Leonardo da Vinci Read online

  Leonardo had taken over a large unused refectory at the nearby monastery of Santa Maria Novella to use as a studio, where he would draw the enormous sketch from which the outlines of the painting would be transferred to the wall of the Council Hall. As in his work on “The Last Supper,” he had private living quarters next to the refectory. A ten-foot-wide platform was hung from a system of pulleys so that Leonardo could reach the whole surface of his drawing. By late spring of 1504, he was hard at work, his notebook filled with the snarling faces of warriors and the straining, contorted muscles of their horses. The great fresco would be no idealized triumph, but a grisly depiction of the true horrors of war.

  By then, Michelangelo’s “David” – referred to merely as “the giant” by Florentines – was nearly finished. There’s no record of how the two rivals got along up to this time, but they were hardly compatible. By all accounts, Leonardo was cool, fastidious, and almost unfailingly courteous; he shunned conflict, and his rare outbursts of temper always surprised those around him. By contrast, Michelangelo was brash, a swaggerer, with a flattened nose smashed in a fistfight.

  It would hardly be surprising if Leonardo resented the young genius - on top of everything else, Michelangelo’s “David” was already eclipsing the Verrocchio sculpture for which Leonardo himself had been the youthful model. So when the Signoria called together twenty-nine illustrious Florentine artists to vote on where in the Piazza della Signoria Michelangelo’s masterpiece was to be permanently displayed, Leonardo’s opinion was a bit dismissive. “I say that it should be placed in the loggia,” the record quotes him, “behind the low wall . . . in such a way that it does not interfere with the ceremonies of state.” But he was in the minority: The statue was hauled to a position of honor in the piazza, outside the main entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio, where visitors would see it before they could view Leonardo’s mural.

  Whether it was before or after Leonardo’s harsh words, the rivalry produced a confrontation on the streets of Florence. Anonimo Gaddiano, who apparently heard the story from someone who was there, recorded this vivid anecdote: “Leonardo was walking with P. da Gavine through the Piazza Santa Trinita, and they passed the Pancaccia degli Spini where there was a gathering of citizens arguing over a passage of Dante; and they called out to the said Leonardo, asking him to explain the passage. At that point, by chance, Michele Agnolo was passing by, and Leonardo answered their request by saying, ‘There’s Michele Agnolo, he’ll explain it to you.’ Upon which Michele Agnolo, thinking he had said this to insult him, retorted angrily, ‘Explain it yourself – you who designed a horse to cast in bronze, and couldn’t cast it, and abandoned it out of shame.’ And so saying he turned his back on them and walked off. And Leonardo was left there, his face red because of these words.”

  On another occasion, Gaddiano records, Michelangelo jeered at Leonardo, “So those stupid Milanese actually believed in you?” Not long after this, he wrote a veiled comment on Michelangelo’s characteristically tense and straining bodies in his paintings: “You should not make all the muscles of the body too conspicuous . . . If you do otherwise you will produce a sack of walnuts rather than a human figure.”

  With “David” completed, the Signoria was inspired to ratchet up the rivalry between the two artists: In October 1504, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint a separate mural on the Council Chamber wall opposite Leonardo’s. He was to depict another martial scene, the Battle of Cascina, dating from an earlier war with Pisa.

  It wasn’t to be. As soon as he learned of the new commission, Leonardo left Florence. His father had died in July, and his journey was in part to visit relatives in Vinci. But one biographer believes his departure was at least partly “a piqued withdrawal from the scene: a walk-out.”

  Meanwhile, Michelangelo was given another large studio to produce his own drawing. He chose to paint a scene prior to the battle, showing surprised Florentine soldiers hastily putting on their armor after being caught swimming in the Arno by the enemy. As Vasari described it, “Michelangelo’s inspired hand depicted them . . . in various unusual attitudes, some upright, some kneeling or leaning forward, or halfway between one position and another, all exhibiting the most difficult foreshortenings.”

  Michelangelo exhibited his finished draft in February 1505; Vasari says that “all the other artists were overcome with admiration and astonishment.” Michelangelo then left for Rome to discuss designing a tomb for Pope Julius II. A copy of his drawing remains, but there is no record that he ever started work on the painting itself.

  By the time Leonardo started painting his Council Room wall, he had reached the deadline by which he had promised “without any exception or cavil whatsoever” to finish the whole project. He painted throughout the year while the Signoria paid his monthly stipend of fifteen florins. But the councilors were grumbling, and Vasari recorded a telling incident: “It is said that when [Leonardo] went to the bank for the salary which he was accustomed to receive from Piero Soderini every month, the cashier wanted to give it to him in piles of quattrini [small coins]. He did not want to take them, saying, ‘I am not a penny painter!’ There were complaints about this behavior, and Piero Soderini was turning against him. So Leonardo got many friends of his to gather up a whole pile of quattrini, and he took them to him to return the money; but Piero did not want to accept them.” The payments to Leonardo continued through the end of October.

  Some records suggest that the painting ran into technical problems akin to those of “The Last Supper.” Writer Antonio Billi said Leonardo’s pigments weren’t adhering to the wall because he had been fobbed off with adulterated linseed oil. Whatever the cause, Leonardo never finished the mural, though a large central portion was near completion when he left Florence in May 1506. As late as 1549, writer Anton Francesco Doni wrote to a friend, “Go up the stairs of the Sala Grande, and take a close look at a group of horses and men, a battle-study by Leonardo da Vinci, and you will see something miraculous.” But twelve years later the painting was gone, covered by a huge multi-wall fresco done by Giorgio Vasari.

  Unless the painting had deteriorated, Vasari would likely have taken steps to preserve a work of Leonardo’s before plastering the wall for his own fresco. In fact, a tiny inscription in a corner of Vasari’s painting reads Cerca Trova, seek and ye shall find. In recent years, various high-tech means have been used to probe the walls for a buried painting. But the results have been ambiguous, and it isn’t even certain which wall of the chamber Leonardo painted. Even if Vasari’s fresco were ripped away, there might be nothing but fragments left of “The Battle of Anghiari.” And as a Florentine councilor recently argued, “Vasari may not be Leonardo, but he is still Vasari.”

  Leonardo’s initial drawing for the painting has also vanished. There are several copies of varying quality, but the closest we are likely to get to Leonardo’s work is a marvelous watercolor attributed to Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens never saw the original mural, but his version was painted sometime after 1600 directly on top of an earlier Italian drawing of the fresco. Rubens conveys all the fury, turmoil, and brutality of Leonardo’s preparatory sketches.

  Leonardo turned to classical themes during his second stay in Florence, creating a drawing of Neptune in his chariot for his patron Antonio Segni, a Florentine banker. He seems to have painted a Bacchus as well; Alfonso d’Este, Isabella’s brother and the Duke of Ferrara, wrote to one of his business agents that he wanted to buy Leonardo’s “Bacchus,” but the agent replied that the painting had already been promised to the Cardinal of Rouen. If the painting did exist, it has been lost.

  Leonardo’s classical period neared its peak in “Leda and the Swan,” a painting that Antonio Segni may have commissioned and Leonardo may or may not have finished. Several drawings in Leonardo’s hand exist, along with copies of several versions of the painting, apparently by Leonardo’s apprentices. The French royal collection once included a “Leda” attributed to Leonardo, but it was dropped from the list late in the s
eventeenth century. It has long been rumored that Madame de Maintenon, mistress and secret wife of King Louis XIV, found the painting immoral and ordered its removal.

  She would have had reason. The painting depicts the classical myth of Jupiter, disguised as a swan, courting the lovely princess Leda. None of Leonardo’s sketches of the scene are as erotic as earlier interpretations of the scene by other artists, which show the swan forcing itself upon Leda; his versions stress fecundity and fertility, portraying Leda as a Rubensesque beauty with a brood of small children hatching from eggs at her feet. In Leonardo’s most striking drawing, Leda rests on one knee, with the other leg poised to lift her to her feet, while the amorous swan seems to be nibbling at her ear. Finished copies of the painting show Leda standing on both feet, and there is also a full-scale copy of a preliminary drawing of the standing Leda done by Raphael while he was in Florence in 1505 or 1506. Of the painting itself, if it existed, there is no trace.

  But more than one swan inhabited Leonardo’s thoughts in those years. He had returned to his obsession with flying and flying machines, sketching detailed designs for such parts as rotating wing joints, and musing repeatedly on what it would be like to soar through the air. A small notebook now in the Royal Library in Turin is filled with these notes, drawings of bird flight, and observations on aerodynamics.

  “A bird is a machine working within mechanical laws,” Leonardo wrote. “It lies within the power of man to reproduce this machine with all its motions, but not with as much power.” A machine built to fly would lack only “the spirit of the bird,” he said, which the spirit of man would have to supply. In his own spirit, he was already in the sky, mounting thermals with his wings steady or banking with the wind: “If the north wind is blowing and you are gliding above the wind, and if in your straight ascent upward that wind is threatening to overturn you, then you are free to bend your right or left wing, and with the inside wing lowered you will continue a curving motion . . .”

  He may actually have tried his flying machine. The Turin notebook contains two versions of what amounts to a press release, an announcement worthy of P.T. Barnum: “The big bird will take its first flight above the back of the Great Cecero, filling the universe with amazement, filling all the chronicles with its fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.” The “great Cecero” is Leonardo’s version of Monte Ceceri, a peak near Florence; no doubt he spelled it Cecero because that is Florentine dialect for swan.

  For all the notebook braggadocio, if he did try to fly, it must have been in secret. If there had been any such public event, it is hard to imagine that it was never recorded, by Leonardo or anyone else. The only surviving note is a tantalizing sentence by the mathematician Girolamo Cardano, who wrote in 1550 that Leonardo was an “extraordinary man” who tried to fly “and was frustrated.” Leonardo would surely have left word of such an experiment, whether it was a success or a failure; he would have learned too much from either to let it pass. In all probability, he spread his wings only in his imagination.

  By 1506, Leonardo had become a trophy, sought after by cities, nobles, and kings who squabbled over his talents, his attention, and his very presence.

  Milan was calling him back, primarily to settle the long legal battle over payment for the “Virgin of the Rocks,” but Florence didn’t want him to leave, especially without finishing “The Battle of Anghiari.” In May, the Signori reluctantly permitted him to go to Milan if he promised to return in three months, with a penalty of 150 florins if he stayed longer – guaranteed by the manager of the bank where he kept his savings.

  Milan now had a French governor, Charles d’Amboise, an intelligent, vigorous and self-indulgent young aristocrat – “as fond of Venus as of Bacchus,” one historian wrote – who was already a fan of Leonardo. He took him into his castle, the former Sforza stronghold, and Leonardo almost immediately began making detailed plans for a summer villa d’Amboise intended to build outside the city. He visualized the landscaping in exquisite detail, including orange and lemon trees, an arbor covered with a net of copper wire to keep songbirds inside, and a mock windmill powered by water to act as a fan on warm days.

  The two men became as close as a master and servant can be. “We loved him before meeting him in person,” d’Amboise was to write, “and now that we have been in his company . . . we see in truth that his name, though already famous for his painting, has not received sufficient praise for the many other gifts he possesses, which are of an extraordinary power.” To mark Leonardo’s fifty-fifth birthday, the count gave him back his vineyard, which the French had confiscated soon after they took over Milan in 1500.

  As Leonardo’s deadline for returning to Florence approached, d’Amboise wrote the Signoria asking for permission for Leonardo to extend his stay until the end of September to “supply certain works which he has at our request begun.” The Signoria agreed, not wanting to offend Florence’s powerful but touchy French allies. Early in October, however, with the painter still in Milan, Soderini wrote d’Amboise angrily pointing out that Leonardo “has not behaved as he should have done toward the republic, because he has taken a large amount of money and made only a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out. . . . We do not wish any further requests to be made on this matter.”

  Early in December, d’Amboise wrote again, saying he would not seek any further extension but asking that Florence treat Leonardo with the respect and honors he deserved. Then, however, Soderini’s ace was trumped: His ambassador to France reported that Louis XII wanted Leonardo to stay in Milan until the king himself arrived there on a planned visit, because the king wanted “certain little pictures of Our Lady, and other things as they occur to my fantasy, and perhaps I will get him to paint my own portrait.” Soon, Soderini received the king’s own confirmation: “We have necessary need of Master Leonardo da Vinci, painter of your city of Florence.”

  On an earlier visit to Milan, King Louis had been powerfully taken by “The Last Supper,” even exploring the possibility of removing the fresco from its wall and hauling it back to France. Then his courtier Florimond Robertet had shown him the “Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” and the king’s appetite for Da Vinci paintings became voracious.

  There’s no record of any immediate commission for Leonardo after King Louis arrived in Milan at the end of April 1507, but the king did provide him some added income: the tolls from a section of Milan’s system of canals. The demand for Leonardo’s services had not subsided – Isabella d’Este was still writing imploring letters, and Soderini was still fuming in Florence – but the king’s whim was law, and there was no immediate need for Leonardo to leave Milan.

  Legal wrangling over the “Virgin of the Rocks” would drag on for years. By this time, the dispute was about the second version of the painting, done mostly by Ambrogio de Predis after Ludovico Sforza sent the first one to Emperor Maximilian; the new painting was to replace the original in the chapel of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception.

  The second painting was, in fact, delivered to the Confraternity sometime after 1499, but Ambrogio complained to King Louis in 1503 that the friars still owed money for it. The king sent the case to arbitration, and after three years the ruling went against the artists: The painting was imperfetto, meaning either incomplete or not good enough - perhaps simply that Leonardo’s hand wasn’t sufficiently evident. In either case, Leonardo was ordered back to Milan to finish it.

  The judgment awarded the painters 200 lire on completion - less than they wanted, but twice what the friars had offered - and the Confraternity came up with half this amount in August 1507. But that didn’t end the dispute. The retouched painting was delivered early in 1508, but in August of that year, a new contract was drawn up: Instead of the final payment of a hundred lire, the painters would get the right to do yet another copy of the painting and sell it. Ambrogio was to do the painting under Leonardo’s supervision, and the two men would share equally in whatever price it
brought. If this third “Virgin of the Rocks” was ever painted, it has vanished.

  Another legal dispute finally took Leonardo back to Florence – a bitter fight with his half-brothers over the will of his uncle, Francesco.

  When Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci, died in 1504, Leonardo was passed over in his will. There may have been tensions simmering between father and son, or because Leonardo was by then a successful artist, with a growing retinue of apprentices and servants, he had less claim to Piero’s money than his eleven legitimate children. In either case, there is no record that Leonardo challenged Piero’s will.

  But the omission evidently rankled Piero’s younger brother. Francesco had been Leonardo’s boyhood mentor on those long walks through the Tuscan countryside, and after Piero’s death, his brother drew up a new will naming Leonardo as his only heir. This reneged on an earlier agreement between the brothers that Francesco’s estate should go to Piero’s legitimate children, and when Francesco died, they moved immediately to have his will invalidated.

  Leonardo took a large part of his household back to Florence to fight the case. It rapidly grew as rancorous as family fights get; Leonardo wrote that his brothers treated him “not as a brother but as a complete stranger” and that they had “wished the utmost evil” to Francesco while he was alive.

  Leonardo brought some powerful guns to bear. Even before he arrived in Florence, the Signoria had a letter from King Louis asking for direct intervention in the case on behalf of “our painter and engineer in ordinary,” Leonardo’s official title. Another letter from Charles d’Amboise asked the council to expedite the legal matter as swiftly as possible. And a letter from Leonardo to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, another of Isabella’s brothers, asked him to intervene with Ser Raffaello Hieronomo, a member of the Signoria who was adjudicating the case.