We have some fragmentary knowledge of Leonardo’s ‘circle’ in Florence – his pupils Tommaso and Atalante; his literary chums Cammelli and Bellincioni; his philosophical gurus Toscanelli and Argyropoulos; his boyfriends Jacopo and Fioravanti. We assume his continued acquaintance with fellow artists on the Florentine scene – Botticelli, Pollaiuolo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Credi, Filippino Lippi and others – though none is mentioned in his writings except Botticelli, and he slightingly. (Verrocchio left Florence for Venice in 1480, and as far as we know did not return before his death eight years later.) We know also of certain more elevated contacts, who might be called his patrons – the Benci family, Bernardo Rucellai, and perhaps others of that upmarket Platonic set centred on Ficino’s academy at Careggi. But of his relations with the city’s premier family, and particularly with Lorenzo de’ Medici, we know almost nothing.
If the Anonimo Gaddiano is to be believed, Leonardo was a favoured protégé of Lorenzo’s: ‘As a young man he was with the Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici, who provided for him, and employed him in the gardens in the Piazza di San Marco in Florence.’ Lorenzo purchased these gardens in 1480, as a present for his wife, Clarice; they belonged to the Dominican convent of San Marco, where the Medici had their well-appointed cells, decorated by Fra Angelico, to which they retired for devotional interludes. He created a kind of sculpture-park there, under the management of Bertoldo di Giovanni, a former pupil of Donatello, and artists were invited to study this inspirational collection of classical statues and to do restoration work on them.60
The Anonimo’s statement is often repeated as historical fact, but I think it should be treated with caution. The idea that Lorenzo provided lodging for Leonardo (the Anonimo uses the phrase stare con, which generally means ‘to live with’) and paid for his upkeep (provisione) is not mentioned at all by Vasari. There is a similar disparity on the matter of Leonardo’s visit to Milan in 1482. According to the Anonimo, Leonardo was ‘sent’ there by Lorenzo, but Vasari says he was ‘invited’ there by Ludovico Sforza. Vasari was himself a protégé of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, and would surely have given his patron’s illustrious ancestor any credit that was due for fostering the talent of the young Leonardo. The Anonimo’s biography, which Vasari knew and used, gives him two opportunities for doing so, but in each case he rejects them. He omits any reference to Leonardo being supported by Lorenzo, and he contradicts the idea that Leonardo was an emissary of Lorenzo’s in 1482. I suspect Vasari’s removal of Lorenzo from the story is based on some knowledge of the case. His silence almost amounts to a statement – that Leonardo was not supported and encouraged by Lorenzo.
Another reason for suspecting the Anonimo’s statement about Lorenzo and Leonardo is that the phrasing would correctly describe Lorenzo’s patronage of the young Michelangelo some ten years later. Thus Vasari: ‘Michelangelo always had the keys to the garden [of San Marco]… He lived in the Medici household for four years… He was given a room, and ate at Lorenzo’s table, and received an allowance of 5 ducats a month.’61 All this is backed up by other sources: the four years would be c. 1489–92. It may well be that the Anonimo, writing half a century after the event, mixed things up, and believed it was Leonardo who was the recipient of these benefits. I do not want to remove Leonardo completely from the inspiring ambience of Lorenzo’s sculpture-garden. He may well have had access to it – the sculptural overtones of the portrayal of St Jerome may be a direct result of it, as is argued by Pietro Marani and others. But the broader idea that Leonardo was a favoured protégé of Lorenzo’s is not borne out.62
Leonardo’s career with Verrocchio certainly brought him into contact with the Medici – the preparations for the Milanese visit of 1471; the painting of standards and banners for the giostre; the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, whom Lorenzo much admired; the Pistoia altarpiece in memory of a Medici bishop. But once he steps out of the circle of Verrocchio’s bottega the nature of the record seems to change. In 1476 he is involved in a homosexuality case with embarrassing overtones for the Tornabuoni family – the family of Lorenzo’s mother. The following year another scandal results in the exile, personally approved by Lorenzo, of Leonardo’s pupil or servant Paolo. In 1478 Leonardo undertakes but fails to complete an important commission for the Signoria (the San Bernardo altarpiece). In 1479 he sketches the hanging body of Giuliano de’ Medici’s assassin, but is not apparently commissioned – as Verrocchio and Botticelli had been – to produce a full-scale piece of Medici propaganda. None of these on their own would count as evidence of Lorenzo’s negative view of Leonardo, but taken together they seem to add up to that.
Further indication emerges in 1481, when Lorenzo dispatches various artists to Rome, as part of the new mood of amity between Florence and the papacy. The artists chosen to assist in the decoration of the newly built Sistine Chapel are Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli. Their joint contract to paint ten storie or scenes from the Bible is dated 27 October 1481. This was an immensely prestigious commission, as well as a very valuable one: Ghirlandaio received 250 ducats for his Calling of St Peter and St Andrew.63 Leonardo may have been passed over for purely practical reasons (he was not a fresco painter; he was busy with another commission), but it adds to my feeling that he was not among Lorenzo’s favourite painters: that he was considered too unreliable, too difficult, and perhaps too openly homosexual to represent Florence in this role of cultural ambassador. So at least it may have seemed to him in October 1481, as those other – in his eyes inferior – artists packed their bags and headed off for Rome.
Late in his life – probably in Rome in about 1515 – Leonardo wrote, ‘Li medici mi crearono e distrussono.’64 This can be translated either as ‘The Medici created me and destroyed me’ or as ‘Physicians created me and destroyed me.’ The first interpretation could indeed imply that Leonardo was supported by Lorenzo at the beginning of his career, and thus ‘created’ by the Medici, but to say he was also ‘destroyed’ by the family would be a curious statement to make in 1515, when he was living in Rome at the expense of Lorenzo’s son Giuliano, with whom he was on very good terms. The line has a perfectly valid meaning without invoking the Medici at all. Leonardo elsewhere describes physicians as the ‘destroyers of lives’ (destruttori di vite), and he was in general critical of the profession. He was by then in his early sixties, and his health was failing. A pun on medici and Medici may be somewhere in his mind as he writes this, but the line cannot be taken as evidence of Lorenzo’s active patronage.
This chapter is a tissue of negative evidence, which is never very readable, but I think it worth questioning the customary casual assertion that Leonardo in Florence was a protégé of the Medici. His brilliance must have been noticed but one senses a note of exclusion: a young man who doesn’t quite fit.
There is a tiny profile drawing by Leonardo which looks very like a portrait of Lorenzo. It is one of those ‘Windsor fragments’ taken from sheets in the Codex Atlanticus.65 On stylistic grounds it is dated to c. 1485 or later: in other words, it was drawn in Milan. It may therefore be a recollection of the man, but is not a sketch done dal vivo.