It is time now to rescue from obscurity one of the most curious and engaging figures in Leonardo’s retinue: Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, generally known by the imposing alias of ‘Zoroastro’. He is mentioned by the Anonimo Gaddiano as one of Leonardo’s assistants during the painting of the Battle of Anghiari fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio, and this is confirmed by documents recording payments to him in April and August 1505; these describe him as Leonardo’s garzone, whose job was ‘to grind the colours’.16This precise mention of him, and the rather lowly status he is accorded, have led most biographers to assume that he was a young apprentice of Leonardo’s in 1505. But in fact he was already part of Leonardo’s circle in Milan in the 1490s – he is mentioned (as ‘Geroastro’) in an anonymous Milanese poem dedicated to Leonardo in about 1498 – and there is other evidence suggesting that their association goes back to this first Florentine period.
Tommaso was born in about 1462, in the village of Peretola, in the flatlands between Florence and Prato. He died in Rome in 1520, at the age of fifty-eight, and was buried in the church of Sant’Agata dei Goti.17 A brief and colourful sketch of his life is found in Scipione Ammirato’s Opusculi, published in Florence in 1637.
Zoroastro’s name was Tommaso Masini; he was from Peretola, a mile out of Florence. He was the son of a gardener, but claimed to be the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, the brother in law of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Then he joined up with [si mise con: literally, ‘he placed himself with’] Leonardo Vinci, who made him an outfit of gall-nuts, and for this reason he was for a long time known as Il Gallozzolo [‘the Gall-Nut’]. Then Leonardo went to Milan and with him went Zoroastro, and there he was known as Indovino [‘the Fortune-Teller’], since he professed the arts of magic. Later he was in Rome, where he lived with Giovanni Rucellai, castellan of Sant’Agnolo, and then with Viseo, the Portuguese ambassador, and finally with Ridolfi. He was a great expert on mining techniques… When he died he was buried in Santa Agata, between the tombs of Tressino and Giovanni Lascari. On his tomb there is an angel with a pair of tongs and a hammer, striking at the skeleton of a dead man, representing the faith he had in the resurrection. He would not kill a flea for any reason whatever. He preferred to dress in linen so as not to wear something dead.18
This has its obscurities, but gives us an attractive idea of Zoroastro as something between a jester, a magician and an engineer – and also a vegetarian, as Leonardo was reputed to be. The outfit of gall-nuts is curious, but has a parallel in some notes about masquerade costumes, where Leonardo describes an outfit made by sticking grains of black and white millet on to cloth varnished with turpentine and glue.19 However, Ammirato does not suggest a theatrical context: he seems to mean that Leonardo made this unusual appliqué outfit, perhaps a cloak, and that Tommaso, being an eccentric young man, wore it, and so earned the nickname.
Zoroastro is probably the ‘Maestro Tommaso’ referred to by Leonardo in some accounting notes of 1492–3:
Thursday 27 September: Maestro Tommaso returned [to Milan]. He worked on his own account until the penultimate day of February…
On the penultimate day of November we reckoned up accounts… Maestro Tommaso had nine months to pay. He then made 6 candlesticks.20
This would place him as an independent craftsman working under the aegis of Leonardo’s Milanese studio. He is a metalworker, which ties in with Ammirato’s mention of his interest in mining. In another near-contemporary source – a Venetian manuscript which has some copies of Leonardo machinery – he is described as a ‘blacksmith’.21 In 1492–3 Leonardo was involved in a very ambitious project – the casting of the gigantic equestrian statue known as the Sforza Horse – and doubtless the expert metallurgist Masini was involved in that too, and in many other projects: military, architectural and indeed aviational.
Zoroastro has a mercurial quality: his status is hard to define. He is ‘Maestro Tommaso’ to Leonardo, but to the accountant reckoning up the costs of the Anghiari fresco he is only a garzone or shop-assistant mixing the colours. He is also probably ‘Tommaso my servant’ – ‘mio famiglio’ – who makes household purchases for Leonardo in 1504. If so, we have some samples of his handwriting preserved among Leonardo’s papers in the Codex Arundel: a rounded, well-formed script.22
Another first-hand account of Zoroastro has recently surfaced. It is in a letter from Dom Miguel da Silva, Bishop of Viseo – a courtly and well-connected Portuguese who is one of the interlocutors in Castiglione’s book The Courtier. The letter, dated 21 February 1520, is addressed to Giovanni Rucellai, the son of Bernardo. (This tends to validate Ammirato’s account of Zoroastro, which mentions his connection with both da Silva and the Rucellai.) At some point before the letter, we learn, Zoroastro had been living at the Rucellai country villa, Quaracci, outside Florence. Da Silva writes of visiting the house, where he was pleased to find ‘everything arranged just as if Zoroastro was still there – a great many cooking-pots with dried-up paste, and other pieces of pots that had already been in the fire, were to be seen all over the place’. These ‘cooking-pots’ are to be understood as chemical vessels – retorts, alembics, etc. – as the continuation of da Silva’s letter makes clear:
Zoroastro is now in my house [in Rome] and governs me completely. We have some secret special rooms, and in the corner of a nice square room, in a place that once served as a little chapel, we have set up an excellent kitchen [i.e. laboratory], where I do nothing but puff with the bellows and pour out tremendous torrents of melted lead. We make spheres which shine brilliantly and in which appear strange human figures with horns on their heads and crabs’ legs and a nose like a prawn. In an old fireplace we have made a furnace, built up with bricks, and here we distil and separate the elements of everything; and with these we extract the fire from a marine monster [dactilo marino] which forever burns and shines. In the middle of the room there is a large table cluttered with pots and flasks of all sorts, and paste and clay and Greek pitch and cinnabar, and the teeth of hanged men, and roots. There is a plinth made of sulphur polished up on a lathe, and on this stands a vessel of yellow amber, empty except for a serpent with four legs, which we take for a miracle. Zoroastro believes that some gryphon carried it through the air from Libya and dropped it at the Mamolo bridge, where it was found and tamed by him. The walls of this room are all daubed with weird faces and drawings on paper, among which is one of a monkey who is telling stories to a crowd of rats who are attentively listening, and a thousand other things full of mystery.23
This vivid account gives us Zoroastro the alchemist, distilling and decocting strange brews; Zoroastro the keeper of strange reptiles; and indeed Zoroastro the artist, daubing the walls of his Roman laboratory with grotesque faces and talking animals. He is almost like a comic, folkloric version of Leonardo da Vinci. His interest in alchemy or chemistry (broadly the same activity at this time, but with different ends in view) is cognate with his work as a metallurgist. I cannot resist attributing to him the recipe written out by Leonardo, probably in the late 1480s. Headed ‘Deadly smoke’ (Fumo mortale), and appearing on a sheet related to naval warfare, its constituents are:
Arsenic mixed with sulphur and realgar
Medicinal rosewater
Venom of toad – that is, land-toad
Slaver of mad dog
Decoction of dogwood berries
Tarantula from Taranto24
This seems to me pure Zoroastro; it is almost a little poem.
A few months after Miguel da Silva wrote his letter Zoroastro was dead. His epitaph, inscribed on his tomb in Sant’Agata, commemorated him as ‘Zoroastro Masino, a man outstanding for his probity, his innocence and his liberality, and a true Philosopher who looked into the darkness of Nature to the admirable benefit of Nature herself’. Leonardo would not have minded this for his own epitaph: ‘ad naturae obscuritatem spectat…’
The memory of Zoroastro lingered on. The comic novelist Anton Francesco Grazzini (known by the fishy pen-name of Il Lasca – ‘the Roach’) includes a ‘crazy’ magician called Zoroastro in his collection Le Cene (Suppers). Grazzini was born in Florence in 1503, and was writing the Cene in mid-century. It is possible the character is loosely based on the real Zoroastro, though too loosely to be biographically useful. Grazzini’s Zoroastro is a comic-book magician, a stereotype, and there is no way of knowing if his physical appearance – a ‘tall, well-built, sallow-complexioned man, with a surly face and a proud manner, and a bushy black beard which he never combed’ – agrees with that of Tommaso Masini.25
Tommaso has been undervalued by Leonardo scholars: he always seems just a picturesque footnote – an eccentric hanger-on with a strong line in hocus-pocus. There is a folkloric element in all the early descriptions of him – in Ammirato’s sketch as much as in Grazzini’s fictionalized version, even in da Silva’s letter, which is an actual report of him, though doubtless pepped up for the amusement of Giovanni Rucellai. Leonardo’s version of him, as far as he gives us one, is rather different: Tommaso the maker of candlesticks, the grinder of colours, the purchaser of provisions – filling eminently practical roles. One notes also the enduring of his relationship with Leonardo. According to Ammirato he had already ‘joined up’ with Leonardo before the latter’s departure from Florence in c. 1482; he goes with Leonardo to Milan, and is glimpsed there, in Leonardo’s studio, in the early 1490s; back in Florence, in 1505, he is mixing colours for the Anghiari fresco. This already covers twenty-five years of acquaintance (though not necessarily continuous employment); it is also possible they were in Rome together in 1513–16. Tommaso may have been something of a joker, but he was clearly no fool. The range of his protectors and hosts in Rome is also impressive: Giovanni Rucellai, da Silva, Giovan Battista Ridolfi.
When Ammirato says that Tommaso ‘joined up’ with Leonardo, he means that he entered Leonardo’s studio as an apprentice or assistant. He perhaps replaced young Paolo di Leonardo in 1478, when the latter had been chased out of Florence for ‘wicked’ behaviour. Tommaso would then have been sixteen: a gardener’s son from Peretola, but already a young man of some promise. According to Ammirato, he claimed to be Bernardo Rucellai’s natural son: this is either a Zoroastrian joke or more likely a misunderstanding by Ammirato, who is the only source for it. (Rucellai was thirteen when Tommaso was born, making the paternity improbable though I suppose not impossible.) More likely is that he was a protégé or prodigy of Bernardo Rucellai, as he later was of Rucellai’s son Giovanni. Bernardo was an assiduous member of Ficino’s academy, and in later years would found his own Platonic academy at the Orti Oricellari, or Rucellai Gardens, round the corner from Santa Maria Novella. The ‘Zoroastrian’ side of Tommaso Masini may have its beginnings precisely in the ambit of Ficinian magic, with which we find Leonardo associated through his connection with Bernardo Bembo and the Benci.
One does not want to lose the colourful Zoroastro of legend: magic and alchemy and their attendant showmanships were doubtless part of his act, and part of his attraction to those upmarket Roman hosts. (Alchemy, of course, had an added attraction – the remote but tempting possibility of infinite wealth.) But there is a real man behind the showmanship, and he was valued by Leonardo. A man of probity, says his epitaph: an innocent, a philosopher.