On another list written around this time we find the name Antonio da Pistoia. This refers to the rough-diamond poet Antonio Cammelli, known as ‘Il Pistoia’ or ‘Il Pistoiese’, who opens up another aspect of Leonardo’s Florentine circle in the late 1470s.35 They may have met when Leonardo was in Pistoia in 1477: Cammelli is plausibly one of those ‘companions in Pistoia’ to whom Leonardo refers. Some poems found among Leonardo’s papers are probably in Cammelli’s hand; one of them can be dated quite precisely to around November 1479.
Now in his mid-forties, Cammelli was one of the finest vernacular poets of his generation. He typifies the slangy, ribald, satirical style often called burchiellesco, after an early exponent of the genre, the Florentine barber Domenico di Giovanni, called Il Burchiello. The name derives from the phrase alla burchia, which literally means ‘in haste’ or ‘higgledy-piggledy’. These ‘poets in a hurry’, dashing off poems with a feel of improvisation, and with a deliberate roughness and slanginess, were the jazz poets or rap artists of the Quattrocento – a very different breed from humanist poets like Poliziano and Landino with their classical allusions and Petrarchan conceits. Others who belong within this vein of anti-classicismo are the Florentines Luigi Pulci and Bernardo Bellincioni, and somewhat later Francesco Berni, born down the road from Vinci, in Lamporecchio, in 1498. Berni paid tribute to Cammelli – ‘O spirito bizarro del Pistoia!’ – and the great satirist Pietro Aretino praised the ‘sharpness and speed’ of his pen.36
Cammelli wrote ‘sonnets’, but not in the fourteen-line form later adopted in Elizabethan England. The term was more generic: sonetto simply means ‘a little song’, and is scarcely distinguishable from other lyric forms – frottole, rispetti, strambotti, etc. – which these poets used. Their verses were often performed to music, and some poets, like Serafino Aquilino, were noted musicians as well. Cammelli is occasionally romantic but more often cynical, as in the spirited poem ‘Orsu che fia?’ (‘What are you up to?’), much of it spoken by the poet’s frustrated wife:
Io starei meglio moglie d’un sartore,
che mi mettria tre punti in uno occhiello.
Ognor tu scrivi e canzone e rispetti,
vivo a marito a guisa di donzella:
che’l diavol te ne porti e tua sonnetti…
[I’d be better off married to a tailor: he’d put a few stitches in my buttonhole. You spend every hour writing songs and catches, I’m living with a husband who’s like a girl: the devil take you and your sonnets…]
The poet’s reluctance, it turns out, is not just because he’s composing his ‘songs and catches’, but because he fears she will get pregnant again:
Quel che a te piace a me non par bel gioco,
ch’io non vo’ piu cagnoli intorno al foco…
[That game you like I’m not so fond of, because I don’t want any more pups round the fireside… ]37
Poverty, hunger, disappointment and imprisonment are common themes, delivered in a defiantly humorous tone. A typical sonnet plays variations on Cammelli’s ugliness – he is ‘thin and scrawny’, he looks like a ‘screech-owl without a beak’, and so on – and then delivers the punchline:
Dunque chi vol veder guardi mi tutto:
Un uom senza dinar quanto par brutto.
[So take a good look at me all who wish: how ugly a man looks when he has no money.]
Some of the satirical poems are just a catalogue of ingenious insults – the railing which Cammelli calls ‘talking pepper’ (dire pepe) – but his typical tone is charming and nonchalant:
Cantava il concubin della gallina;
La rugiada sul giorno era nei prati…
[The hen’s lover-boy was singing; the dew of the day was on the meadows… ]38
The elegant Cardinal Bibbiena summed up Cammelli’s style well: ‘le facezie, il sale e il miele’ – ‘jokes, salt and honey’.
It is very likely that Cammelli wrote the short, humorous poem in Latin distichs found on a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus.39 The occasion of the poem was the siege of Colle Val d’Elsa by the troops of the Papal League in November 1479 – this was part of the war that followed the Pazzi Conspiracy. The town capitulated on 14 November, its walls having been reduced to rubble by an enormous piece of siege-artillery nicknamed La Ghibellina. This gun is the subject – indeed the imagined speaker – of the poem found in Leonardo’s papers, which begins:
Pandite iam portas, miseri, et subducite pontes
Nam Federigus adest quem Gebellina sequor…
[Now throw open your gates, you miserable creatures, and let down your drawbridges, for Federico is here whom I, Ghibellina, follow… ]
‘Federico’ is Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, one of the generals of the anti-Florentine league. On the same sheet are various drawings of artillery by Leonardo: the poem and the drawings belong together – companion pieces.
Cammelli is the likely author per se, and there are other circumstantial pointers. His patron at this time, the Ferrarese courtier Niccolò da Correggio, was a senior military figure in the Florentine alliance, and Cammelli may have done some soldiering under his banner. We know Cammelli was in Florence in the summer of 1479 – on 20 August he answered a court summons for debt – so it is not improbable he was there in late November or December, the presumed date of the poem.
If this eccentric little braggadoccio is from the pen of Il Pistoiese, so too are some other passages in the Codex Atlanticus written in the same hand. One is a quite personal poem addressed to Leonardo, or perhaps rather a draft of a poem. Unfortunately it is obscured by a large ink-blot, but infra-red imaging has made at least part of it legible. The title of the poem can be partially read as ‘S […] 4’ – probably ‘Sonetto 4’. It begins:
Lionardo mio non avete d[…]
Lionardo perche tanto penato[?]
[My Leonardo you don’t have any […] Leonardo, why so troubled?]
The rest is hard to interpret, but seems to harp on a note of reconciliation or apology: the last word of the poem is perdonato, pardoned. Also written on this page are fragments of poetry in Leonardo’s mirror-script. There are two quotes from Ovid – ‘Things done without any witnesses, things known only to the dark night’ and ‘O Time, the consumer of all things’ – and one from Petrarch. And there is a lovely little couplet – very Cammellesco, but actually a quotation from Luca Pulci (brother of Luigi):
Deh non m’ avete a vil ch’io son povero
Povero e quel che assai cose desidera
[Don’t despise me because I’m poor: a man is poor when he desires many things.]40
This page gives us a sense of Leonardo opening up to the possibilities of poetry, perhaps under the capricious influence of Cammelli.
Another poem in the same handwriting appears to be a satirical sally against Bernardo Bellincioni, a Florentine poet in much the same burchiellesco vein as Cammelli, but younger. Bellincioni was a favourite of Lorenzo de’ Medici, with whom he exchanged scurrilous sonnets, and of Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, and hence a suitable target for the irascible Cammelli.41 Leonardo probably knew him too – they certainly knew one another later, in Milan, and collaborated together. They were the same age, and Bernardo was a poor boy raised up by his wit – a type Leonardo liked. He was a sparky, difficult young man: an enfant terrible. The Medici poet and priest Matteo Franco was an enemy – Bellincioni wrote a sonnet against him, beginning, ‘Taci, non ciarlar piu che tu schimazzi’ (‘Be quiet, stop chattering, or you’ll turn into a monkey’). The acerbic Luigi Pulci liked him, and praised his wit in his own great work, the burlesque epic Morgante maggiore, published in 1481 – a book which Leonardo later owned, and from which he quoted. Thus the Florentine literary currents flow in and around Leonardo’s studio.
If one were looking for a literary influence on Leonardo, the rough and laconic Cammelli would seem more congenial to him than the more mannered style of Poliziano, whose influence we felt hovering over the Ginevra portrait. Leonardo was never an exponent of belles-lettres; there are some forays into literary modes, but his writing style is terse, vernacular and tending to roughness of finish, and if it achieves poetry at times it does so through lucidity and density of expression, not through verbal tricks and pretty assonances.
There is something heartening about the friendship with the hard-bitten poet from Pistoia – that ‘Lionardo mio’ certainly suggests friendship – though we also learn from that poem that Leonardo is penato: literally ‘pained’, therefore troubled, stressed, downcast (though it can also mean ‘hard-working’, as in one who ‘takes pains’ over something). And he is ‘poor’, but philosophical about being so. Business at the bottega was not booming, we might infer, but the evenings were convivial.