Leonardo’s connection with rimesters like Cammelli and Bellincioni leads us to another of his accomplishments – one that is often forgotten. The early biographers are unanimously agreed that he was a brilliant musician, and that he was particularly good at playing the ‘lyre’. He must already have excelled during these years in Florence, since both the Anonimo and Vasari insist that when he went to Milan, probably in early 1482, he was presented to the Milanese court not as a painter or technologist, but as a musician. This is such a singular idea that one can only believe it is true.
The lira which Leonardo played was not the harp-shaped lyre of classical antiquity, such as is plucked in comic scenarios of Elysium. It was a more recently evolved instrument known as the lira da braccio, literally the ‘arm lyre’. It was essentially a variation on the viola da braccio, which in turn was the forerunner of the violin. Typically the lira da braccio had seven strings. Five were melody strings, tuned by pegs set in a heart-shaped peg-box. They were played with a bow, and were stopped with the fingers against a fingerboard to produce different notes. In addition it had two open strings (corde di bordone) running outside the fingerboard: these were ‘drones’ producing only one tone, and were plucked with the thumb of the left hand (or perhaps in Leonardo’s case the right) to produce a beat. These open strings, being comparable in sound and technique to those of a lyre, gave the instrument its name. A sixteenth-century Venetian lira da braccio is in the National Music Museum in South Dakota. It has a sentence in Latin painted round its carved ribs: ‘While the horse goes over the sheep, back and forth, the wood returns a mellifluous sound.’ This punning pastoral motto – referring to the horsehair of the bow, the sheep-gut of the strings, and the wood of the lira – sounds like one of Leonardo’s riddling prophecies.42
Angel playing a lira da braccio in the panel attributed to Ambrogio de Predis.
In paintings of the period, the lira or viola da braccio (it is often hard to tell which) is frequently shown being played by an angel. It features in pictures by Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Raphael and Mantegna, and in a page-border illumination in the Sforza Book of Hours. It is definitely a lira da braccio being played by the angel in the panel by Ambrogio de Predis in the National Gallery in London – you can clearly see the drone-strings passing outside the angel’s left thumb. This painting was originally a side-panel for Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks; it was painted by one of his chief colleagues in Milan, and may reflect something of the experience of watching – and listening to – Leonardo play.
Thus Leonardo’s instrument is essentially a prototypical fiddle, a violin avant la lettre. When and from whom he learned to play it is not known. Vasari makes music one of the accomplishments of the boy Leonardo, but this may be biographer’s hindsight. We know that Verrocchio had a lute among his possessions: this suggests that music was played in the bottega, and perhaps it was taught there, informally at least. Benvenuto Cellini, writing of his father Giovanni’s apprenticeship in Florence in the 1480s, says, ‘According to Vitruvius, if you want to do well in architecture, you must have some knowledge of both music and drawing. So Giovanni, having achieved skill at drawing, began to study music, and at the same time he learned to play excellently on the viola and the flute.’ Cellini also says that the Florentine pifferi (pipers) and other musicians who played on civic occasions – his father among them – were all very respectable artisans, and ‘some of them were of the arti maggiori, such as silkworkers and woolworkers, and for this reason my father did not think it unworthy to pursue this profession’.43 Both these comments seem relevant to Leonardo – that a proficiency in music went with the study of art and architecture; and that there was a strong tradition of music-making among the Florentine guilds.
Musical games. A sketch for a fantastical stringed instrument, and a riddle using musical notation, both from the late 1480s.
What kind of music did Leonardo da Vinci play? No compositions by him survive, and the soundtrack of late Quattrocento Florence is loud and various – the fifes and drums of the pifferi, the sing-along ‘catches’ of carnival, the instrumental preludes and interludes that accompanied the sacre rappresentazioni, the fashionable dance tunes of Guglielmo Ebreo, the virtuoso organ music of Francesco Squarcialupi. Vasari gives us a clue (or at least an assumption) when he adds apropos Leonardo’s musical talents, ‘He was also the most skilled improviser in verse of his time.’ This pictures Leonardo accompanying himself on the lira while reciting or singing poems extempore. Viola-type instruments were particularly associated with this. The Flemish musician Johannes Tinctoris, at this time resident composer at the Neapolitan court, recommended the viola for ‘the accompaniment and ornamentation of vocal music and the recitation of epics’. The tradition of the improvvisatore lasted into modern times. The Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett described a performance by one in 1765: ‘When the subject is given, his brother tunes his violin to accompany him, and he begins to rehearse in recitative, with wonderful fluency and precision. Thus he will, at a minute’s warning, recite two or three hundred verses, well-turned and well-adapted.’44 Such skills shade into those of the frottolista – the singer of love-songs. Frottole (‘Trifles’) were essentially sung poems: the term is used generically to cover a variety of lyric forms – sonnets, odes,strambotti, etc. – set to music. These compositions have been described as ‘half-popular, half-aristocratic’ – they used popular tunes, but in a manner designed to please the cultivated listener. The heyday of the frottola was a little later than Leonardo’s arrival in Milan – around the turn of the century – and is particularly associated with the Mantuan court of Isabella d’Este, where accomplished poet-musicians like Serafino Aquilino held sway.
We can say broadly that if Leonardo were a typical lira da braccio player in Florence in c. 1480 he would probably be playing the kind of light, amorous, chordal music typified by the Medici carnival-song and the Mantuan frotella. He would be singing or reciting the love-poems of Petrarch and Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici, or indeed the more abrasive ditties of Cammelli and Bellincioni, many of which were certainly intended to be performed in this way. His association with Cammelli evokes evenings of rough-and-ready entertainment – spectral one-off performances of ‘Orsu che fia?’ and other numbers, with Il Pistoiese on vocals and Leonardo da Vinci on fiddle. Leonardo was not typical, however, and one looks also for other moods. There was another well-known Florentine who played the lira da braccio – the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who composed ‘Orphic hymns’ (as he called them), and performed them on the lira. Thus another kind of influence on Leonardo emanates from the rarefied philosophical soirées at Careggi. It is possible his involvement with the Ficino circle awakened a new sophistication in Leonardo the musician. He later called music a ‘representation of invisible things’ – a phrase with a strong whiff of Platonism.45 And so to the pleasant sawings and strummings of the frottolista is added something a little other-worldly and ethereal which makes you stop and close your eyes as the music steals over you.
I said that no compositions by Leonardo remain, but there are little ghosts of musical phrasing which emerge from some of the riddles he invented. There are half a dozen riddles using musical notation in the Windsor collection. They are usually a combination of pictorial, musical and verbal symbols. The example illustrated here can be read easily enough (once one knows that the Italian for a fish-hook is amo), as follows:
amo [drawing of a fish-hook]; re sol la mi fa re mi [musical notes]; rare [written]; la sol mi fa sol [musical notes]; lecita [written].
This produces the following romantic ditty: ‘Amore sola mi fa remirare, la sol mi fa sollecita’ – ‘Only love makes me remember, it alone fires me up.’ The two passages of musical notation can be picked out on a keyboard – DGAEFDE AGEFG. This is a melody by Leonardo da Vinci.46
According to Vasari, Leonardo constructed a special lira da braccio to impress his Milanese hosts: ‘He took with him a lyre that he had made himself, mostly of silver, in the shape of a horse’s skull, a very strange and novel design which made the sound fuller and more resonant.’ There do not seem to be any designs for this in the notebooks, though according to the eighteenth-century scholar Carlo Amoretti, who was familiar with Leonardo’s manuscripts in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana before they were carted off to France, there once existed a drawing of a lira which may have been the ‘skull-lyre’ referred to by Vasari. This bizarre instrument has been conjecturally reconstructed by a team of musical scholars and instrument-makers in Cremona.47 There are various other strange instruments in the notebooks – ingenious versions of hurdy-gurdies, zithers, harpsichords, mechanical drums, a ‘viola organista’, and so on. And in around 1490 Leonardo conducted a little experiment in harmony: ‘The plucked string of a lute will produce a corresponding movement in a similar string of the same pitch on another lute, and this can be seen by placing a piece of straw on the string similar to the one that is played.’48
Another fragment of information comes from the Anonimo Gaddiano, who tells us that Leonardo taught music to a young man called Atalante Migliorotti, and that Migliorotti accompanied him to Milan – and so another of Leonardo’s motley Florentine circle swims into focus. Atalante di Manetto Migliorotti was born, probably illegitimate, in about 1466, and was thus sixteen when he travelled to Milan with Leonardo. One of the drawings which Leonardo took to Milan, as listed in c. 1482, may be a portrait of him: ‘una testa ritratta d’Atalante che alzava il volto’ (‘a portrait of Atalante raising his face’).49 A beautiful drawing of a naked young man playing a stringed instrument may also show him. (The instrument, drawn in metalpoint, has not been inked in and is almost invisible in reproduction.) 50 We don’t know how long Atalante stayed in Milan with Leonardo: he is next heard of in Mantua in 1491, singing the title role in Poliziano’s opera Orfeo for the delectation of Isabella d’Este. He seems to have established himself as an instrument-maker, for in 1493 he was commissioned by Isabella to make her a guitar, ‘with as many strings as he liked’, and in 1505 he wrote to the Marquis of Mantua (Isabella’s husband) to tell him he had constructed a new twelve-stringed lira ‘of unusual shape’, perhaps recalling that bizarre silver lyre his maestro had made so many years before.