The young man looks out and away, beyond the frame which contains and constrains him. Sometime after September 1481 – the date of the last reference to him in the San Donato accounts – Leonardo left Florence for Milan. He would not return (as far as we know) for more than eighteen years, though this is a hindsight he did not have at the point of his departure, so we cannot say whether he was definitively and defiantly leaving – turning his back on his home city, his father, his stalled and uncertain career – or whether he was simply going away for a while: a trip up north, a taste of something new.
As I have already mentioned, the rather surprising circumstance of Leonardo’s departure for Milan is that he went there as a musician. As also noted, there is a discrepancy in the early accounts as to whether he was ‘sent’ by Lorenzo de’ Medici or ‘invited’ by Ludovico Sforza. Behind this small crux lies a larger question: in what kind of mood did Leonardo leave Florence? Was he sent as a cultural ambassador, someone appreciated as an example of Florentine talent and ingenuity? Or did he leave under a cloud, with a sense of failure and frustration – his paintings unfinished, his lifestyle controversial, his reputation a mix of brilliance and difficulty? This is not really an either/or question: both moods can be accommodated. Leonardo was ready to go, and Lorenzo was ready to let him go. Restlessness and expedience – two powerful motivations which here coalesce into a single curious fantasy: a violin with a silver sounding-box in the shape of a horse’s skull.
The date of Leonardo’s removal is uncertain. The last record of him in Florence (that delivery of ‘vermilion wine’ from the San Donato vineyards) is dated 28 September 1481; the earliest record of him in Milan (the contract for the Virgin of the Rocks) is dated 25 April 1483. The Anonimo says he was thirty years old when he left: if we take this literally, the date of his departure was sometime after 15 April 1482.
One interesting possibility is that Leonardo went as part of the retinue of Bernardo Rucellai and Pier Francesco da San Miniato, who were dispatched to Milan as Florentine oratori or envoys in early 1482.75 There is certainly no difficulty in associating Leonardo with the popular and scholarly Bernardo Rucellai, the fashionable Platonist, patron of Tommaso Masini, and plausible commissioner of Leonardo’s St Jerome. He was now in his late thirties. He was one of the richest men in the city, and brother-in-law of Lorenzo de’ Medici; he would remain in Milan for four years, the last two (1484–6) as resident Florentine ambassador. A sonnet by the gossipy poet Bernardo Bellincioni may pinpoint Leonardo’s connection with Rucellai and his fellow envoy to Milan, Pier Francesco da San Miniato. It is headed ‘S a Madonna Lucretia essendo l’auctore a Fiesole’ – it is, in other words, a sonnet written at Fiesole and addressed to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of Lorenzo de’ Medici. It refers to a ‘Messer Bernardo’ and a ‘Piero’ who are plausibly identified as Rucellai and San Miniato, and it contains the lines:
A Fiesole con Piero é Leonardo
E fanno insieme una conclusione
[At Fiesole with Piero is Leonardo, and together they reach an agreement.]76
Bernardo and Pier Francesco were nominated oratori on 10 December 1481, and they left Florence for Milan on 7 February 1482. This may give us the date of Leonardo’s departure.
Shortly before he left, Leonardo drew up that list of his Florentine works from which I have frequently quoted. These are the paintings, drawings and models he is taking with him to Milan: his portfolio. It includes ‘two Madonnas’, one of which is probably theBenois Madonna; and ‘certain figures of St Jerome’; and a portrait of Atalante Migliorotti ‘raising his face’; and ‘some machines for ships’ and ‘some machines for water’; and ‘many flowers drawn from nature’; and ‘many designs of knots’ or vinci. These are identifiable with known Leonardo works of the late 1470s, but this document is also melancholy in that many of the items cannot now be identified and have almost certainly been lost. Where are the ‘8 St Sebastians’, or the ‘head of a gypsy’, or the ‘head of the Duke’ (probably, for reasons that will soon become apparent, the late Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza) ? In some cases the description is not even intelligible – were the ‘4 disegni della tavola da santo angiolo’ drawings done for a painting featuring a holy angel or for a painting in the church of Sant’Angelo? And for that matter are the ‘componimenti d’angioli’ compositions of angels or angles? His fascination with hair is already apparent – five separate entries identify the drawing by referring to the hair (‘a head in profile with fine hair’, ‘a full face, with curly hair’, ‘a head of a girl with tresses gathered in a knot’, etc.). In among the art-works one spots a calcedonio, or chalcedony – a precious stone of the quartz kind, of which agates and cornelians are the best-known varieties.
The folio on which the list appears has some other surprises. The first item on the list (or what is given as the first item in modern transcriptions) – ‘a head, full face, of a young man with a fine head of hair’ – was written by someone other than Leonardo, and possibly at a different time. It is upside down in respect of the rest of the list, and is written from left to right. The hand is almost identical with the one which wrote the Latin distichs about the gun called La Ghibellina and the blotted sonnet beginning ‘Leonardo mio’ – the hand, in other words, of the Pistoiese poet Antonio Cammelli. In the bottom left-hand corner of the folio is a rather unskilful caricature, in profile, of a glum-looking young man with long hair and a berretta. I wonder if this is a last image of Leonardo in Florence – ‘Lionardo mio… perche tanto penato?’ – ‘My Leonardo, why so troubled?’ Perhaps this drawing is the handiwork of Il Pistoiese himself, or perhaps of Zoroastro, whose laboratory-walls in Rome were ‘daubed with weird faces’.
List of works by Leonardo, c. 1482, on a much doodled sheet of the Codex Atlanticus.
If the list of works is a retrospective document, the famous ‘letter of introduction’ to Ludovico Sforza looks ambitiously forward to Leonardo’s future in Milan. It was probably written up in Florence, ready to be presented to Ludovico at the earliest opportunity. The copy that survives is in a handsome scribal hand, perhaps a professional scrivener’s, though as there are some minor changes and insertions it cannot be the presentation copy.77 It is an elaborate prospectus of the skills that Leonardo can offer, very confidently phrased, though pretty surprising in that the skills are mainly those of military engineering, in which he has at this point no known expertise or experience. This is the new role he dreams of as he prepares to leave Florence: engineer to the Duke of Milan.
He begins with a wordy flourish:
My most illustrious Lord,
I have sufficiently seen and examined the inventions of all those who count themselves makers and masters of instruments of war, and I have found that in design and operation their machines are in no way different from those in common use. I therefore make bold, without ill-will to any, to offer my skills to Your Excellency, and to acquaint Your Lordship with my secrets, and will be glad to demonstrate effectively all these things, at whatever time may be convenient to you…
Then follows a numbered list of the ‘instruments’ whose secrets he will offer Ludovico – a brochure of military hardware:
1. I have methods for making very light and strong bridges, easily portable, and useful whether pursuing or evading the enemy; and others more solid, which cannot be destroyed by fire or assault…
2. When a siege is under way I know how to remove water from the trenches, and to make all manner of bridges, covered ways, scaling-ladders and other devices suitable for this sort of operation.
3. If the place under siege cannot be reduced by bombardment, because of the height of its banks or the strength of its position, I have methods for destroying any fortress or redoubt even if it is founded upon solid rock…
4. I have certain types of cannon, extremely easy to carry, which fire out small stones, almost as if it were a hailstorm, and the smoke from these will cause great terror to the enemy, and they will bring great loss and confusion…
5. I have ways of silently making underground tunnels and secret winding passages to arrive at a desired point, even if it is necessary to pass underneath trenches or a river.
6. I will make armoured cars, totally unassailable, which will penetrate the ranks of the enemy with their artillery, and there is no company of soldiers so great that it can withstand them. And behind these the infantry can follow, quite unharmed and encountering no opposition.
7. In case of need I will make cannon and mortar and light artillery, beautifully and usefully constructed, quite different from those in common use.
8. Where bombardment turns out to be impractical I will devise catapults, mangonels, caltrops,78 and other wonderfully effective machines not in common use…
9. And when the fight is at sea I have many kinds of highly efficient machines for attack and defence, and vessels which will resist the attack of heavy bombardment, and powder and fumes.
‘In short,’ he sums up, ‘I can contrive an infinite variety of machines for attack or defence.’ The question that immediately occurs, and would soon be occurring to Ludovico Sforza, is: Could he? It is possible – Leonardo had a base of engineering skills; he had a capacity to learn fast; he had the metalworker Tommaso Masini working with him – but there is no evidence that any of these machines ever existed except on paper.79 The document has a sci-fi air about it, as if his imagination is running ahead of him. It is the pitch of a multi-talented dreamer who will fill in the details later.
At the end of the letter Leonardo remembers that he is also an artist – ‘in painting I can do everything that it is possible to do’ – and he adds a last specific offer to Ludovico which some believe to be the true motivation of his trip to Milan: ‘I would be able to begin work on the bronze horse which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honour of the Prince your father’s happy memory and of the famous house of Sforza.’ Here is the first mention of the great equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza which would occupy Leonardo, ultimately fruitlessly, for years to come. In 1480 his former master Verrocchio had gone to Venice to create a similar work: the equestrian statue of the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni. News of a Sforza commission had been buzzing round Florence for a couple of years: the Pollaiuolo studio had already produced some designs.80 These monuments were grand, expensive, highly public productions: Leonardo is thinking big.
He wraps these documents up carefully, with that secretive air he has: an inventory of the past and a prospectus of the future. They go into the travelling-chest or the saddle-bag, along with the drawings and half-finished paintings, and the clay figurines, and the lustrous chalcedony, and the silver lyre in its case.