leonardo’s annual income range from an adequate 500 ducats to a princely 2,000. But Leonardo was not above grumbling. He complained in a letter that he hadn’t received payments: “If your Lordship thought I had money, your Lordship was deceived . . . It vexes me greatly that . . . my having to earn a living has forced me to interrupt the work on “The Last Supper” and to attend to lesser matters instead of following up the work which your Lordship entrusted to me.”

  When Leonardo finished the mural, Ludovico gave him three acres of land outside the city walls with a house, garden, and vineyard. It was a refuge from the heat and clamor of Milan, and Leonardo cherished it.

  After “The Last Supper,” Leonardo had two years of comparative tranquility. He puttered in his garden, hobnobbed with cronies, and embarked on remodeling and redecorating the north wing of the ducal palace, which Ludovico turned into his private quarters after his duchess, Beatrice d’Este, died in childbirth. At the age of forty-five, Leonardo’s mind was as busy as ever, and a compatible mind arrived in Venice in the body of Fra Luca Pacioli, a scholar in mathematics and philosophy, who soon became Leonardo’s friend. Leonardo provided the intricate geometrical illustrations for Pacioli’s book, Divina Proportione, including a drawing of a dodecahedron with shadings that make it nearly three-dimensional.

  Leonardo was also at least toying with the notion of starting his own academy, a group of intellectuals that might have included the architect Donato Bramante, the court poet Gasparè Visconti, the architect Giacomo Andrea, and the physician Giuliano da Marliano. Scholars differ on whether such an academy was actually organized, but it exists in Leonardo’s notes along with elaborate drawings of knot designs that spell out variations of “Academia Leonardo Vinci.”

  This interlude for Leonardo was destined to be brief: Ludovico and the Sforza dynasty were about to be toppled. Early in 1499, the French were preparing to invade Italy. Charles VIII had died, and new King Louis XII, the former Duc d’Orleans, was determined to add Milan to his possessions. French troops crossed the border into Italy in May, and by late July, they neared Ludovico’s territory.

  From his notebook, we can reconstruct a vivid picture of Leonardo preparing his studio for the arrival of looting soldiers. He counted the money in his cashbox: 1,180 lire, which he divided into packets and wrapped in paper, hiding them in nooks and crannies around the studio, and putting the small change back in the cashbox where it could easily be found. In late July, he observed another kind of preparation: “In the park of the Duke of Milan I saw a 700 pound cannon-ball shot from a height of one braccia. It bounced twenty-eight times, the length of each bounce having the same proportion to the previous one as the height of each bounce had to the next.”

  Some of Ludovico’s allies were defecting, and his political foes whipped up a riot in which his treasurer was killed. On September 2, the duke fled the city, hoping for help from the Emperor Maximilian in Innsbruck. Four days later, the French took over Milan. There was no resistance.

  Leonardo apparently tried to ingratiate himself with the French during the six weeks that the king stayed in Milan. He kept a coded note reminding himself to get in touch with the Comte de Ligny, whom he had met before, and another from an unidentified person urging him to “produce as soon as possible the report on conditions in Florence, especially the manner and style in which the reverend father Friar Jeronimo [Savonarola] has organized the state of Florence.”

  But in December, Leonardo made plans to leave the city. The French had left, and Ludovico’s people said the duke was coming back with Swiss mercenaries and the backing of the emperor. It would hardly be prudent for a man who had collaborated with the occupiers to stick around to greet the patron he had failed to defend. His list of to-do notes, beginning with “Have two boxes made,” concludes a bit bleakly, “Sell what you cannot take with you.” So, after eighteen years and the completion of some of his greatest works, Leonardo left Milan.

  Isabella d’Este wanted desperately to be Leonardo’s next patron. Her family was one of Italy’s oldest and most distinguished. Isabella was one of the three d’Este siblings whose marriages in 1491 cemented a new set of alliances in northern Italy. She began her collection with gems, intaglios, and cameos, but branched into busts and small sculptures and soon began commissioning paintings. In 1498, she had written, somewhat imperiously, to Cecilia Gallerani, asking to borrow Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine,” so that she could compare it with a portrait by Giovanni Bellini. (The request was a bit indelicate, since Cecilia was well-known to be the mistress of her sister’s husband.) Isabella was filling two large display rooms in her palace with her growing collection, which included two large allegories by Andrea Mantegna, two by Lorenzo Costa, and one by Perugino. But she had no paintings by Leonard
o, and she badly wanted one.

  Leonardo was probably accepting a standing invitation when he left Milan for Mantua in December 1499, and while he was Isabella’s guest that winter, he did a drawing of her. It shows a proud, aristocratic woman, past her prime, with the air of someone accustomed to getting her way. Shown in profile, the rendering bears a marked resemblance to a portrait of her sister Beatrice by Ambrogio de Predis.

  The atmosphere in Isabella’s court may not have been entirely simpatico. Although considered intelligent, she was also strong-willed and capricious; when her lapdog died, court poets were called on to write tributes to it both in Latin and Italian. In any case, by mid-March, Leonardo was in Venice, and Lorenzo Guznago, a musician from Ferrara, visited him in his lodgings there and wrote a letter to Isabella reporting that her portrait was coming along splendidly – “very true to nature and beautifully done. It couldn’t possibly be better.”

  While in Venice, Leonardo studied copperplate engraving and was busy with major works of engineering. His notes indicate that he was hired by the Venetian Senate to look into fortifying the Isonzo River, in the Friuli region northeast of the city, to ward off a Turkish invasion.

  Leonardo learned of Ludovico Sforza’s last chapter in Milan. Troops loyal to the duke under Galeazzo Sanseverino had entered the city, but Ludovico’s army of Swiss mercenaries was routed, and he was captured and imprisoned. Leonardo’s note was laconic: “The duke lost his state, and his goods, and his freedom, and none of his works was completed.” It was a farewell not only to his patron, but to the great horse and “The Last Supper” as well.

  In 1500, back in Florence after eighteen years, Leonardo found the city of his youth a diminished place. The theocracy of Savonarola was gone; the monk had been hanged and burned two years earlier. But Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities had consumed Florence’s gaiety and confidence along with many of its treasures, and the Medici had yet to return; Florence was now a republic. After the French abandoned Pisa, city fathers had declared independence from Florence, and the Signoria had embarked on an unnecessary and badly waged war to regain control. Now Florence was bankrupt.